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America Retold: 250 years of the United States and the world. Read more from the series.

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The Declaration of Independence famously declared that “all men are created equal,” endowed with the rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But the document never explicitly mentions “freedom” or uses the word “American.” When it mentions “the united States of America,” “united” is left lower-case, while the concluding paragraph insists that the colonies (plural) are “Free and Independent States.”

More than a mere matter of semantics, this fact is worth reflecting on as Washington celebrates 250 years of “American freedom.” In reality, the Declaration of Independence called the United States into being as an independent political entity before defining an identity for its inhabitants or articulating who among them would be granted freedom.

The Declaration of Independence famously declared that “all men are created equal,” endowed with the rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But the document never explicitly mentions “freedom” or uses the word “American.” When it mentions “the united States of America,” “united” is left lower-case, while the concluding paragraph insists that the colonies (plural) are “Free and Independent States.”

More than a mere matter of semantics, this fact is worth reflecting on as Washington celebrates 250 years of “American freedom.” In reality, the Declaration of Independence called the United States into being as an independent political entity before defining an identity for its inhabitants or articulating who among them would be granted freedom.

This tension, between independence and freedom, has reverberated through U.S. history, shaping the country’s domestic debates and foreign policy alike. Throughout the 19th century, Americans fought over what freedom and equality meant at home. Then, in the 20th, they struggled, and often failed, to apply this new understanding to the rest of the world.

John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence (1818) depicts the five-man drafting committee presenting their work to the Continental Congress. John Turnbull

When members of the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia in 1776, they did so with a clear purpose: to explain why colonists were justified in taking up arms against the British Empire, why King George III correspondingly had lost the right to rule the 13 colonies, and thus why the colonies deserved independence. This was a document built on Enlightenment principles—think John Locke on the social contract and the natural rights of man.

The declaration, as historian David Armitage reminds us, was written for foreign audiences as much as colonial ones. As Thomas Jefferson later recalled, it was “an appeal to the tribunal of the world.” The point was to persuade potential European allies that this was no mere rebellion. The declaration laid out King George’s failings in a 27-point list that showed how Britain had betrayed its North American subjects.

The widely read Law of Nations (1758) insisted, “For any nation … it is enough that it should be truly sovereign and independent, that is to say, that it governs itself under its own authority and its own laws.” By declaring independence, then, the Congress asserted the United States equal to its Old World peers. This was an act of rupture but also an insistence on the people’s rights to statehood.

But “the people” was, itself, a contentious term. The Declaration of Independence began the........

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