America at 250 and The Making of the American Mind

The Making of the American Mind: The Story of our Declaration of Independence
By Matthew Spalding
Encounter Books, 2025. 344 pages.

America’s Declaration of Independence was not just rhetoric or the position of one person, committee, or Congress. It was and remains, as author Matthew Spalding writes, “an expression of the American mind.”

In The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Own Declaration of Independence, released on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, Spalding encourages Americans to reengage with our history, to rediscover the timeless principles embedded within the Declaration of Independence, and to fall in love with America, again.

Spalding, who serves as Kirby Professor in Constitutional Government and Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College,  dedicates the first chapter to the opening phrase of the Declaration: “When in the course of human events.” Though the American Founders understood English history to be their history, they viewed the American experiment as “part of the course of human events, stretching back well before the Declaration” and even well before the Magna Carta.

England’s rule of law, development of the common law under substantial Judeo-Christian influence, and parliamentary supremacy resulting from the Glorious Revolution directly shaped the American mind. But the American Founders understood the influence of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem to be just as foundational.

Alongside John Locke and Algernon Sidney, two prominent English political philosophers in the 18th Century, Thomas Jefferson named Aristotle and Cicero within “the elementary books of public right.” Aristotle and the Greek philosophers developed the very idea that objective reality exists and that the human mind can pursue truth, as opposed to merely reacting and forming opinions based on experiences. Then in Rome, Cicero integrated Aristotle’s concept of justice with the law and argued that all have a moral duty to strive for virtue. 

In looking beyond their immediate circumstances, the American Founders claimed authority to declare independence from a much higher and more foundational source. The Declaration begins and ends with references to the divine. According to Spalding, this not merely for gravitas but presents a “theology of the Declaration.”

Immediately in the Declaration’s paragraph-long first sentence, the “one people” dissolving their ties with Great Britain say they are “entitled” to do so by “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” As the document moves toward its close, the references to the divine become more personal and particular.

At first, as Spalding argues, God appears “by virtue of man’s unaided reason” in his ability to discern the laws of nature. Then, God appears as the Creator “not just of nature in general but of man in particular.” It is the divine, and not culture or government, that endows man with his certain, unalienable rights.

Next, God appears as the “Supreme Judge of the world,” but specifically the supreme judge of man. In this role, God knows the deepest intentions of both parties and reigns at all times. In the Founders’ view, after suffering “a long train of abuses,” submitting the “[f]acts… to a candid world,” and petitioning the King without receiving relief, the divine was the only court left. 

Importantly, the Declaration could have appealed to history or the previously mentioned “opinions of mankind” as its supreme judge, but it does not. The Framers wrote not to justify their current preferences or momentary whims. They genuinely believed their cause was just and informed by enduring, self-evident truths.

Lastly, in pledging their lives, fortunes, and “sacred honor” to support the Declaration, the signers state their “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” This final expression of God is an active one. To the signers, God did not create the laws of nature, endow man with inalienable rights, and then walk away. He remains present and as Spalding notes “sometimes changes the course of human events.” 

The Declaration’s references to God, self-evident truths, and enduring principles aren’t lofty rhetoric that the Founders did not truly believe, as the 1619 Project or other revisionist history projects attempt to convince us. In the epilogue, “Iron Men,” Spalding recounts story after story of the Declaration’s signers who sacrificed their personal fortunes for independence, risked their lives, and even suffered torture without recanting their signatures from the Declaration of Independence. Yet, as Spalding wrote, “None forfeited his sacred honor.”

For those wishing to reengage with our history, our timeless principles, and the classical tradition that gives America its strength, read The Making of the American Mind. The ideas are timeless but the content is timely.

Davison Drumm is a Research Assistant at Advancing American Freedom. He studied at The King’s College and is a graduate of Fordham University with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. Drumm interned at the IRD from 2024 to 2025 as a Falls Church Fellow.

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