Declaration of Independence

Declaration of Independence full and formal declaration adopted July 4, 1776, by representatives of the Thirteen Colonies in North America announcing the separation of those colonies from Great Britain and making them into the United States.

The Road to Its Adoption

Official acts that colonists considered infringements upon their rights had previously led to the Stamp Act Congress (1765) and to the First Continental Congress (1774), but these were predominantly conservative assemblies that sought redress from the crown and reconciliation, not independence. The overtures of the First Continental Congress in 1774 came to nothing, discontent grew, and as the armed skirmishes at Lexington and Concord (Apr. 19, 1775) developed into the American Revolution, many members of the Second Continental Congress of Philadelphia followed the leadership of John Hancock, John Adams, and Samuel Adams in demanding independence.

The delegates from Virginia and North Carolina were in fact specifically instructed on independence and on June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee called for a resolution of independence. On June 11, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman were instructed to draft such a declaration; the actual writing was entrusted to Jefferson. The first draft was revised by Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson before it was sent to Congress, where it was again changed. That final draft was adopted July 4, 1776, and Independence Day has been the chief American patriotic holiday ever since. It is interesting to note, however, that the July 4 document is merely a fuller statement justifying the resolution of independence adopted by Congress July 2, 1776.

The Declaration and Its Importance

The Declaration of Independence is the most important of all American historical documents. It is essentially a partisan document, a justification of the American Revolution presented to the world; but its unique combination of general principles and an abstract theory of government with a detailed enumeration of specific grievances and injustices has given it enduring power as one of the great political documents of the West. After stating its purpose, the opening paragraphs (given here in the form used in the engrossed copy) assert the fundamental American ideal of government, based on the theory of natural rights , which had been held by, among others, John Locke, Emerich de Vattel, and Jean Jacques Rousseau.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable 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 its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and 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 are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, 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, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

Then follows an indictment of George III for willfully infringing those rights in order to establish an "absolute Tyranny" over the colonies. The document states that colonial patience had achieved nothing and therefore the colonists found themselves forced to declare their independence. The stirring closing paragraph is the formal pronouncement of independence and is borrowed from the resolution of July 2.

"We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.—And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Signers of the Declaration

Not all the men who helped draw up or voted for the Declaration signed it (Robert R. Livingston, for example, did not) nor were all the signers present at its adoption. All the signatures except six (Wythe, R. H. Lee, Wolcott, Gerry, McKean, and Thornton) were affixed on Aug. 2, 1776. The first is that of John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress. The remaining 55 (see individual articles on each) are those of Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry, Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery, Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott, William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris, Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark, Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross, Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean, Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton, William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn, Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton, Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, and George Walton.

Bibliography

See studies by J. H. Hazelton (1906, repr. 1970), C. L. Becker (1922, repr. 1962), and F. R. Donovan (1968); D. Malone, The Story of the Declaration of Independence (1954); D. F. Hawke, A Transaction of Free Men (1964, repr. 1989); R. Ginsberg, ed., A Casebook on the Declaration of Independence (1967); G. Wills, Inventing America (1979); J. Fliegelman, Declaring Independence (1993); P. Maier American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997).

Declaration of Independence. When the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in May 1775, only a minority of delegates favored independence from Great Britain. Just a year later, however, sentiment for complete separation was strong enough to make a movement toward independence politically feasible. By that time George III had declared the colonies to be in rebellion, and Parliament had pronounced them beyond the protection of the Crown and forbidden all trade with them. Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published in January 1776 and widely circulated, forcefully and convincingly argued for a complete political and emotional break with the mother country.

By the spring of 1776 the delegates to the Continental Congress from the two largest colonies, Massachusetts and Virginia, strongly advocated independence. On 15 May, the delegates adopted John Adams's radical resolution that the colonies assume full powers of self‐government and that all exercise of British authority be suppressed. On 7 June, Richard Henry Lee moved (and Adams seconded) that the colonies were “and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” Four days later, Congress appointed a committee consisting of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston (1746–1813), and Roger Sherman (1721–1793) to draft a preamble to Lee's resolution. This preamble is what we know as the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson, the youngest member of the committee and, according to John Adams, one with “reputation of a masterly pen,” was chosen to prepare the document. Influenced by George Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and using the opening of his own first draft of the Virginia Constitution, Jefferson prepared a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence. He submitted it first to Adams and then to Franklin and other members of the committee for suggestions. They proposed some stylistic alterations and on 28 June the revised version was presented to Congress. On 2 July the Congress meeting as a committee of the whole adopted the Lee resolution, declaring independence without a negative vote (the New York delegation, waiting for new instructions, abstained). Between 2 and 4 July the committee's preamble, the Declaration, was debated. The congressional delegates, again meeting as a committee of the whole, further revised the document. The preamble was changed only in minor stylistic ways but major deletions were made in the list of grievances (see below). The Declaration was adopted on 4 July, and on the 15th, Congress directed that the word “Unanimous” be added to the document's official title, “Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.” After the official engrossed parchment copy was signed on 2 August, broadsides were distributed throughout the country.

