Americans will celebrate our 250th birthday this year on July 4, as we should. But such celebrations, perhaps unintentionally, have also drawn attention to our nation’s darkest failures—and raised new questions about how we can contend with the paradoxes of our painful past. 

Take Thomas Jefferson. Although a slaveholder himself, he is rightly venerated for making an indelible case for the “inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It is less well known that Jefferson twice unsuccessfully introduced legislation in the Virginia House of Burgesses to abolish the heinous institution of slavery that made his life comfortable. In Jefferson’s 1774 pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, he wrote that “the abolition of slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.” In the one book Jefferson wrote, Notes on the State of Virginia, he denounced the practice even though he never freed his own slaves. Should his hypocrisy erase the grandeur of the Declaration? No, because the principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence were always more important than a single man.

Jefferson always denied that he showed much creativity in writing the Declaration. He claimed merely to “place before mankind the common sense of the subject” of self-government. But what was that “common sense”? And where did it come from? 

Some might say it came from Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, which swept across the colonies like a tidal wave in early 1776. Having immigrated from England to Philadelphia in 1774, the audacious Paine claimed that Americans, for the first time since Noah’s Ark, could begin the world over again. Tens of thousands of readers were thrilled by Paine’s rousing call to shed British rule.

Or take the irascible John Adams, now maligned for dismissing his wife Abigail’s demand for women’s rights and for silencing his opponents during his........

© Time