The Declaration of Independence: Origins

1
The Declaration of Independence Origins

• The Bill of Rights Institute
• Milwaukee, WI
• August 23, 2010
• Artemus Ward
• Department of Political Science
• Northern Illinois University
• http//polisci.niu.edu/polisci/faculty/ward

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Background

• 1763 The French and Indian War ended. The
  British forced the French from North America and
  assumed financial obligations that led them to
  try to raise more revenue from the American
  colonists.
• 1765 Parliament passed the Stamp Act, its first
  effort to lay a direct tax on the Americans,
  provoking massive colonial opposition.
• 1767-1768 Parliament passed the Townshend Acts
  to raise money through duties on trade, provoking
  another wave of colonial resistance.
• 1770 British troops fire on and kill five
  civilians during a riot in Boston which becomes
  known as The Boston Massacre.
• 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act prompting
  colonists dressed as Indians to dump newly
  imported tea into Boston harbor rather than allow
  the import taxes on it to be paid in what became
  known as the Boston Tea Party.
• 1773 The British responded with a series of
  Coercive Acts. They closed the port of Boston,
  revised the Massachusetts charter to undercut
  popular power and enhance that of the Crown,
  allowed English officials charged with murder for
  killing colonists with repressing riots or
  enforcing British revenue laws to be tried in
  England (which, colonists said, meant they would
  be acquitted), and allowed military commanders to
  quarter troops where needed to control the
  civilian population.
• 1774 Americans throughout the Continent quickly
  called those laws the Intolerable Acts, and
  most colonies sent delegates to a Continental
  Congress, later known as the First Continental
  Congress, to coordinate their opposition. It met
  in Philadelphia in September and October 1774,
  and dumbfounded the Kings ministers, who
  considered the colonists incapable of acting
  together. Congress pledged loyalty to the Crown
  and assured the King that peace and harmony would
  immediately return if the colonies were returned
  to their situation in 1763. The King ignored
  their pleas.
• 1775 War broke out in the farming towns of
  Lexington and Concord some twenty miles north and
  west of Boston. Paul Revere, a Boston silversmith
  and experienced express rider, warned the people
  in the town the night before that war was
  imminent. Samuel Adams and John Hancock are among
  those who escape.

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The Second Continental Congress Same as the
First?

• While the fledgling United States was fighting
  for its independence from England, it was being
  run (and the war conducted) by the Continental
  Congress. Although this body had no formal
  authority, it met in session from 1774 through
  the end of the war in 1781, establishing itself
  as a de facto government.
• But it may have been something more than that.
  About a year into the Revolutionary War, the
  Second Continental Congress took steps toward
  nationhood. It met on May 10, 1775 and began
  drafting and issuing numerous petitions,
  resolutions, addresses, and declarations for
  settling their grievances with Britain. For
  example, Thomas Jefferson drafted a Declaration
  on Taking Up Arms only to have it rejected and an
  alternate declaration written by John Dickinson
  approved. None of the documents called for
  independence and many explicitly rejected that
  outcome.

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Thomas Paine

• On January 9, 1776the same day James Wilson
  proposed that Congress once again disavow any
  desire for Independence, a Philadelphia press
  distributed the first copies of Common Sense.
• The pamphlet was published anonymously, but in
  time it became known as the work of Thomas Paine,
  a largely self-educated Englishman of no
  particular distinction, who had first arrived in
  America in 1774.
• Earlier colonial pamphlets and essays, including
  John Dickinsons Letters from a Farmer in
  Pennsylvania (1767-68), had presented carefully
  reasoned arguments sprinkled with references to
  Tacitus, Montesquieu, or a familiar list of
  English and Scottish political and legal writers
  of the 17th and 18th centuries, and often assumed
  an almost scholarly character.
• Not Common Sense. Paine wrote in a knock-about
  language, as John Adams later put it, suitable
  for an Emigrant from New Gate the English jail,
  or one who had chiefly associated with such
  Company, with references to The Royal Brute
  of England, The Blood upon his Soul, and a few
  others of equal delicacy.
• While Paines arguments were not new,
  particularly in Congress, they were meant to
  persuade the people whose support Congress
  needed. The pamphlet was widely published,
  circulated, read, and discussed and was
  successful in shifting the public debate from
  reconciliation to deciding how an independent
  America should be governed.

