The language of perhaps the best-known sentence in America’s founding documents raises a lot of questions.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Why is Rights capitalized but not truths? In modern English, the only capitalized word in this sentence would be “We.”

Only men? Today we’d say “people.” But Thomas Jefferson and his cosigners did indeed mean men, specifically white men who owned property (which included, in the case of Jefferson and others, human beings).

Unalienable? Jefferson wrote inalienable, as in modern English. John Adams may have had it changed at the printer. 

Happiness as a right (or Right)? Well, no. First, it’s “pursuit” of happiness, not happiness itself. Second, “happiness” did not refer, as it usually does today, to personal pleasure. Jefferson and John Locke, from whom he likely received the phrase, “were invoking the Greek and Roman philosophical tradition in which happiness is bound up with the civic virtues of courage, moderation, and justice.” Their “happiness” is social, not individual.

And, saving for last the question that inspired this post:

If “these truths” are “self-evident,” why point them out?

Because people in power often forget the most basic truths about their own and others’ humanity. We need revolutionaries – who nowadays hardly ever are rich white men and who certainly do not “own” other human beings – to speak truth to power.