Self-Evident: How Benjamin Franklin’s two-word edit changed American history

The then 70-year-old scientist shifted the philosophical foundation of the United States from religious conviction to rational thought

The Declaration of Independence.

In the sweltering Philadelphia summer of 1776, Thomas Jefferson handed his draft of the Declaration of Independence to Benjamin Franklin for review. Jefferson, steeped in the philosophy of John Locke, had written that the truths of human equality and unalienable rights were “sacred and undeniable.” But Franklin, a devoted empiricist and friend of David Hume, saw an opportunity to strengthen the philosophical bedrock of the nascent nation. With a few strokes of his pen, he transformed Jefferson’s religious appeal into a statement of rational self-evidence—a change that would echo through centuries of American thought and governance.

I came across this little known anecdotes about early American history while listening to the audio version of the superb “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life,” by Walter Isaacson, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in biographies, history, science, or philosophy. In turn, my curiosity about Franklin was piqued by two independent recent events. A few months ago I visited a friend in Philadelphia, where I held a workshop on Stoic practice. And of course my wife and I went to visit Franklin’s house and museum. At about the same time, Apple TV released its miniseries entitled Franklin, with the titular role played by the excellent Michael Douglas (who, in an interview, said he got interested in Stoicism while he was doing research for his role). I was hooked.

When the Declaration of Independence was being written, between June and July 1776, Thomas Jefferson was 33 years old and Benjamin Franklin was 70. The 56 delegates of the Second Continental Congress had charged Jefferson with producing the first draft, despite his relative youth and inexperience, in part because nobody really had a sense of just how historical that document would turn out to be.

Jefferson asked John Adams for a first round of edits and then, on the morning of Friday June 21st, forwarded it to Franklin, asking him if he would be “so good as to peruse it and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate.”

Franklin made a small number of changes, some of which can still be seen, in Franklin’s hand writing, on a surviving draft prepared by Jefferson. The most crucial change applied by Franklin was that he crossed out the last three words of a crucial part of the original formulation: “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” Instead, he wrote what became the famous final version: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

In so doing, comments Isaacson, Franklin shifted away the tone from that of a religious assertion (because of the word “sacred”) to one of rationality (by using “self-evident”). Although the final version still refers to men being “created equal” and endowed with unalienable rights by “their Creator,” the shift was momentous. And it was the result of the different philosophical backgrounds of the two Founding Fathers.

Thomas Jefferson, left, and Benjamin Franklin, right. Images from Wikimedia, CC license.

Jefferson’s favorite philosopher was John Locke, who came from a Puritan background. The work by Locke that had the most most influence on Jefferson was arguably his Second Treatise on Government, which was often quoted during discussions of the evolving conflict between Britain and what became the United States, particularly in the context of American resistance to taxation from the motherland. The book had been printed for the first time on the other side of the pond, in Boston, in 1773, just three years before the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson was impressed and wrote:

“Bacon, Locke and Newton … I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences.” (Manuscript from the Library of Congress)

Franklin also counted Newton among his major influences, but instead of Locke he often referred to his good personal friend, David Hume, whose religious attitude, crucially, was that of an agnostic. Franklin adopted Newton’s determinism and coupled it with Hume’s analytical empiricism to guide his thought in both scientific and ethical matters. In particular, Franklin was impressed by what is now known as Hume’s fork. Here is how Hume himself explains it:

“All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, relations of ideas, and matters of fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic ... [which are] discoverable by the mere operation of thought. ... Matters of fact, which are the second object of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing.” (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section 4.1, 1757)

In essence, the Fork makes a distinction between two kinds of truth: synthetic and analytic. Synthetic truths concern facts about the world, for instance that Saturn has rings, or that Paris is in France. Analytic truths are either derived by reason or are the result of definition. For example, a truth derived by reason is that the ratio of circumference to diameter in a circle is equal to pi, while a definitional truth may be that all parents have at least one child.

Notice that Hume did not recognize any other kind of truth, and indeed ends his Enquiry with these strong words:

“When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section 12.3, 1757)

John Locke, left, and David Hume, right. Images from Wikimedia, CC license.

Ouch! Hume is saying that if a piece of writing does not contain either synthetic or analytic truths it is likely to be sophistry, and he explicitly mentions books on divinity and metaphysics, referring to the ample productions of Medieval Scholasticism in those respects. Despite his mild manners, Hume was declaring war against centuries of tradition, thus positioning himself as one of the central figures of the Enlightenment.

Franklin’s edit did far more than change three words—it transformed the philosophical foundation of the American project. Where Jefferson’s “sacred and undeniable” would have anchored the Declaration in religious conviction, Franklin’s “self-evident” planted it firmly in Enlightenment rationality. That he left the reference to a Creator intact is unsurprising: most Enlightenment figures, including Voltaire and Jefferson himself, were deists rather than atheists. In their time, before Darwin’s Origin of Species would appear 83 years later, the existence of a creator seemed as evident as any other fact about the natural world—a synthetic truth derived from what we now call the argument from design.

It was Franklin’s friend Hume who would most famously challenge even this assumption in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), pushing the boundaries of Enlightenment thought beyond what most of his contemporaries, including Franklin, were ready to embrace. But Franklin’s crucial edit had already done its work: by replacing religious sanctity with rational self-evidence, he helped ensure that the American experiment would be grounded in reason rather than revelation.