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Common Sense

• American freedom would never be secure under
  British rule, Paine argued, because the so much
  boasted Constitution of England was deeply
  flawed. The problem lay in two major
  constitutional errorsmonarchy and hereditary
  rule. To prove the point he cited, with more
  passion than order, one kind of evidence after
  another.
• The Bible, he insisted, condemned monarchy as
  one of the sins of the Jews. Nature also
  disapproved of monarchy, which was why it so
  often presented capable kings with inept sons, or
  gave mankind an ass for a lion. Monarchy and
  hereditary rule made bad rulers even of capable
  individuals by breeding arrogance, and by
  separating them from the rest of mankind whose
  interests they needed to know well.
• Moreover, the ambitions of kings and those who
  would be kings caused civil and foreign wars that
  had laid both Britain and the world in ashes.
  The problem, then, was not just that evil persons
  were exercising power. It was systemic, in the
  very design of British government, which, like
  all governments, was incapable of constraining
  the power of hereditary rulers.
• The only way to solve that problem was to
  redesign the machine of government, eliminating
  monarchy and hereditary rule and expanding the
  republican element of British government which
  derived power not from birth but from the ballot.
  The solution, in short, was revolution.
• Paine provided suggestions for a new government
  and argued that Americans could defeat the
  British and thrive on their ownboth economically
  and politically.

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The Declaration of Independence

• On June 11, 1776, a committee was appointed to
  draft the document Benjamin Franklin, John
  Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, and
  Thomas Jefferson.
• On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress
  passed a resolution declaring the United States
  Colonies free and independent states. Two days
  later, on July 4, it formalized this proclamation
  in the Declaration of Independence, in which the
  nations founders used the term United States of
  America for the first time.
• But what was in the Declaration? And who was
  responsible for it? While this question has been
  debated by scholars for some time, there is
  general consensus today on these questions

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Thomas Jefferson

• The committee chose Jefferson to draft the
  document. Why? Because having a Virginian and a
  Southerner, rather than a New Englander, write
  the document had great political advantage it
  would demonstrate that support for Independence
  went far beyond the radical New Englanders who
  were sometimes accused of pulling the country in
  their preferred democratical or
  anti-monarchical direction.
• As was the common practice at the time, Jefferson
  drew on other documents for his draft the draft
  preamble for the Virginia constitution that he
  had just finished and which was itself based on
  the English Declaration of Rights a preliminary
  version of the Virginia Declaration of Rights by
  George Mason.

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Jeffersons Draft Charges and Opening

• All agreed that the document must contain a set
  of charges against the King. The English
  Declaration of Rights and previous colonial
  documents of a similar sort had included such a
  set of claims.
• The various charges had a common purpose to
  demonstrate that the King had inflicted on the
  colonists unremitting injuries and usurpations,
  all of which had as a direct object the
  establishment of an absolute tyranny.
• But it was the paragraphs that preceded and
  introduced the charges against the King that were
  distinctive.
• When in the course of human events it becomes
  necessary for one people to dissolve the
  political bands which have connected them with
  another, and to assume among the powers of the
  earth the separate and equal station to which the
  laws of nature of natures god entitle them, a
  descent respect to the opinions of mankind
  requires that they should declare the causes
  which impel them to the separation.
• In an earlier draft the opening began, When in
  the course of human events it becomes necessary
  for a people to advance from that subordination
  in which they have hitherto remained, and to
  assume, which was more awkward and also harder
  to say than the revised version. The earlier
  draft also referred to an equal independent
  station rather than a separate and equal.

