Declaration of Independence

Declaration of Independence In one vibrant paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson managed to compress both a résumé of American constitutional theory that justified the struggle for independence and a précis of a revolutionary, republican theory of government. “All men are created equal”; they enjoy “unalienable Rights” (this repudiated arguments by Thomas Hobbes and William Blackstone that people surrender their natural rights when they leave the state of nature); these rights include “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (a liberal and literary improvement on John Locke's triad of life, liberty, and property); governments exist to protect those rights; governments are created by “the consent of the governed” (the compact theory); the people retain the right “to alter or to abolish” government when it violates its ends, “and to institute new Government” to secure the people's “Safety and Happiness” (the commonwealth theory). In their totality, these concepts provided a comprehensive statement of popular sovereignty.

The remainder of the Declaration consisted of a indictment arraigning King George III with thirty offenses, some constitutional, some legal, and some merely matters of policy. The indictment omitted counts drafted by Jefferson that condemned the slave trade, at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia delegates, who were determined that self‐government and unalienable rights in America were to remain the prerogatives of white men exclusively.

The Declaration was drafted by Thomas Jefferson, with only minor participation by a committee that included John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston, pursuant to a resolution of the Second Continental Congress. It was adopted by Congress on 4 July 1776. Jefferson himself belittled the originality of his work, stating that, though he penned the Declaration without consulting other sources, it contained nothing novel in the way of political thought. In this, he was correct: the basic theory of the Declaration was derivative of the thought of Locke and reflected English Whig theory as it had evolved in the preceding century and a half. George Mason had anticipated much of the substance of Jefferson's ideas in his draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (12 June 1776), though the literary grace and felicity of Jefferson's Declaration eclipsed the ponderous lawyer's couplets and triplets of the Virginia Declaration.

The constitutional and legal status of the Declaration of Independence is curiously ambiguous. John Hancock (in his capacity as president of the Second Continental Congress) and James Madison both considered it to be, in Madison's words, “the fundamental Act of Union of these States.” Reflecting that view, Congress has placed it at the head of the United States Code, under the caption, “The Organic Laws of the United States of America.” The Supreme Court has infrequently accorded it binding legal force, for example, in resolving questions of alienage (Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor's Snug Harbour, 1830). Yet lawyers generally, and the Supreme Court in particular, have been reluctant to treat the Declaration as part of American organic law, or even to accord it the restricted status of the Preamble to the Constitution. Conservatives like Daniel Webster denied that there is a constitutionally recognized right of revolution, and those state supreme courts that have addressed the issue in the twentieth century have adopted Webster's view. Reformers, such as antebellum abolitionists, insisted that the Declaration was part of the constitutional order, while their opponents, including John C. Calhoun, denigrated its authority and validity. The adoption of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments allayed the urgency of that question by incorporating concepts of equality, freedom, and citizenship into the operative constitutional text.

Nevertheless, the Declaration of Independence endures as the basic statement of the principles of American government. Abraham Lincoln invoked its authority in the supreme crisis of the union, and it remains today the foundation of our constitutional order.

See also Natural Law.

Bibliography

Carl Becker , The Declaration of Independence (1922).
Gary Wills , Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1978).

William M. Wiecek