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 Declaration of Independence Table of Contents Every post and every day rolls in upon us Independence like a torrent. The delegates from Georgia made their appearance this day in Congress with unlimited powers and these gentlemen themselves are very firm. South Carolina has erected her government and given her delegates ample powers, and they are firm enough. North Carolina have given theirs full powers, after repealing an instruction given last August against Confederation and Independence. This days post has brought a multitude of letters from Virginia, all of which breath the same spirit. They agree they shall institute a government - all are agreed in this they say.42 Independence efforts also accelerated outside the Pennsylvania State House, but some were focused on pressuring the state legislature meeting on the second floor - so that independence could be moved toward approval on the first floor. Pennsylvania constituted a stumbling block to a declaration of American independence. Historian Francis Jennings noted that "Pennsylvanians resisted the movement for American independence. It is misleading to suggest that they were slow in making up their minds. Quite to the contrary, the minds of a great many were determined for liberty within the empire but against secession from it."43 Historian Merrill Jensen noted "Most of the older leaders of the proprietary and Quaker parties had buried their enmities and joined forces to oppose independence which they feared would destroy what they repeatedly called 'our excellent constitution.' With John Dickinson as their leader, both in the assembly and in Congress, they refused to change the instruction of November 1775 forbidding the Pennsylvania delegates in Congress to vote for independence."44 That tho' they were friends to the measures themselves, and saw the impossibility that we should ever again be united with Gr. Britain, yet they were against adopting them at this time:Confrontation over independence was heating up in Congress. Jefferson biographer Claude Bowers wrote "When Lee offered his resolutions, six of the colonies were under instructions against a declaration of independence - Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina. And Dickinson, keyed to the highest pitch of grim determination, stepped forward to lead the opposition. Wilson, of Pennsylvania, Robert Livingston, of New York, and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, supported him. And bearing the brunt of the battle for the resolutions were three giants of debate - John Adams, Richard Henry Lee, and George Wythe.74 South Carolina's Rutledge "argued that independence might prevent rather than encourage alliances with other countries, and he argued for putting off the ultimate question indefinitely," wrote William M. Hogeland. "His real concern was that in declaring independence, Congress would become a creature of the North and begin to interfere with southern planters like him." Hogeland wrote: "On Monday, June 10, things grew dire....John Adams, Lee, and others argued hotly, openly now, that the people were for independence, that only congressmen and representatives in home governments were against it. They called America already independent, the only question being whether the Congress would publicly admit it. They mocked as naive young Rutledge's idea that the Congress could seek foreign alliances without first resolving for independence. They attacked Pennsylvania's and Maryland's governments directly."75 Robert Middlekapuf wrote: "Both sides spoke intelligently, though it is likely that each erred in its estimate of popular attitudes."76 Debate on independence was then delayed so a draft committee could be appointed and set to work while reluctant state delegations were brought into line. Meanwhile, Richard Henry Lee departed to Virginia and was absent for the vote on independence. The pressure on Pennsylvania's anti-independence leaders continued. "In Pennsylvania a revolution was already under way. On June 8 new instructions to the delegates in Congress had been adopted, not indeed authorizing them point black to vote for independence, but removing the former restrictions and authorizing them to concur with the other delegates in Congress in forming further compacts between the colonies," wrote historian Edward Cody Burnett.77 "Without days after the congressional debate on 10 June, independence received widespread support. In Philadelphia nearly 2000 men in four battalions of the military associators met and voted. Two battalions were unanimous for independence....When the Pennsylvania provincial conference met on 18 June, the delegates were unanimous for independence."78 John Adams recognized that timing was important. On June 22, he wrote: "The only Question is, concerning the proper Time for making an explicit Declaration in Words. Some People must have Time to look around them, before, behind, on the right hand, and on the left, then to think, and after all this to resolve. Others see, at one intuitive Glance into the past and the future, and judge with Precision at once. But remember you cant make thirteen Clocks, Strike precisely alike, at the Same Second."79 Two other initiatives were underway in the Continental Congress - one, to establish the form of a national government and a second, to establish relations with foreign governments. Garry Wills wrote that the part of Lee's resolution calling on the formation of foreign alliances was more important. "Not only were the other two motions just as important as the first; they were, in fact the real goals to which declaring independence was directed. Independence had to be declared to get foreign aid; and a league had to be formed to negotiate that aid." As Wills described the "motive for declaring independence," it "was a necessary step for the securing of foreign aid in the ongoing war effort."80 Drafting the Declaration Thomas Jefferson recalled: "It appearing in the course of … debates, that the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina were not yet matured for falling from the parent stem, but that they were fast advancing to that state, it was thought most prudent to wait a while for them, and to postpone the final decision to July 1st; but, that this might occasion as little delay as possible, a committee was appointed to prepare a Declaration of Independence. The committee were John Adams, Dr. Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, and myself. Committees were also appointed, at the same time, to prepare a plan of confederation for the colonies, and to state the terms proper to be proposed for foreign alliance. The committee for drawing the Declaration of Independence, desired me to do it. It was accordingly done, and being approved by them, I reported it to the House on Friday, the 28th of June, when it was read, and ordered to lie on the table."81 To write out the Declaration of Independence, Congress appointed a five-member committee - Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, John Adams of Massachusetts, Robert R. Livingston of New York, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. Adams was the logical person to assume the writing responsibilities for the document but his confrontational nature had alienated many colleagues. Neither his personality nor his pen was congenial to the task of composing the Declaration of Independence. Sherman was steady and forthright but no skilled writer. Sherman was known to be "cunning as the Devil" and a skilled legislator.82 Livingston was not a conspicuous advocate of independence and at 30 was the youngest member of the committee. Franklin was old, tired, sick, and not necessarily very energetic. Jefferson was the logical choice on several fronts. One was that Massachusetts firebrands generally liked Virginia to take public leadership. Jefferson was not a good orator like Adams. Nor was he a congenial colleague like Franklin. His primary asset was his pen and his unquestioned support for independence. Moreover, Jefferson seemed to have intellectually synergized the importance elements of American thinking about independence. "From his voracious reading, from his extensive knowledge of law, from his acute attention to the views of his teachers and of his colleagues in politics, and from his instinctive understanding of independence as he had personally experienced it on his borderland plantations, he had developed a comprehensive view of politics, freedom, and America's unique role in world history which would shape all of his thought and much of his actions thereafter," wrote historian Bernard Bailyn.83 Historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote that John Adams contributed little to the document because he was otherwise engaged: "It was not a declaration of independence that Adams wanted so much as the fact of independence, and he concentrated on maneuvering the Congress to prepare for the actual independence that he was sure they would come to in the end."84 Adams wisely yielded the pen to his Virginia colleague, Thomas Jefferson. "Adams was a better polemicist than most. Jefferson was even better," wrote historian John Ferling.85 Adams and Jefferson later differed on how Jefferson was chosen to write the declaration's initial text. Adams's recollection may have been influenced by his short-sighted failure to appreciate at the time the long-term significance of the task assigned to Jefferson and the glory that would be attached to his work. Adams maintained that he insisted Jefferson write the draft: Jefferson proposed to me to make the draught I said, "l will not." "You should do it." "Oh! no." "Why will you not? You ought do it." "I will not." "Why?" "Reasons enough." "What can be your reasons?" "Reason first - You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second - I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are much otherwise. Reason third - You can write ten times better than I can." "Well," said Jefferson, "if you are decided, I will do as well as I can." "Very well. When you have drawn it up, we will have a meeting."86Nearly four decades later during a period when a controversy over the origins of the Declaration was heating up, Adams wrote to Massachusetts Federalist Timothy Pickering: "You inquire why so young a man as Mr. Jefferson was placed at the head of the Committee for preparing a Declaration of Independence, I answer; It was the Frankfort advice, to place a Virginian at the head of every thing. Mr. Richard Henry Lee, might be gone to Virginia, to his sick family, for aught I know, but that was not the reason of Mr. Jefferson's appointment. There were three committees appointed at the same time. One for the Declaration of Independence, another for preparing articles of Confederation, and a other for preparing a treaty to be proposed to France. Mr. Lee was chosen for the Committee of Confederation, and it was not thought convenient that the same person should be upon both." Thomas Jefferson was a logical alternative for the committee to draft the declaration, wrote Adams: "Though a silent member in Congress, he was so prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive upon committees and in conversation, not even Samuel Adams was more so, that he soon seized upon my heart; and upon this occasion I gave him my vote, and did all in my power to procure the votes of others. I think he had one more vote than any other, and that placed him at the head of the committee. I had the next highest number, and that placed me the second. The committee met, discussed the subject, and then appointed Mr. Jefferson and me to make the draught, I suppose because we were the two first on the list."87 Regardless of the reasoning, there was a grace and rhythm to 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson's language that his colleagues could not duplicate. Although himself an accomplished writer, Pennsylvania's Benjamin Franklin had been in Canada for most of the spring. For much of June, he was sick with gout. He was effectively out of touch with even congressional sentiment. Franklin wrote General Washington that he had been missing from congressional sessions because of illness "so that I know little of what has passed except that a declaration of independence is preparing."88 The aging revolutionary was also probably upset that his Tory son William had been arrested in New Jersey and imprisoned in Litchfield, Connecticut. Franklin's dedication to American union predated even his commitment to independence. Two decades earlier in 1754, Franklin had tried unsuccessfully to get the colonies to unify at a conference in Albany. Franklin had labored as a colonial delegate in London to bring about reconciliation between the mother country and her rebellious offspring. As he was to write to Lord Richard Howe, "Long did I endeavour, with unfeigned and unwearied zeal, to preserve from breaking that fine and noble china vase, the British Empire for I knew that, being once broken, the separate parts could not retain even their shares of the strength or value that existed in the whole, and that a perfect reunion of those parts could scarce ever be hoped for. Your lordship may possibly remember the tears of joy that wet my cheek when, at your good sister's in London, you once gave me expectations that a reconciliation might soon take place. I had the misfortune to find those expectations disappointed, and to be treated as the cause of the mischief I was labouring to prevent." Reconciliation, however, wrote Franklin was not "impossible on any terms given you to propose."89 Connecticut's Roger Sherman was a energetic and forceful attorney, but not known for the felicity of his pen. Sherman was an active member of the Continental Congress and later worked on the Constitutional