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Jeffersons Draft Second Paragraph

• As reported by the committee, the paragraph
  began
• We hold these truths to be self-evident that
  all men are created equal that they are endowed
  by their Creator with inherent and inalienable
  rights that among these are life, liberty, and
  the pursuit of happiness that to secure these
  rights, governments are instituted among men,
  deriving their just powers from the consent of
  the governed that whenever any form of
  government becomes destructive of these ends, it
  is the right of the people to alter or to abolish
  it, and to institute new government, laying the
  foundation on such principles, and organizing
  its powers in such form as to them shall seem
  most likely to effect their safety happiness.

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Jeffersons Draft Second Paragraph

• Jeffersonperhaps with some help from
  Franklinmade the same kind of careful editorial
  adjustments in the opening lines of this
  paragraph, which, as an examination of successive
  drafts of the document reveals, were based on the
  first three provisions of George Masons Virginia
  Declaration of Rights.
• Jefferson began with Masons statement that all
  men are born equally free and independent, which
  he rewrote to say they were created equal
  independent then (on his original rough draft)
  cut out the independent.
• Mason said that all men had certain inherent
  natural rights, of which they cannot, by any
  compact, deprive or divest their posterity,
  which Jefferson compressed into a statement that
  men derived from their equal creation rights
  inherent inalienable, then moved the noun to
  the end of the phrase so it read inherent
  inalienable rights.
• Among those rights, Mason said, were the
  enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of
  acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing
  and obtaining happiness and safety, which
  Jefferson again shortened first to the
  preservation of life, liberty, the pursuit of
  happiness, and then simply to life, liberty,
  the pursuit of happiness.

George Mason
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Jeffersons Draft Second Paragraph

• The second paragraph continued Prudence indeed
  will dictate that governments long established
  should not be changed for light transient
  causes and accordingly all experience hath shewn
  that mankind are more disposed to suffer while
  evils are sufferable than to right themselves by
  abolishing the forms to which they re accustomed.
  But when a long train of abuses usurpations,
  begun at a distinguished period, pursuing
  invariably the same object, evinces a design to
  reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their
  right, it is their duty, to throw off such
  government, to provide new guards for their
  future security.
• Jeffersons assertions of the right of revolution
  summarized succinctly ideas defended and
  explained at greater length by a long list of
  17th-century writers that included such prominent
  figures as John Milton, Algernon Sidney, and John
  Locke, as well as a host of others, English and
  Scottish, familiar and obscure.
• By the time of the Revolution those ideas had
  become, in the generalized form captured by
  Jefferson, a political orthodoxy whose basic
  principles colonists could pick up from sermons
  or newspapers or even schoolbooks without ever
  reading a systematic work of political theory.
• The sentiments Jefferson eloquently expressed
  were, in short, absolutely conventional among
  Americans of his time.

John Locke
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Jeffersons Draft Second Paragraph

• Jefferson concluded the second paragraph Such
  has been the patient sufferance of these
  colonies such now is the necessity which
  constrains them to expunge their former systems
  of government. The history of the present King of
  Great Britain is a history of unremitting
  injuries and usurpations, among which appears no
  solitary fact to contradict the uniform tenor of
  the rest, but all have in direct object the
  establishment of an absolute tyranny over these
  states. To prove this, let the facts be submitted
  to a candid world, for truth of which we pledge a
  faith yet unsullied by falsehood.
• After his list of charges, he concluded that
  section a prince whose character is thus marked
  by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit
  to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free.

