HW March 1: "The Declaration of Independence" and Jill Lepore

 Comment on the following sentence, relating it with three texts of this class, one of them being "The Declaration of Independence."

"After Benjamin Franklin read Jefferson's draft, he picked up his quill, scratched out the words "sacred & undeniable", and suggested that "these truths" were, instead, "self-evident". This was more than a quibble. Truths that are sacred and undeniable are God-given and divine, the stuff of religion. Truths that are self-evident are laws of nature, empirical and observable, the stuff of science. This divide has nearly rent the Republic apart." (Jill Lepore, These Truths, in our anthology, p. 109)