Convention, helping create the Great Compromise. Historian John Ferling wrote that Sherman's selection for the committee may have been because "his comrades regarded him as industrious and reliable - they repeatedly named him to committees - and because he was a veteran congressman with seniority over many of his colleagues."90 The final member of the committee, attorney Robert Livingston, was just 30 and had only recently joined Congress so he was the least experienced of the five-member committee. However, he represented the key and undecided state of New York. Adams took a much more prominent role in serving on the treaty committee that Congress established - and writing the treaty. Garry Wills wrote that Adams' memory failed him in his memories of 1776: "If his story about the Declaration were true, he would have far greater reason to turn down the treaty assignment. But, of course, it was not true. The Declaration, a minor matter in 1775, had become a great if vague national symbol since then, and Adams's self-pity made him remember giving up the chance to secure glory because of his noble resignation to the common good."91 The virtue of humility explained his lack of national recognition. (The third big item on Congress's agenda was the preparation of a draft constitution for the new nation. Independence foe John Dickinson drafted that report.) Jefferson went to work after the declaration committee was selected on June 11. "Faced with a deadline, Jefferson drafted the initial version of the Declaration of Independence in just two or three days," wrote John Ferling. "He was ordinarily a rapid writer, and in this instance he had in his possession, and used as templates, both the draft preamble for Virginia's first state constitution and its Declaration of Rights. In addition, having taken copious notes during the debate on Lee's resolution on independence, he was well aware of the arguments that recently had been offered on behalf of an immediate break with Great Britain."92 The phraseology of the Declaration was not new - nor was it intended to be. John Adams wrote in 1822 that "there is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before. The substance of it is contained in the Declaration of Rights and the Violations of those Rights in the Journals of Congress, in 1774. Indeed, the essence of it is contained in a pamphlet, voted and printed by the town of Boston, before the first Congress met, composed by James Otis, as I suppose, in one of his lucid intervals, and pruned and polished by Samuel Adams."93 The Declaration was not an original work of political science. It drew on other documents previously written by Thomas Jefferson and public documents authorized by other colonial bodies. According to historian Pauline Maier, Jefferson "was no Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from the hand of God, but a man who had to prepare a written text with little time to waste, and who, like others in similar circumstances, drew on earlier documents of his own and other people's creation, acting within the rhetorical and ethical standards of his time, and producing a draft that revealed both splendid artistry and signs of haste."94 Maier wrote: "When Jefferson began writing the preamble of his constitution for Virginia - the part the Virginia Convention used - he turned to the opening section of the English Declaration of Rights....It provided an entirely appropriate model of how to proclaim the end of an old regime."95 Historian Daniel J. Boorstin noted: "Jefferson said the purpose of the document was not to find out new principles or new arguments never before thought of, not merely to say things that had never been said before, but as Jefferson said, 'to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.'"96 The Founders did not worry about intellectual property rights. They borrowed freely from themselves and others. Adams biographer Zoltan Haraszti wrote that in writing A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, Adams effectively plagiarized three-quarters of the first volume, nine-tenths of the second and half of volume III.97 Indeed, the draft Declaration of Independence was a deliberate synthesis of Jefferson's own writings and the writings of others. Jefferson himself recalled five decades later: "With respect to our rights and the acts of the British government contravening those rights, there was but one opinion on this side of the water. All American Whigs thought alike on these subjects. When forced, therefore, to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles or new arguments never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before, but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc..98 The goal was simplicity and synthesis, not to develop material that was unseasoned and untested. Jefferson biographer Alf J. Mapp, Jr. wrote: "The Declaration was not a strikingly original document, nor was it intended to be. Indeed, a paper bristling with fresh turns of thought and glittering neologisms would not have served nearly so well. The author's purpose was to produce 'an expression of the American mind.' This he did in an esthetic and moving blend of the political currency of the time as known to the representatives of the American states in Congress assembled. The thoughts and some of the phrases recall the words of John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, James Wilson, and George Mason.99 Historian Walter A. McDougall observed that "the original passages in Jefferson's draft declaration were not good, while the good ones were not very original. The text's lofty philosophical introduction, bill of particulars against King George, and syllogistic conclusion calling for independence were a pastiche of phrases lifted from Paine, the 'little declarations' issued by colonies, and above all Virginia's magnificent Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason and published in Philadelphia on June 12."100 Jefferson biographer Willard Sterne Randall noted that Jefferson used "the final draft of his precious constitution for Virginia: from it he would copy the long list of grievances against the king. Jefferson was not expected to create something original: quite the opposite. Yet he was free to glean his words from a hundred writers from the time of ancient Greece to the day-before-yesterday's charged rhetoric of Tom Paine."101 Biographer James Truslow Adams wrote that Jefferson "took phrases and ideas from the wide reading he had noted in his Commonplace Book, and from Locke and others who had become almost as familiar to members of Congress as the Bible, but also from current documents which were even then passing from hand to hand."102 He synthesized American grievances and American philosophy. Timothy Pickering, a political opponent of Jefferson would follow him as secretary of state under George Washington, would later echo Adams that much of Jefferson's