King George III
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Jeffersons Draft The Penultimate Section

• The underlined passages were deleted from the
  final draft and the bold passages left in.
• Nor have we been wanting in attention to our
  British brethren. We have warned them from time
  to time of attempts by their legislature to
  extend a jurisdiction over these our states. We
  have reminded them of the circumstances of our
  emigration settlement here, no one of which
  could warrant so strange a pretension that these
  were effected at the expense of our own blood
  treasure, unassisted by the wealth or the
  strength of Great Britain that in constituting
  indeed our several forms of government, we had
  adopted one common king, thereby laying a
  foundation for perpetual league amity with
  them but that submission to their parliament was
  no part of our constitution, nor ever in idea if
  history may be credited and we appealed to their
  native justice magnanimity as well as to the
  ties of our common kindred to disavow these
  usurpations which were likely to interrupt our
  connection correspondence. They too have been
  deaf to the voice of justice of consanguinity,
  when occasions have been given them, by the
  regular course of their laws, of removing from
  their councils the disturbers of our harmony,
  they have by their free election re-established
  them in power. At this very time too they are
  permitting their chief magistrate to send over
  not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch
  foreign mercenaries to invade destroy us.
  These facts have given the last stab to agonizing
  affection, and manly spirit bid us to renounce
  forever these unfeeling brethren. We must
  endeavor to forget our former love for them, and
  to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind,
  Enemies in War, in Peace Friends. We might have
  been a free a great people together but a
  communication of grandeur of freedom it seems
  is below their dignity. Be it so, since they will
  have it the road to happiness to glory is open
  to us too we will climb it apart from them and
  acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our
  eternal separation!
• For Jefferson, the key to this section was that
  America had been settled with no help from
  Britain. Indeed, he had written an entire
  treatise, which remained locked away in an
  unpublished notebook until the 20th century, to
  refute a point in the speech on American affairs
  that George III delivered to Parliament in 1775.
  The King said that the colonies had been planted
  by the British nation with great industry,
  nursed with great tenderness, and, above all,
  protected and defended at much expence and
  treasure.

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Jeffersons Draft The Conclusion

• Then, finally, on the basis of all that came
  before, the Declaration arrived at its main
  business We therefore the representatives of
  the United States of Americano longer the
  United Coloniesin General Congress assembled
  do, in the name by authority of the good people
  of these states, reject and renounce all
  allegiance subjection to the kings of Great
  Britain all others who may thereafter claim by,
  through, or under them, a passage that amounted
  to a rejection not only of George III but of his
  descendants and any other claimants to the
  throne, in effect, a rejection of monarchy, as
  well as of those public servants the King
  appointed. And more we utterly dissolve all
  political connection which may heretofore have
  subsisted between us the parliament of people
  of Great Britain, a statement that strangely
  suggested there might once have been some
  political connection between Parliament and the
  good people of America and finally we do
  assert and declare these colonies to be free and
  independent states and that as free independent
  states they have full power to levy war, conclude
  pace, contract alliances, establish commerce,
  to do all other acts and things which independent
  states may of right do. And for the support of
  this declaration we mutually pledge to each other
  our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
• Much of this language was initially drafted by
  Richard Henry Lee in his congressional resolution
  to declare independence, June 7, 1776. And
  Jeffersons prose (above) was further edited by
  Congress to more accurately reflect Lees
  language.

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Mr. Jefferson and His Editors

• The committee suggested changes and Jefferson
  accommodated them, working closest with Adams and
  Franklin.
• Then Congress made their revisions rewriting or
  chopping off large sections of the draft,
  eliminating in the end fully ¼ of Jeffersons
  text.
• Exactly how this process unfolded and who was
  responsible for what largely remains a mystery as
  there are no accounts of the proceedings beyond
  Jeffersons notes and he was anything but a
  dispassionate observer.
• Congress agreed to the final version on July 4,
  1776.
• In the end, what generations of Americans came to
  revere was not Jeffersons but Congresss
  Declaration, the work not of a single man, or
  even a committee, but of a larger body of men
  with the good sense to recognize a pretty good
  draft when they saw it, and who were able to
  identify and eliminate Jeffersons more
  outlandish assertions and unnecessary words.