Seeking not to set forth a new theory of government but to justify and publicize the American cause, and to provide a philosophical rationale and political justification for independence, Jefferson turned to ideas that were the conventional wisdom of the day. He sought consensus, not originality. Among the ideas upon which he drew were those of natural law philosophy, the British Whig revolutionary tradition, and the Scottish enlightenment. Among these were the writings of John Locke, Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon. The Declaration proclaimed “self‐evident truths”: that all men are created equal and that they possess certain God‐given rights by virtue of being human beings. Among these natural, “unalienable” rights are “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The corollary of Jefferson's premise was that government is instituted only to secure these rights and that whenever government fails in this duty, the people have the right “to alter or to abolish it” and institute a new one. Such a change, however, is not to be undertaken “for light and transient Causes.”

The longest section of the document offered a catalog of grievances leveled not against Parliament but directly and personally at the Crown, to which, the colonists maintained, their loyalty was exclusively owed. These “facts submitted to a candid world” were systematically enumerated to demonstrate how patient the colonists had been in the face of repeated injury. Most of the accusations had been anticipated in earlier documents that Jefferson penned or contributed to (A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, and the Preamble to the Virginia Constitution). Nineteen grievances, one of which is divided into eight parts, were included in the final version of the Declaration of Independence. Among the offenses of the king were refusing his assent to laws necessary for the public good, dissolving properly elected legislatures, creating a multitude of new offices “to harass our People,” quartering armed troops in the colonies, imposing taxes without the consent of the people, ravaging coasts and burning towns, and inciting “domestic Insurrections.” The repetition of the phrase “He has” before each of George III's misdeeds made a rhetorically powerful summary of “repeated Injuries and Usurpations” that could serve as useful propaganda for attracting support from other countries.

Most of the revisions that Congress made to the document tightened and improved the prose in this list of grievances. The most notable excision was a lengthy paragraph condemning the slave trade and holding George III responsible for its continuation by opposing all legislative efforts to halt it. Congress also softened Jefferson's strident criticism of the British electorate for failing to object to the abuses being heaped upon their compatriots in North America.

In the immediate post‐revolution period, little attention seems to have been paid to the Declaration or its authorship. In the 1790s, a period of intense partisanship, however, the Republicans were eager to establish a connection between their party leader, Jefferson, and the nation's founding document. Federalists understandably played down the association. John Adams insisted that Jefferson had merely put a collaborative effort on paper.

Contemporary scholars tend to emphasize the social and cultural context of the document rather than the evolution of its text and the political ideas expressed in it. Criticized today for excluding blacks and women from its ringing assertion of equality, the Declaration of Independence nonetheless inspired the language and ideology of later social and political reform charters, including the declaration of the 1848 Seneca Falls woman's rights convention which Elizabeth Cady Stanton explicitly modeled on the 1776 document.
See also Colonial Era; Committees of Correspondence; Constitution; Equality; Republicanism; Revolution and Constitution, Era of; Revolutionary War; Seneca Falls Convention; Slavery: The Slave Trade; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Carl Becker , The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, 1922.
Garry Wills , Inventing America, 1978.
Jay Fliegelman , Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language & the Culture of Performance, 1993.
Pauline Maier , American Scripture: The Declaration of Independence, 1997.
Julian P. Boyd , The Declaration of Independence: The Evolution of a Text, rev. ed., 1999.
Robert M.S. McDonald , Thomas Jefferson's Changing Reputation as Author of the Declaration of Independence: The First Fifty Years, Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Summer 1999), 169–95.

Barbara B. Oberg

Declaration of Independence, 1776. Conflict in America was well advanced when Congress on 4 July 1776 adopted the Declaration of Independence. Primarily the work of Thomas Jefferson in a five-man committee, a principal objective was to facilitate an understanding with France. The celebrated ‘self-evident truths’ of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were followed by a fierce denunciation of George III—a 27-point indictment, insisting that he was ‘a tyrant unfit to be the ruler of a free people’. The drafters understood that hatred is more easily called forth if it can be personified, and though it was doubtful history, it was very effective propaganda. The list of grievances would have been longer had Congress not prudently deleted the accusation that George had vetoed attempts to abolish slavery, ‘this execrable commerce’. The declaration concluded that ‘all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.’

J. A. Cannon