work came from James Otis's 1764 pamphlet "The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved."103 John Adams himself thought Jefferson's work relied on Samuel Adams' 1722 pamphlet written for the Massachusetts Committees of Correspondence.104 Jefferson never claimed that his work was anything under than a work of synthesis. Historian Pauline Maier concluded: "The sentiments Jefferson eloquently expressed were, in short, absolutely convention among Americans of his time."105 Maier wrote that in addition to his own draft preamble for his own state's constitution, Jefferson used George Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Maier wrote: "In the eighteenth century, however, educated people regarded with disdain the striving for novelty. Achievement lay instead in the creative adaptation of preexisting models to different circumstances, and the highest praise of all went to imitations whose excellence exceeded that of the examples that inspired them."106 Biographer Dumas Malone noted: "Jefferson could have drawn on George Mason for his own statement of fundamental human rights, and he would have thought this not amiss, but the ideas were in his mind already. They belonged to no single man but, in his opinion, were the property of mankind. Certainly they were the property of the American Patriots, whose mind he was trying to express, and it really made no difference where they came from."107 Jefferson later dismissed his reliance on other sources. He wrote nearly five decades after the drafting: "I know only that I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether, and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before. Had Mr. Adams been so restrained, Congress would have lost the benefit of his bold and impressive advocations of the rights of Revolution. For no man's confident and fervid addresses, more than Mr. Adams', encouraged and supported us through the difficulties surrounding us, which, like the ceaseless action of gravity, weighed on us by night and by day. Yet, on the same ground, we may ask what of these elevated thoughts was new, or can be affirmed never before to have entered the conceptions of man?"108 The delegates in Philadelphia had to decide where to place the blame for the actions their revolutionary actions. Historian Robert Middlekauff wrote that Jefferson originally included criticism of "our British brethren," but "Congress removed most of these denunciations of the British people and kept the king as the focus of rejection."109 Historian Walter A. McDougall complained about the "murky swamp of complaints that stick to a reader's boots even today. One that especially troubled Congress was Jefferson's diatribe against the British people, whom he accused of being 'deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity' despite 'our former love for them' and necessitating 'our everlasting Adieu!' Its false sentimentality aside, the passage shifted the focus of American ire away from the crown while gratuitously insulting the very people Congress hoped might pressure Parliament to change course."110 As finally approved the Declaration demonized the King of England rather than the Parliament of England. Historian Pauline Maier, wrote that " the Americans...for the first time formally attributed their repeated injuries to the 'present King of Great Britain.'" She noted: "The King was blamed, however, not because of any new discovery of his guilt - that had been first suspected and asserted after the failure of the London Remonstrances a half decade earlier. The reason lay rather in customary forms. By English revolutionary tradition, a people announced their acceptance of revolution by publicly attributing responsibility for unconstitutional acts to the King, who embodied the state's authority, rather than to his ministers."111 The Declaration listed causes, but it also listed principles. Historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote that "the Declaration, like Common Sense, was much more than a repudiation of George II. It put into words, even more effectively than Paine did, the principle which had been forming in the American mind, 'that all men are created equal.' The only immediate application was the assertion that Americans were entitled to 'a separate and equal station' among the nations of the earth, but the words were phrased in the form of a sacred creed and with an elemental eloquence that has been moving men ever since. The declaration that all men were created equal might mean for the moment that Americans should have the same independence as a nation that other peoples enjoyed. What else it might mean remained to be seen."112 Historian Roger G. Kennedy wrote: "The Declaration of Independence conveys two kinds of information. Upon its surface, Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues state their grievances and their aspirations - information by inclusion. Below the surface...there lies information by omission: the passages Jefferson sought to include but failed, and further material that others on the committee of draftsmen, such as Benjamin Franklin, might have sought to have included but was left out. The legislative history of the Declaration is rich in discourse about why their suggestions were omitted, stimulating us to imagine what was left unrecorded, or even unspoken."113 The basis of the Declaration is a laundry list of complaints against England's King George III. The charges were deliberately general and vague - the better to avoid contradiction. According to Pauline Maier, "To examine them more closely confirms the adage that there are two sides to every story, and the colonists weren't always clearly on the side of the angels."114 Maier wrote: "The grievances in the Declaration served...to justify revolution by proving that George III was a tyrant."115 It was the king who was the Americans' target, not Parliament, whose role in colonial grievances was completely ignored. Carl Becker wrote: "Although occupying a subordinate place in the logical structure, the list of grievances is of the highest importance in respect to the total effect which the Declaration aims to produce."116 While violating the normal writing canons against laundry lists, Becker notes: "Of set purpose, throughout this part of the Declaration, he began each charge against the king with 'he has': 'he has refused his assent'; 'he has forbidden his governors'; 'he has refused to pass laws'; 'he has called together legislative bodies'; 'he has refused for a long time.' As if fearing that the reader might not after all notice this oft-repeated 'he has,' Jefferson made it still more conspicuous by beginning a new paragraph with each 'he has.' To perform thus is not to be 'literary' in a genteel sense; but for the particular purpose of drawing an indictment against the king it served very well indeed. Nothing could be more effective than these brief, crisp sentences, each