A Typo in the Declaration of Independence
What the document's past tells us about our future.
Have you ever noticed that the Declaration of Independence says our rights are “unalienable”?
Did you know that’s not how it was written?
Thomas Jefferson wrote it with an i: inalienable. But the u version showed up in the printer’s copy on the night of July 4th, it’s the one on the signed parchment, and it’s the one that stuck. Nobody knows for certain who changed it. One historian guessed the printer. Another guessed John Adams, who wrote “unalienable” in his own copy while helping oversee the process. What everyone agrees on is the part that matters: nobody voted on it. The most famous line in American history about where our rights come from was, in its final wording, fixed by a typesetter. And it was frozen that way forever because of a misprint.
Lucky for us, the two words mean the same thing. Both mean a right you can’t sell off, because it was never fully yours to begin with. It was given to you by God, and no one can take it, hand it over, or give it away.
If you didn’t know any of this, you’re in good company.
Most of my generation learned our civics from Schoolhouse Rock. And even the lucky few who know these words usually stop there with no idea about the editing process that created one of the most famous documents in history.
This was a document made by men. It was drafted, argued over, cut, and corrected. That is exactly why it is worth reading closely, because how these men edited the Declaration (what they cut and what they kept) will change how you read the document forever.
LINK TO THE ORIGINAL JEFFERSON DRAFT
The Changes:
Here is the passage in the form we know today:
“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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Jefferson wrote the first draft, edited it with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, and then Congress trimmed it further over two days. There were dozens of changes. Most were small. But a handful of them are incredibly telling. Once you see them, you will notice that they all pull in the same direction. Every one reinforces a theme. Read them in order and you can watch these men decide what has to remain true as our foundation for everything in our Republic to hold together after.
How do we know?
“Sacred and undeniable” becomes “self-evident”
Jefferson’s original wording did not say “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” It said “sacred and undeniable.” Somebody crossed it out and wrote “self-evident” instead.
That phrase is answering one question: how do we know these things called rights are true? And the answer moved from a religious word, “sacred,” to a reasoning word, “self-evident.”
The idea that some truths are simply obvious to any honest mind is ancient, and it is deeply Christian. Paul writes in Romans that God’s law is “written on the heart,” that even people who never had Scripture know right from wrong by conscience. So the truth is still God-given. It has just been planted in our reason, where every person can find it, instead of locked away in a holy book.
And notice what that framing does. If these truths were merely “sacred,” you could excuse yourself by saying you don’t hold them sacred, that you follow a different faith, or none at all. “Self-evident” closes that door. It doesn’t ask what religion you belong to. It says the Truth is visible to anyone with eyes to see and a conscience to feel it, which is everyone. No one is exempt, because no one can honestly claim they cannot see it. Whatever your background, deep down, you know it. That is what makes everyone accountable to it, and it is exactly why no government and no majority gets to vote it away.
These truths are discovered, not invented. They are not voted in. And what no one votes in, no one can vote out.
Who are we?
“Created equal and independent” becomes “created equal”
Jefferson first wrote that all men are “created equal and independent.” Eventually he (or the editors) struck the last two words… leaving just: “created equal.”
Dropping “independent” throws the whole weight of the sentence onto “created”. Not born equal. Created equal. They are created, on purpose, by Someone. Created means intended. Somebody meant to make you, and meant to make you equal.
And it cannot mean equal in money, or talent, or strength, because at the moment you are created you do not have any of those yet. You are equal at moment one, before life sorts anyone into anything. The word creation puts a higher authority in the driver’s seat. Someone did the creating, and He did it evenhandedly.
Sticking with the beginning of life theme, watch what happens a few words later. Jefferson’s early draft did not say “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It said “the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
“the preservation of” got deleted.
That may be a small edit on the page but there is enormous weight underneath it. A right to the preservation of life is a right to keep the life you already have, a right not to be killed, essentially self-defense. A right to life is something else entirely. It is a right to live in the first place. The edit moves the claim upstream, from do not take the life I already have to life itself is mine by right. Two and a half centuries later, that is not a historical footnote. It is the exact ground our fiercest fights are fought on, every argument over who counts as one of the living and whose life is theirs by right before anyone else gets a vote. Jefferson deleted three words and turned a shield into a foundation.
Where do our rights come from?
“They derive rights” becomes “endowed by their Creator”
Here is the change to hand anyone who wants to file Jefferson away as an atheist or skeptic. Because this is Jefferson making his own sentence MORE religious.
His first version said men derive their rights “from that equal creation.” Rights come from the bare fact that we were all made equal. No giver named. He rewrote it to say we are “endowed by their Creator,”… “with certain rights.”
The first change told us how we know. This one tells us where our rights come from. And the answer is not “from the fact of our equality.” It is a personal Creator, who hands us our rights and determines our purpose (a job only the Maker can fulfill). We belong to the One who made us. What He gives, no man can take back. Put it as plainly as it can be put: if the state can grant your rights, the state can take them. If God grants them, the state can only recognize what is already yours.
