The Declaration of Independence

Overview

The Declaration is about thirteen hundred words and takes ten minutes to read. It has four parts: an opening paragraph explaining why an explanation is owed, a paragraph of political theory, a long list of charges against George III, and a closing paragraph that does the actual declaring. Everything famous about it is in the second paragraph, and everything legally operative is in the last.

It is worth remembering what kind of document this is. Congress had already voted for independence on 2 July, on Richard Henry Lee’s resolution; the Declaration was the public justification of a decision already taken. It was addressed outward, to a candid world, and specifically to European powers whose recognition and money the colonies needed. That audience explains the form. A rebellion needs to look like a lawful response to a broken compact rather than like a riot.

The argument

The drafting is short and well documented. Congress appointed a committee of five on 11 June: Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston. Adams later said he pushed the writing onto Jefferson, who was thirty-three and had a reputation for a happy pen. Jefferson worked for about two and a half weeks in his lodgings in Philadelphia, drawing on the Virginia Declaration of Rights that George Mason had drafted weeks earlier, on his own draft of a Virginia constitution, and on the dozens of local and state resolutions for independence that had been passed that spring. Pauline Maier’s work showed how much of the language was already in circulation.

Adams and Franklin made small changes to the draft, one of which mattered: the assertion became self-evident rather than, in Jefferson’s phrase, sacred and undeniable. Congress then cut about a quarter of the text over two days of debate. It struck a rhetorical passage blaming the British people, softened some of the language about the king, and removed Jefferson’s longest grievance, which charged George III with forcing the slave trade on unwilling colonies. South Carolina and Georgia objected, and Jefferson believed northern shipping interests were content to see it go. The excision is the single most revealing fact about the document, because the paragraph would have made the tension between the second paragraph and colonial practice explicit on the page.

The theory in that second paragraph is compressed almost to the point of being a syllogism. Human beings are equal in their possession of certain rights. Government exists to secure those rights, and holds its powers by the consent of the governed. When a government works steadily against that purpose, the people who made it may replace it. This is not framed as a novelty; it is framed as something any reasonable reader already accepts, which is the work the phrase self-evident is doing.

The grievances are the longest part and the part nobody reads, which is a mistake, because they are where the argument is actually made. There are twenty-seven, and they are ordered rather than piled up. The first group concerns the king’s interference with colonial legislation and courts: refusing assent to laws, dissolving assemblies, obstructing the administration of justice, making judges dependent on his will. The second group concerns military power exercised over civil authority: standing armies in peacetime, quartering troops, mock trials that shielded soldiers from prosecution. The third group, introduced by the claim that the king combined with others to subject the colonies to a jurisdiction foreign to their constitution, covers the acts of Parliament, cutting off trade, taxing without consent, suspending charters. The last group is the recent war itself. Notice the grammar: every charge takes the king as its subject. Parliament is never named. That is deliberate, since the colonists’ position was that they were subjects of the crown and had never been under Parliament’s authority at all, so only the king could be the party in breach.

The document then states that the colonists have petitioned repeatedly and been answered with injury, that they have appealed to their British kinsmen in vain, and therefore that they must, reluctantly, separate. The final paragraph declares the colonies free and independent states with the full powers of sovereign nations, and fifty-six men sign their names to treason.

How to read it

Read it aloud. It was written to be read aloud, and it was, in town squares and to troops, throughout July 1776.

Then read it twice more with different purposes. Once as theory, stopping at the second paragraph, where the case for revolution is made in five sentences. Once as an indictment, reading the grievances in order and asking what each one alleges and whether the sequence builds.

Programs almost always pair it with Locke’s Second Treatise, and the reason is visible in the second paragraph. Locke had argued that men are naturally free and equal, that government is instituted by consent to protect life, liberty and property, that its powers are held in trust, and that a legislature which acts against its trust dissolves itself and returns power to the people. Jefferson’s sentences track that argument closely enough that Congress could assume its readers would recognise it. The differences repay attention. Jefferson writes the pursuit of happiness where Locke writes property, and his rights are unalienable, a stronger word than Locke usually needs. Locke also writes at length about the conditions under which resistance becomes lawful, which is what the grievance list is designed to satisfy.

Do not treat the document as a constitution. It creates no institutions and confers no rights enforceable in court. Its power has been rhetorical and moral, which is exactly how Lincoln used it at Gettysburg and how Douglass used it against the country that produced it.

Questions it raises

• What makes a truth self-evident, and what happens to the argument if a reader denies it?
• Fifty-six men signed a statement about human equality while many of them owned slaves. Is the document therefore a lie, a hypocrisy, or a promise?
• Why address the king alone and never Parliament? What does the choice concede and what does it protect?
• The right to alter or abolish a government is asserted without a test for when it applies. Do the grievances supply one?
• Jefferson writes the pursuit of happiness where Locke wrote property. Does the substitution change the theory?
• If legitimate power rests on consent, who counted as the governed in 1776, and who decides?