one the bare affirmation of a malevolent act. Keep your mind on the king, Jefferson seems to say; he is the man: 'he has refused'; he has forbidden'; 'he has combined'; 'he has incited'; 'he has plundered'; 'he has abdicated.'"117 Just as important as the complaints was the Declaration's purpose. Robert Allen Rutland wrote: "The first resolution of the Declaration, an echo of John Locke, stated the basic propositions that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and property, and that they cannot be deprived of these rights without their consent. The nine following resolves elaborated these two themes and applied them practically to the crisis which had arisen."118 Carl Becker wrote: "The purpose of the Declaration is set forth in the first paragraph - a stirring sentence, in which simplicity of statement is somehow combined with an urbane solemnity of manner in such a way as to give that felicitous, haunting cadence which is the peculiar quality of Jefferson's best writing." Becker wrote: "Superficially, the Declaration seems chiefly concerned with the causes of the Revolution, with the specific grievances; but in reality it is chiefly, one might say solely, concerned with a theory of government - with a theory of government in general, and a theory of the British empire in particular." Becker wrote: "The Declaration was not primarily concerned with the causes of this rebellion; its primary purpose was to present those causes in such a way as to furnish a moral and legal justification for that rebellion."119 Historian Matthew Spalding wrote: "The structure of the Declaration of Independence is that of a common-law legal document; the stated purpose is to 'declare the causes' which impelled the Americans to separate from the British. The document's famous second paragraph is a powerful synthesis of American constitutional and republican government theories."120 Spalding wrote: "Certainly the Declaration's language stressing man's natural rights calls to mind the great influence of John Locke. But the idea of government created by the consent of the governed (known as the social compact theory of government) was well established in the colonies. So was the idea that the purpose of government is to secure the people's safety and happiness (the commonwealth theory). Jefferson intended the Declaration to be 'an expression of the American mind,' and wrote so as to 'place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent."121 "No doubt it was a promising text, one that would have been easily improved if the author could have put it aside for two weeks, then looked at it afresh," wrote Pauline Maier. "Jefferson didn't have two weeks. He had, however, the next best thing: an extraordinary editor."122 That would be Congress itself. Historian Carl L. Becker wrote: "Jefferson, as the original drafts of his papers show, revised and corrected his writings with care, seeking, yet without wearing his soul threadbare in the search, for the better word, the happier phrase, the smoother transition." Becker argued: "Having something to say, he says it, with as much art as may be, yet not solely for the art's sake, aiming rather at ease." Becker noted that "the Declaration is filled with these felicities of phrase which bear the stamp of Jefferson's mind and temperament: a decent respect to the opinions of mankind; more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed; for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures; sent hither swarms of officers to harrass our people and eat out their substance; hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends."123 Decades later, Adams and Jefferson wrote differing versions of how the declaration was composed. As Jefferson recalled his draft: "I communicated it separately to Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams, requesting their corrections, because they were the two members of whose judgments and amendments I wished most to have the benefit, before presenting it to the committee; and you have seen the original paper now in my hands, with the corrections of Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams interlined in their own handwritings. Their alterations were two or three only, and merely verbal. I then wrote a fair copy, reported it to the committee, and from them, unaltered, to Congress. This personal communication and consultation with Mr. Adams, he has misremembered into the actings of a sub-committee. Pickering's observations, and Mr. Adams' in addition, "that it contained no new ideas, that it is a commonplace compilation, its sentiments hackneyed in Congress for two years before, and its essence contained in Otis' pamphlet," may all be true. Of that I am not to be the judge. Richard Henry Lee charged it as copied from Locke's treatise on government. Otis' pamphlet I never saw, and whether I had gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know."124 Carl L. Becker wrote: "Having formulated a philosophy of government which made revolution right under certain conditions, they endeavored to show that these conditions prevailed in the colonies, not on account of anything, which the people of the colonies had done, or had left undone, but solely on account of the deliberate and malevolent purpose of their king to establish over them an 'absolute tyranny.' The people of the colonies must, accordingly (such is the implication), either throw off the yoke or submit to be slaves. As between these alternatives, there could be but one choice for men accustomed to freedom."125 The Americans had been accumulating and documenting their grievances for years. Historian David Armitage wrote: "Jefferson's recounting of this 'History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,' was the culmination of a theory of conspiracy that had unfolded across Congress's state papers since 1774. The address 'To the Inhabitants of the Colonies' (October 1774) had enumerated all the legislative and other designs against the colonies since 'the conclusion of the late war' - that is, the Seven Years' War - in 1763. The evidence it presented proved to Congress's satisfaction 'that a resolution is formed and now is carrying into execution, to extinguish the freedom of these colonies, by subjecting them to a despotic government."126 The Declaration was based on the English notion of contract between the people and the governors. Historian Gordon S. Wood wrote: "This contract between rulers and people was an impressive image, and the Whig theory of politics was built upon it, even though such a notion of a legal bargain borrowed from the mercantile world assumed a mutuality of interests and good will between the parties and the most radical Whigs doubted existed."127 This was to be a declaration by and for the American people. Historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote that Jefferson "made a point of distinguishing the nation from its government, a distinction that is implicit in the Declaration of Independence and that Jefferson stated explicitly at least as early as 1787."128 Jefferson biographer Christopher Hitchens noted that "the idea that government arose from the people and was not a gift to them or an imposition upon them, was perhaps the most radical element in the Declaration."129 This was both an American and a Jeffersonian document. Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote Jefferson's "spirit brooded over it, giving light to the whole."130 Jefferson documents editor Julian P. Boyd wrote of the Declaration: "The greatness of his achievement, aside from the fact that he created one of the outstanding literary documents of the world and of all time, was that he identified its sublime purpose with the roots of liberal traditions that spread back to England, to Scotland, to Geneva, to Holland, to Germany, to Rome, and to Athens. In the fundamental statement of national purpose for a people who were to embrace many races and many creeds, nothing could have been more appropriate than that the act renouncing the ties of consanguinity should at the same time have drawn its philosophical justification from traditions common to all."131 Biographer Dumas Malone wrote: "It is hard to see how Jefferson could have combined in such compass a larger number of important ideas or could have better imparted the tone of dignity, solemnity, respectful firmness, and injured virtue which the circumstances required. It was necessary to dissolve these old political bands. The American people were entitled to an independent station under the laws of God and Nature, but they had a decent respect to the opinion so mankind and were thus impelled to give reasons for their course."132 A year before his death, Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee that as the Declaration's author, he tried to "place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent,133 The second paragraph of the Declaration began: "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." This was the heart of the Declaration's proclamation of the natural rights of men - a higher law than any civil law. "In different times this higher law has taken on different forms - the law of God revealed in Scripture, or in the inner light of conscience, or in nature; in nature conceived as subject to rational control, or in nature conceived as blind force subjecting men and things to its compulsion. The natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence was one formulation of this idea of a higher law. It furnished at once a justification and a profound emotional inspiration for the revolutionary movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries," wrote Carl L. Becker. "For Jefferson and his contemporaries, happiness no doubt demanded safety or security, which would have been in keeping with the biblical phrase one colonist after another used to describe the good life - to be at peace under their vine and fig tree with none to make them afraid (Micah 4:4)," wrote Pauline Maier. "The inherent right to pursue happiness probably also included 'the means of acquiring and possessing property,' but not the ownership of specific things since property can be sold and is therefore alienable." She wrote that "his rewriting of Mason produced a more memorable statement of the same content. Less was more."134 Draft Revision Thomas Jefferson compiled and composed. Only Adams and Franklin, to whom Jefferson showed his draft, made changes to his draft. Adams and Franklin made more changes than Jefferson remembers. Adams recalled: "We were all in haste. Congress was impatient, and the instrument was reported, as I believe, in Jefferson's handwriting as he first drew it. Congress cut off about a quarter of it, as I expected they would; but they obliterated some of the best of it, and left all that was exceptionable, if any thing in it was. I have long wondered that the original draught has not been published. I suppose the reason is, the vehement phillipic against negro slavery." Adams wrote: "A meeting we accordingly had, and conned the paper over. I was delighted with its high tone and the flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning negro slavery, which, though I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never would oppose. There were other expressions which I would not have inserted, if I had drawn it, particularly that which called the King a tyrant. I thought this too personal. I never believed George to be a tyrant in disposition and in nature; I always believed him to be deceived by his courtiers on both sides of the Atlantic, and in his official capacity only, cruel. I thought the expression too passionate, and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document; but as Franklin and Sherman were to inspect it afterwards, I thought it would not become me to strike it out. I consented to report it, and do not now remember that I made or suggested a single alteration."135 In response, Jefferson observed: "The committee of five met; no such thing as a sub-committee was proposed, but they unanimously pressed on myself alone to undertake the draught. I consented; I drew it; hut before I reported it to the committee, I communicated it separately to Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams, requesting their corrections, because they were the two members of whose judgments and amendments I wished most to have the benefit, before presenting it to the committee; and you have seen the original paper now in my hands, with the corrections of Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams interlined in their own handwritings. Their alterations were two or three only, and merely verbal. I then wrote a fair copy, reported it to the committee, and from them, unaltered, to Congress."136 In 1817 Jefferson wrote that "the rough draft was communicated to those two gentlemen, who each of them made two or three short and verbal alterations only, but even this is laying more stress on mere composition than it merits, for that alone was mine. The sentiments were of all America."137 Jefferson understated the contributions of his colleagues when he wrote: "Their alterations were two or three only, and merely verbal."138 Carl Becker claimed that there were 26 alterations and more consultations with Adams and Franklin than Jefferson recalled decades later.139 The product of this "committee work" was reported to the full Congress on June 28. Congress tabled discussion on it until a decision was made about independence itself. That was scheduled for July 1. While Jefferson was concerned with his literary efforts on the Declaration, Adams was more concerned with foreign policy issues before Congress. Historian Garry Wills observed that the actions of John Adams, belied by his later recollections, confirm that "Adams, who did little on the declaration committee, worked