When the signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor on the morning of July 4, 1776, they were making a fundamental compact uniting Americans for all time.

It may not have seemed so on that steamy morning in Philadelphia, when the members of the Continental Congress adopted Thomas Jefferson’s announcement that the united colonies had voted — two days earlier — to separate from Great Britain.

The Declaration was seen as an administrative task, something necessary to legitimize their attempts to form an alliance with France and to start creating a confederated government among the 13 now sovereign states.

So busy were they with the business of trying to turn around a losing war that not until weeks later did they even think to have their Declaration written out formally and signed.

The summer of 1776 was a dark time for the Americans.

The British had evacuated Boston back in March, but the war was going badly, within half a year, Congress would flee Philadelphia for Baltimore as the British chased George Washington and the Continental Army across New Jersey.

The Declaration was meant to give comfort to the Patriots, sway the undecided, and maybe even convince some Loyalists to switch sides.

Congress spent two full days debating the draft of young Jefferson and the Committee of Five, which included Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. They cared enough about the statement to cut nearly a quarter of Jefferson’s words, including his passionate condemnation of the slave trade, while strengthening other parts.

But how could they realize this announcement would be celebrated a quarter of a millennium later?

Or that its phrases would change the world?

They almost certainly had no expectations that the Declaration would become, next to the Bible, perhaps the most famous statement of political and moral principles in history.

The signers wrote their Declaration with the express purpose of uniting Americans.

As John Adams recalled later in life, at the time of Independence, only one-third of Americans supported separating from England.

Moreover, the 13 colonies were extremely heterogenous for their time, with different governing and religious traditions, different ethnicities and languages, and different economies. Yet, in order to win the war and survive in a hostile world, the “free and independent” colonies — now States — would have to find unity amidst diversity.

Thus someone, maybe Benjamin Franklin, edited the very first line of Jefferson’s draft to read: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands . . .” (emphasis added).

Jefferson had originally written “a people,” but this did not meet the moment.

Another famous edit: “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable,” changed to the immortal “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

This was the first statement of what we now embrace as the American creed or ethos — one that took nearly two centuries to fully be realized, but which is shared and defended by all Americans.

Even the 27 charges against King George III, which formed the main part of the Declaration, were written to present British actions as an attack on all Americans, even if any specific offense had happened only in one colony.

Rather, each colonist was to feel part of a wronged community, and thus linked to their fellow American, even one living hundreds of miles away. Georgia plantation owners, Philadelphia merchants, and New Hampshire small farmers were one people suffering under the tyranny of the King.

Finally, in their stirring peroration, the signers added:

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

They did not so pledge to the new nation, which would have been expected, or even to their sovereign states, but to each other.

This was the clearest example of their covenant and how they explicitly wrote the Declaration as a statement of unity.

They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

It is the greatness of the Declaration that its 18th century silences — on women, blacks, and American Indians — could be filled in the 19th and 20th centuries to embrace all who wanted to be accepted fully as Americans. That everyone from Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony would appeal to it.

Or, that tens of millions of immigrants who came to these shores would embrace the Declaration as their new birth certificate, translating it into Swedish, Greek, Italian, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and other languages, and then would commit to defending its principles during World War I and II, and the Cold War.

Today, that unity is needed more than ever. With Americans seemingly at each other’s throats over politics, economics, and social issues, and with social media amplifying every angry voice, it can seem as if we are irreparably splitting apart.

A March 2026 poll by Pew found that 53% of Americans viewed their fellow citizens as morally bad — not just mistaken or ill-informed, but bad.

No one, certainly not the brilliant, vain, and ambitious Founding Fathers believed that citizens had to love each other — they were too much the realists to pretend otherwise.

But they clearly believed that we could not hate each other and survive as a nation. It is a lesson we must remember today.

Thus, they wrote their Declaration with the express goal of unity in mind. For those who joined the Patriot side in 1776, unity across geographic, economic, religious, and social boundaries was a constant project, but one that helped keep them together through the following six years of war.

That unity has been tested throughout our history, and it failed during our greatest catastrophe in the 1860s.

Yet for millions of Americans and over our quarter-millennium, the Declaration has been the glue binding Americans to each other, in both their aspirations and their attempts to make a more perfect Union.

That unity, stressed by George Washington in his Farewell Address and two generations later by Daniel Webster (“Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”) is the Founders greatest gift to Americans, and educating Americans of its overriding importance, is the great civic mission of our times.

Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of “National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America” (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster).