Name: A Typo In The First Line Of The Declaration Of Independence? - Walter Isaacson Explains
Uploaded: 2026-02-18T17:16:50.000Z
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Participle clauses

Ladies and gentlemen, my next guest is the New York Times best selling author, known for his biographies of figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs and Einstein.

His new book is the Greatest Sentence Ever Written.

Please welcome back to the Late show, Walter Isaacson.

Hey, is it the greatest book you've ever written?

But you know, that's the exact same length as Thomas Paine, who wrote the pamphlet that 250 years ago started the revolution.

I figured if he could do it in that length, I should be able to, oh, yes, at least defend the revolution.

The Sonnet of Liberty, albeit, what's the greatest sentence?

We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, endowed by the equator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

we've never really parsed it and really thought deeply about it.

I figure for our 250th anniversary, we should do so.

Okay, well, let me parse a few things there.

It's, you know, a lot of people think that are endowed by the Creator with certain inaliens.

Inalienable rights, but it's unalienable rights.

Well, you know, Jefferson in the first draft, which is like here you can see the first draft.

And John Adams, who's editing it, transcribes it to unalienable.

That's the way it is on the Jefferson Memorial.

Yeah, so it's a. Yeah, I mean, so it's a.

It's a typo trying to figure out what's the difference.

And then I realized it's a transcription error.

there's some people I've heard recently saying, well, no, I mean, the Declaration is poetry, but

They look solely to the Constitution for that.

I know arguments have been made about that recently, as there have been debates about the equality of humans.

If it's not our founding document, then why Is this our $250,000?

It's our mission statement and it's a mission statement that begins by saying we're going to become a new country.

And then, even though, as you point out, the mission statement wasn't true at the time, we were all warrant equal.

For 250 years in which everybody from, you know, four score and seven years later, Lincoln invokes it when he's burying the people at Gettysburg who push to make that statement more true.

Dr. King invokes it, John Kennedy invokes it.

So as you say, the document itself has inherent in some conflicts because five men drafted this.

Three of those five men were owners of enslaved people.

Was there any attempt to reconcile that contradiction by the men?

And among those men as they were writing this, absolutely.

Franklin, who had once enslaved two people in his print shop, realized early on how bad it was.

So he's become the president for the society of the Abolition of Slavery.

That's the original, you know, sin that we have to try to overcome.

We know Jefferson famously, you know, had slaves, 400 enslaved people working.

You know, when they're all meeting in this room, there's a little picture of it in the book.

It's Jefferson, Franklin and Adams on that committee and they're writing it.

But there's a fourth person in that room, and

that is Thomas Hemings, who was a 19 year old enslaved valet of Jefferson, whose younger sister would end up being the mother of some of Jefferson's children.

And Jefferson writes a lot of lines denouncing slavery.

The guy who's got 400 enslaved people down at Monticello, he's blaming the King for having imposed slavery on us.

That's why the sentence has so much you can wrestle with.

Current lawmakers can't agree on anything.

We're in a partial government shutdown right now.

And it can't have been easy for our founding fathers to find consensus even among just five of them.

How did they end up coming to this agreement?

Well, first of all, they go through five drafts and they're beautiful, as you see each of them.

Yeah, that's Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration.

And when Franklin, when they get to the Constitutional Convention, he says, look, you know, compromisers may not make great heroes, but

We have to shave a little from one side, take from the other.

We've lost that art of balance and compromise in our country today.

What's the biggest change that went from, like, draft one to the final draft?

You know, one of the changes I like is in the very first draft, Jefferson writes, we hold these truths to be sacred.

And you can see Franklin's printer's pen crossing it out and putting self evident.

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A Typo In The First Line Of The Declaration Of Independence? - Walter Isaacson Explains

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