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To Sign or Not to Sign

• Why sign the document?
• Only John Browne, Parliaments clerk, signed the
  English Declaration of Rights. Moreover, the
  members of Englands 17th century Parliaments did
  not customarily sign instruments they presented
  to the King, nor were declarations and petitions
  signed by their drafters elsewhere in Europe.
• From the viewpoint of those who opposed its
  message, the Declaration was nothing less than a
  public confession of treason. And conviction for
  treason meant death and confiscation of estate.
• The Crown did not recognize the legitimacy of the
  Continental Congress. By affixing their
  signatures, the delegates signaled that each of
  the colonies mentioned supported the petition,
  and also founded it upon their own personal
  authority and dignity. This was, they seemed to
  say, not the work of an inconsequential faction
  of colonists, as their critics in England so
  often alleged, but the voice of the American
  people and of the men of consequence they
  selected to speak for them.
• The Declaration was read in American cities in
  the days after its adoption by Congress. Still,
  only on January 8, 1777, after the long,
  disastrous military campaign of 1776 was over and
  the Americans had won victories at Trenton and
  Princeton, did Congress send the states
  authenticated copies of the Declaration of
  Independence with the signatures affixed.

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Signers

• John Hancock
• New HampshireJosiah Bartlett, William Whipple,
  Matthew Thornton
• MassachusettsJohn Hancock, Samuel Adams, John
  Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry
• Rhode IslandStephen Hopkins, William Ellery
• ConnecticutRoger Sherman, Samuel Huntington,
  William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
• New YorkWilliam Floyd, Philip Livingston,
  Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris
• New JerseyRichard Stockton, John Witherspoon,
  Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark
• PennsylvaniaRobert Morris, Benjamin Rush,
  Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer,
  James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George
  Ross
• DelawareCaesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas
  McKean
• MarylandSamuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas
  Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton
• VirginiaGeorge Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas
  Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr.,
  Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton
• North CarolinaWilliam Hooper, Joseph Hewes,
  John Penn
• South CarolinaEdward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward,
  Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton
• GeorgiaButton Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George
  Walton

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Aftermath American Scripture

• In the 15 years after its adoption, the
  Declaration was all but forgotten.
• It was revived by Jeffersonian Republicans and
  used as a partisan document in the 1790s. The
  Declarations language was used to support
  Republicans and the French Revolution and used
  against the Federalists and their alliance with
  Britain.
• In the late 1820s and 1830s, both Whigs and
  Jacksonians claimed descent from Jefferson and
  his party, which served to confirm and perpetuate
  the old Republican reverence for the Declaration
  of Independence and its emphasis upon Jeffersons
  role in its creation, which persists today, over
  a century and a half later.
• Opponents of slavery also cited the Declaration,
  particularly its second paragraph. In his most
  famous speechthe Gettysburg Address
  (1863)President Abraham Lincoln began
  Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers
  brought forth on this continent a new nation,
  conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
  proposition that all men are created equal.
• The Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC
  (1939-1943) contains excerpts from the
  Declaration. However, Jeffersons prose was
  altered (for space reasons), the right of
  revolution passage that Jefferson felt was the
  point of the Declaration was eliminated, and much
  of what was included was not written by Jefferson.

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Conclusion

• It is important to understand that the ideas in
  the Declaration were not Jeffersons but were
  instead a reflection of popular ideas and
  writings of the time. Furthermore, the finished
  productthe words themselvesshould by understood
  as the work of Congress as a whole and not the
  work of Jefferson.
• The Declarationand Jefferson himselfhave gained
  an almost mythic quality. This deification of the
  document and the man who was picked to draft it
  has obscured the reality of Americas
  revolutionary past and the politics involved in
  constructing and developing the American polity
  a far messier and complicated project than is
  popularly understood.

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Further Reading

• Becker, Carl. The Declaration of Independence A
  Study in the History of Political Ideas. Harcourt
  Brace, 1922.
• Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. 1689.
• Maier, Pauline. American Scripture Making the
  Declaration of Independence. Knopf, 1997.
• Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. 1776.