The Declaration of Independence proclaimed liberty. Its author owned 150 human beings. Philadelphia, Summer 1776.

In a sweltering room, Thomas Jefferson drafts the most consequential document in American history. Two-hundred fifty miles south, at Monticello, Jupiter tends Jefferson's horses and 14-year-old Isaac shapes nails in the forge. They cannot read the words their master is writing. The words do not apply to them. Jefferson's original draft contained a passage most Americans have never read—168 words condemning the slave trade as a "cruel war against human nature itself."

Congress struck it. South Carolina refused to sign a document containing it. Georgia refused. The Northern merchants whose ships carried enslaved Africans refused. The founders made a calculation: they could have the condemnation of slavery or they could have the Declaration of Independence. They could not have both. They chose the Declaration.

We Hold These Truths tells the full story of America's founding document—the courage, the betrayal, the soaring rhetoric and the human trafficking, the men who signed their names and the millions whose names were never written.

Through the eyes of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, experience the debates, the deals, and the genuine terror of men committing treason against the Crown. Through the eyes of Jupiter, Isaac, Deborah, and Crispus, witness the same summer from the rice fields of South Carolina, the forges of Virginia, and the docks of Philadelphia—where the bells of liberty rang for some and not for others.

Forty-one of the 56 signers owned slaves. This novel holds that truth alongside their courage, refusing to resolve the contradiction—because the contradiction is America.