In Americas revolutionary history, no document is more iconic than the Declaration of Independence, the short but sweeping statement issued by Congress on July 4, 1776, severing bonds with Britain and launching the Colonies on their path to independence.

But what does the Declaration of Independence actually declare? For most Americans today, the answer is embodied in the opening sentence of the second paragraph: 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.

Perhaps no sentence in American history is better known or has had a greater impact than these powerful words about equality and rights. It is no wonder then that schoolchildren memorize this sentence, that adults consider it the founding creed of Americas civil religion, or that this and other newspapers will highlight these words on their editorial pages tomorrow.

During the March on Washington in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. recited these words and said it was time for the nation to make good on this promissory note and to rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. One hundred years earlier, in his Gettysburg address, President Abraham Lincoln insisted that the nation had been founded upon the proposition that all men are created equal.

But in 1776, thats not how most Americans would have seen the Declaration. The entirety of the now-famous second paragraph was little more than the minor premise in the argument over independence, historian David Armitage has observed in his study of the Declarations original meaning and global history. Americans at the time rarely discussed these words, instead focusing on the long list of charges against King George III that dominated the body of the text, or the bold capital letters in the documents final section, declaring the Colonies to be FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES.

So why did we come to focus on the message that we did? How and when did Americans turn a diplomatic severance note into a declaration of individual rights and a philosophical statement about the natural equality of all people?

With the help of newly digitized 18th-century American newspapers and other publications, we can now more precisely trace how people wrote about the Declaration in its own time, and can begin to tell a more nuanced story about how - and who - gave us the Declaration we celebrate this week.

While most observers at the time were focusing on other parts of the document, one set of people saw this sentence as its most important statement: opponents of slavery. The story of how they read the Declaration can be traced, in part, back to Massachusetts, where in the summer of 1776 a young man of mixed racial identity named Lemuel Haynes invoked the Declarations self-evident truths of equality and rights in a manuscript essay on the illegality of Slave-keeping.

Haynes and other Revolutionary-era abolitionists constituted a minority of the Declarations early readers. But years later, it would be their reading that helped transform an instrument of international law into a founding document of domestic politics.

In watching how those early Americans read the Declaration, and what they paid attention to, we get a powerful lesson in how a seemingly clear founding document can shift meaning over the years and even hold multiple meanings in its own time. We also see how a state paper designed to dissolve the political bands between Britain and the Colonies slowly and surprisingly came to be recognized as a founding document of American equality and as a distinctly American contribution to political systems around the world.

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Life, Liberty , and the Pursuit of Happiness