very hard on the treaty operation, getting models of treaties from Benjamin Franklin. The Declaration was passed with few changes after two days of debate. The treaty was a more difficult business, and could not even be reported to the Congress until two weeks after the Declaration was passed. It was then another two months before Congress agreed to all its provisions. It was as important to make this document proper as it had been, in the first Congress, to draw up a sound Bill of Rights and Petition (the real aim of that meeting."140 The Declaration of Independence was necessary to get foreign assistance for the break from England just as the Emancipation Proclamation was necessary to prevent foreign assistance to the Southern secessionists. Historian Pauline Maier noted: "Until the colonists declared their Independence, no European power could negotiate with them, receive an ambassador, or even allow American ships to enter their ports."141 As Carl Becker observed, 'the primary purpose of the Declaration was not to declare independence, but to proclaim to the world the reasons for declaring independence. It was intended as a formal justification of an act already accomplished."142 During this period, lobbying inside Congress was intense. John Adams and his cousin Sam were the spears of independence. Adams worked particularly hard on Maryland's 35-year-old Samuel Chase who returned home to get new instructions from the state legislature, which it did on June 28. "Chase had gone to Maryland, corresponded constantly with John Adams, and worked on every Maryland politician he knew. The shift was sudden and extreme, as Adams had predicted it would be. Maryland's delegates went overnight from a strict prohibition against even debating resolutions related to independence to strict orders to vote for it."143 Jefferson was more removed from such politics. During June, he was highly concerned by the health of his wife. Historian Thomas Fleming wrote: "Post ride after post rider had arrived from Virginia with no letter from Martha....A letter finally arrived from Martha, begging him to come home as soon as possible. Whether she was seriously ill or simply though she was remains a mystery."144 While the writing and editing went on, the pressure for independence built. "It is now universally acknowledged that we are and must be independent," John Adams wrote on June 23. "But still, objections are made to a declaration of it. It is said that such a declaration will arouse and unite Great Britain. But are they not already aroused and united, as much as they will be?" Adams added: "The advantages which will result from such a declaration are, in my opinion, very numerous and very great."145 Jack Rakove noted: "Until the very end, moderates inside and outside Congress had continued to argue that popular support for independence would be more durable if Congress could only wait until the [British] commissioners had arrived...But most delegates agreed that congress had waited long enough, and that an early July separation would alienated few wavering souls."146 Passage of Independence The president of the Continental Congress, 40-year-old John Hancock of Massachusetts, called 51 delegates to order at 9 AM on July 1. Congress took a half an hour to conduct its normal business, including some unsettling reports from General George Washington. Then, Congress turned its attention to independence. Pennsylvania's John Dickinson had fought valiantly against independence through June and in the debate on July 1. Dickinson was first to speak - for more than two hours, warning as always that the time was not yet ripe for independence. "The declaration will not strengthen us by one man, or by the least supply, while it may expose our soldiers to additional cruelties and outrages," said Dickinson.147 Beginning in early afternoon, John Adams then spoke for several more hours - forcefully and cogently for the pro-independence group. As Adams recalled the response to Dickinson: "No member rose to answer him, and after waiting some time in hopes that some one less obnoxious than myself, who had been all along for a year before, and still was, represented and believed to be the author of all the mischief, would move, I determined to speak."148 Historian Thomas Fleming wrote: "While thunder rumbled and lightning flashed, Adams refuted Dickinson's scare tactics and insisted a declaration of independence would be the salvation of America. It would force everyone to decide whether to defend American liberty or settle for the subordination and submission of British liberty."149 John Ferling wrote that Adams "summoned all the oratorical skills he had learned in sixteen years of addressing juries and in the course of two years service in Congress. His speech was eloquent and dramatic, and he impressed his listeners with his apparent guilelessness." While he spoke, a thunderstorm darkened the sky and lowered the temperature. Jefferson himself was quiet but later recalled that "all the powers of the soul had been distended with the magnitude of the object."150 Adams himself wrote of the discussions in Congress on July 1: "That Debate took up the most of the day, but it was an idle Mispence of Time for nothing was Said, but what had been repeated and hackneyed in that Room before an hundred Times for Six Months past."151 Decades later, Jefferson spoke warmly of Adams' role in obtaining passage of the Declaration. According to Daniel Webster, who talked with Jefferson in 1824, he said: "John Adams was our Colossus on the floor. He was not graceful, nor elegant, nor remarkably fluent; but he came out, occasionally, with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats."152 Jefferson wrote: "John Adams was the pillar of its [Declaration of Independence] support on the floor of Congress; its ablest advocate and defender against the multifarious assaults it encountered. For many excellent persons opposed it on doubts whether we were provided sufficiently with the means of supporting it, whether the minds of our constituents were yet prepared to receive it &c, who, after it was decided, united zealously in the measures it called for.153 In another letter, Jefferson wrote that Adams "supported the Declaration with zeal and ability, fighting fearlessly for every word of it. No man's confident and fervent addresses, more than Mr. Adams's encouraged and supported us through the difficulties surrounding us, which, like the ceaseless action of gravity, weighed on us by night and by day."154 New Jersey delegate Richard Stockton wrote: "The man to whom the country is most indebted for the great measure of independence is Mr. John Adams....I call him the Atlas of American independence. He it was who sustained the debate, and by force of his reasoning demonstrated not only the justice, but the expedience of the measure."155 Garry Wills wrote that "Adams, remarking the difficulty with which