10 Things People Get Wrong About the Constitution and Declaration
1. They’re not the same document. They were created 11 years apart: 1776 and 1787.
The version that works on a 9-year-old: the Declaration says why. The Constitution says how. Why we’re leaving. How we’ll govern ourselves once we’ve left. If your kid takes away one thing on September 17, take that one — everything below is a footnote to it.
2. The war didn’t start after the Declaration. It was already 14 months old.
Lexington and Concord: April 1775. Bunker Hill: June 1775. The British left Boston in March 1776. By the time Congress sat down to argue about independence, men had been dying over it for more than a year.
This is the one that reorders a kid’s whole mental picture. They imagine a signature, and then a war. It was the reverse — a war, and then finally the nerve to say out loud what it was for.
3. The Declaration was written in secret, and it was treason.
Congress kept the windows shut in a Philadelphia June because they were afraid of being overheard. They feared British spies. Every man who put his name to it was signing a confession to a capital crime.
There’s a man in this story almost nobody has heard of: Charles Thomson, secretary of Congress, who kept the records and handled the papers for 15 years. In the app, he is the first person a child meets—before Jefferson, before Franklin. Partly because it’s accurate, and partly because I wanted a kid’s first thought in that room to be that someone had to keep track of all this—there was real work, and it didn’t appear magically.
4. Jefferson didn’t write it alone, and what he wrote isn’t what we got.
A committee of five was chosen — Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston. Jefferson, age 33, held the pen. Then Congress cut about a quarter of it and argued over the rest for days.
Kids assume great documents arrive finished. Jefferson’s drafts got marked up and entire paragraphs cut out—it took iteration, compromise, and a lot of talking things out.
5. “All men are created equal” was written by a man who enslaved people.
Jefferson enslaved roughly 600 people across his life and freed fewer than 10.
But his original draft of the Declaration contained a paragraph condemning the slave trade — he called it “a cruel war against human nature itself.” Congress struck it out, largely at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia. Jefferson was bitter about it for the rest of his life. Writing about slavery a few years later, he said: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
So he meant “all men.” He said so in writing, more than once, and he tried to put it in the founding document.
6. The Constitution wasn’t the first plan. It was the second.
Between the Declaration (1776) and the Constitution (1787) came the Articles of Confederation (1781) — a national government too weak to tax, to regulate trade, or to enforce its own laws.
So the Constitution wasn’t a first-draft type of document. It was a rewrite after a failure. Kids get noticeably more interested in the second attempt once they know the first one flopped. It’s the difference between a monument and a story showing try, try, try again.
7. July 4 isn’t the day it was signed — but September 17 is.
July 4 is the day the wording for the Declaration was approved, but most delegates signed on August 2, 1776.
September 17 is on the calendar because that’s the day they actually signed the Constitution in 1787 — in the same room, 11 years later. Six men signed both: Franklin, Sherman, Robert Morris, George Read, George Clymer, and James Wilson. Franklin was 70 at the first and 81 at the second, and he had to be carried to the hall in a sedan chair.
8. Both documents nearly died over holdout votes.
Here’s a thing almost nobody knows. On July 1, 1776, Congress took a preliminary vote on independence, and it wasn’t even close to unanimous. Nine colonies said yes, Pennsylvania and South Carolina said no, Delaware split, and New York abstained. Adams and the others spent the next day working on the holdouts. Twelve voted yes on July 2. New York didn’t come along until July 9. Adams was so sure July 2 was the real date that he predicted Americans would celebrate it forever.
Then, 11 years later, the same thing happened to the Constitution. Several states refused to ratify without a written guarantee of rights — North Carolina and Rhode Island simply stayed out of the Union until they got one. The first 10 amendments arrived in 1791 as the price of the last few signatures.
So, the rights your kids—and you—know best were a condition of the deal, not the opening offer. Both times, somebody held out, and both documents came out stronger for it. That’s worth saying out loud: the arguing wasn’t the failure. The arguing was the process.
9. Three branches — but the branches are the solution.
Most kids can recite the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Far fewer can say what stops any one of them, because they were handed the answer before they’d met the problem.
The problem was the Articles of Confederation. Every state got one vote no matter its size. Congress couldn’t tax, couldn’t regulate trade, couldn’t enforce its own laws — and changing anything required all 13 states to agree, which is a polite way of saying it couldn’t be changed.
Here’s an exercise I’d steal for a group: get 13 kids — a co-op, a birthday party, cousins — to agree on one color. Just one. Let it run until it’s uncomfortable. That was the government for eight years.
Franklin famously said, “Principles alone don’t make a country run.” Freedom needs both the ideas and the machinery.
10. These documents were designed to be changed
The Articles required all 13 states to approve any change. The framers had lived through what that does, so Article V made amendment hard but possible — because they fully expected to be wrong about things.
Roughly 11,000 amendments have been proposed; only 27 have made it.
A document you’re allowed to fix is a fundamentally different object than one you can only obey.
About the Author
Jarom Sidwell spent years in Hollywood visual effects production — Avatar, The Avengers — before he started building immersive history for kids. In his newest app release, 1776, children walk into Independence Hall, meet the delegates, work through the wording of the Declaration with Jefferson, and sign it themselves at the desk. A 9-year-old named Evelyn played it and came out of her room to tell her mother she had signed the Declaration of Independence. She wasn’t playing pretend. She meant she had been there. 1776 is available to download on iPhone and iPad, with a one-time $4.99 unlock.
More from Jarom
For about a decade, my job was building rooms and worlds that don’t actually exist. I worked in Hollywood, on films like Avatar, the Avengers, Transformers, X-Men, Man of Steel, and The Hobbit.
In visual effects, you learn a strange trade: how to make a person believe, in their body and not just their head, that what they are seeing is actually real and that maybe, just maybe, they could feel like they are part of that story they are watching on screen.
A few years ago, I built my company, Immersive History, where we endeavor to make sacred and founding history come alive for youth—where history feels real, and where they feel like they’re part of the story.
For America’s 250th, I built Independence Hall in 3D, the delegates, dialogue, historical artifacts hidden around the room, puzzles kids need to solve—and if they can figure everything out, they get to the Declaration themselves. We made it a mobile app and called it 1776.
Free to Try, Join or Renew to Get the Whole App Free.
Try 1776 FREE. Then, if you’re one of the first 100 members to join or renew HEAV, you get a discount for the entire app, free.
Learn more about 1776 and Immersive History here.
Constitution Day, September 17
Constatution Day—the day that commemorates the adoption of the United States Constitution is held on September 17.
I made a free printable—“Declaration to Constitution” 30–45-minute lesson, no prep, nothing to buy, grades 4–10. Yours to download and keep, whether or not you ever open the app.
Download the Free Constitution Day Lesson.
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