That exact fault line ran straight through a Senate hearing in September of 2025. A State Department nominee, Riley Barnes, quoted Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s line that “all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our Creator — not from our laws, not from our governments.” Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia called the idea “extremely troubling”:
“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia (sic) law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. They do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.”
Barnes answered by pointing at the Declaration, and noting that these rights “predate the law.”
He was right, and these edits point back to that truth.
What is our freedom for?
The word Jefferson DID NOT write
The last one is not an edit at all. It is a word Jefferson chose not to use, and it may be the one we have distorted worst.
Life. Liberty. The Pursuit of Happiness.
Everyone in his world would have expected the third item on that famous list to be property. That was the trio from John Locke: life, liberty, and property. Locke taught that government exists mainly to protect what is yours, and every educated reader in 1776 would have expected that word to come next. Jefferson passed it over.
He wrote “the pursuit of Happiness” instead.
It is incredibly important here that we recover what that word meant, because modern culture has nearly destroyed it.
When we hear “happiness”, we hear a feeling: pleasure, comfort, getting what I want. That is close to the opposite of what Jefferson meant. His “happiness” came from the old Greek idea of eudaimonia, which does not mean feeling good. It means living well. A life of virtue and character, lived rightly. Happiness was something you achieved by becoming good, not something you felt by getting your way. And “pursuit” was not an adventure of self-indulgence it was a disciplined intentional course of study or practice. It carried the modern weight in phrases like “the pursuit of law”: a vocation, a life given to something. The pursuit of happiness is not permission to grab whatever feels good. It is the freedom to spend your life practicing the good.
The distortion of this phrase has climbed to the highest levels of our government. In 1992, in a case ironically about abortion, about the freedom to end another human life, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. That anthem of our hedonistic age is exactly what the pursuit of happiness was meant to combat. In Kennedy’s world, you are not free until you can define meaning and virtue for yourself, even if that means celebrating the taking of life. It is the freedom to invent your own conception of good.
That is our fork in the road. Jefferson’s liberty is the freedom to pursue a good already defined, by an older, communal, ancient conception of virtue. Kennedy’s is the freedom to define the good, to do what you want and call it meaning. One measures the self against a higher order. The other makes the self the standard. You do not have to spend much time in America to see which road we are taking.
Why this matters
So why does any of this matter? Why should anyone care which words were edited on a hot summer day in 1776?
Because these changes are not random. Read them together and you see the workings of a brilliant set of minds doing something deliberate. They are bracing. Picture someone bracing a house before a storm. You cannot reinforce every wall. But you walk the structure, finding the joints you believe will be most assaulted by the water, the wind, the waves. You find the places most likely to fail, and you drive your reinforcement there. Jefferson is standing in front of what he knows to be the most revolutionary document in the history of the world, scanning for the points that must hold.
Read his sentence once more, with that gathering storm in mind:
“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.”
Four braces. Take them in turn.
Who are we? Created equal. Every person carrying a God-given dignity, stamped with the image of the Creator, brought into existence with purpose, deserving of protection from conception. It is right there in the change: not born into a position by happenstance, but created equal, on purpose. And not merely the preservation of life, but life itself, a right to live in the first place.
How do we know it? Not by our own invention, not by our intellect evolving to invent a new way of being, but by what is written on the heart. Self-evident. The dignity was always there, waiting to be recognized. Discovered, not invented.
What does it entitle us to? Rights so deeply woven into who we are that they cannot be surrendered, even if someone wanted to lay them down, because what a Creator gives is above any human being’s pay grade to take away. Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. All the way down to life itself.
And what does that mean for our government? If we cannot give our rights away, the state cannot grant them, which means it cannot revoke them. That leaves the government one job: to secure them. Put down the pen; you do not author them. Put down the gavel; you do not divide them out among us. You may pick up only the sword, to guard what you did not create and cannot repeal or repel.
This divinely inspired order moves from vertical to horizontal. It is our standing before God that establishes our standing before each other and our relationship to the state. We are not dignified because we are useful, or powerful, or because some earthly authority said we were. We are dignified because we were made, deliberately, in the image of God. Equality, rights, and the limits of government all run downhill from that one fact.
This is what Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams kept moving back toward in their sentences, working to protect. Take out the Creator and you lose more than a religious decoration. You lose the underpinning holding it all up. Which is why, two and a half centuries later, when a United States senator (and former candidate for Vice President of our nation) can call the idea “extremely troubling,” we should recognize how dramatically we have shifted away from our founding ideas.
Our forefathers built and reinforced our house this way on purpose. Every joint, every bolt secured at the points most likely to fail, so that no storm could move it. These challenges, then, should not surprise us, and they should not make us despair. Instead, they should remind us of exactly what we stand to lose if these truths ever fall apart.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.
I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.
I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.
My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.