the resolution of independence was passed, said it was like getting thirteen clocks to strike at the same instant."156 After Adams had concluded speaking, Dr. John Witherspoon and two other delegates arrived from New Jersey. Adams reprised his arguments for their benefit - and their approval. South Carolina's Edward Rutledge, an opponent of immediate independence, told Adams: "Nobody will speak but you upon this subject. You have all the topics so ready that you must satisfy the gentlemen from New Jersey." So Adams had to summarize the case both for and against independence.157 As Adams himself admitted, nothing much said was new. Jefferson recalled: "The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of many. For this reason, those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offence. The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.158That day, two colonies were unable to vote - Delaware and New York. The Delaware delegation was split, 1-1. New York's delegation was waiting for instructions. Two delegations voted against - Pennsylvania as expected and South Carolina unexpectedly. One of South Carolina's delegates, Edward Rutledge, urged that a second vote be postponed until July 2. Obviously, he thought his state's vote might be changed. Jefferson wrote in his Autobiography: "It appearing in the course of these debates that the colonies of N. York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina were not yet matured for falling from the parent stem, but that they were fast advancing to that state, it was thought most prudent to wait a while for them, and to postpone the final decision to July 1. but that this might occasion as little delay as possible a committee was appointed to prepare a declaration of independence."159 Franklin biographer Esmond Wright note that the opposition of Pennsylvania's delegates "was not of ends but of means. They accepted by June that there could no longer be any form of unity with Britain, but they doubted, as conservatives always are apt to do, whether the time was ripe. The speech made in opposition to independence by Dickinson is as moving a statement, and as severe an indictment of Britain, as the ultimate Declaration itself."160 As Thomas Jefferson recalled these events: On Monday, the 1st of July the house resolved itself into a commee of the whole & resumed the consideration of the original motion made by the delegates of Virginia, which being again debated through the day, was carried in the affirmative by the votes of N. Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, N. Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, N. Carolina, & Georgia. S. Carolina and Pennsylvania voted against it. Delaware having but two members present, they were divided. The delegates for New York declared they were for it themselves & were assured their constituents were for it, but that their instructions having been drawn near a twelvemonth before, when reconciliation was still the general object, they were enjoined by them to do nothing which should impede that object. They therefore thought themselves not justifiable in voting on either side, and asked leave to withdraw from the question, which was given them. The commee rose & reported their resolution to the house. Mr. Edward Rutledge of S. Carolina then requested the determination might be put off to the next day, as he believed his colleagues, tho' they disapproved of the resolution, would then join in it for the sake of unanimity. The ultimate question whether the house would agree to the resolution of the committee was accordingly postponed to the next day, when it was again moved and S. Carolina concurred in voting for it. In the meantime a third member had come post from the Delaware counties and turned the vote of that colony in favour of the resolution. Members of a different sentiment attending that morning from Pennsylvania also, their vote was changed, so that the whole 12 colonies who were authorized to vote at all, gave their voices for it; and within a few days, the convention of N. York approved of it and thus supplied the void occasioned by the withdrawing of her delegates from the vote."161It rained throughout July 2 when the final vote for independence was taken. The vote for independence was facilitated by news from General George Washington that the British navy had arrived off New York. Four delegations remained questionable. Pennsylvania switched to independence when two key opponents - Robert Morris and John Dickinson - decided to stay home. Morris apparently thought that time would bring reconciliation with England but he did not want to alienate his fellow delegates.162 Without their participation and with the switch of James Wilson from opposition to support, Pennsylvania's seven-member delegation narrowly favored independence by a 3-2 margin. The participation of Dickinson and Morris would have tipped the scales in the opposite direction. Robert G. Ferris and Richard E. Morris wrote that Dickinson and Morris, "though unwilling to make a personal commitment to independence, cooperated by purposely absenting themselves; the remaining Delegates voted three to two in favor."163 Attorney James Wilson, according to historian John Ferling, thought "his political career in jeopardy," and so made the switch to support independence.164 Delaware switched to independence when cancer-stricken delegate Caesar Rodney rode through the night to break his delegation's tie. After the arrival from Delaware of the gravely-ill Rodney, a favorable vote was taken on July 2 with only New York unable to support the resolution because of a delay in its instructions. On July 4, Rodney wrote his brother: "I arrived in Congress (tho detained by thunder and rain) time enough to give my voice in the matter of Independence. It is determined by the Thirteen United Colonies, without even one decenting [sic] Colony. We have now got through with the whole of the Declaration, and ordered it to be printed, so that you will soon have the pleasure of seeing it."165 South Carolina then yielded to the preponderant sentiment and voted for independence as well. Only New York, which was being besieged by British naval and army forces, was unable to vote without new instructions. Later that month, Samuel Adams wrote: "Was there ever a Revolution brought about, especially so important as this, without great internal tumults and violent convulsions?"166 The time the vote was 12-0 for independence. For John Adams, this vote for independence was key. In a letter to his wife on July 3, he wrote: "Yesterday, the greatest Question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater perhaps, never was or will be decided among Men. A Resolution was passed without one dissenting Colony 'that these united Colonies, are, and of right ought to be free and independent States, and as such, they have, and of Right ought to have full Power to make War....'" Adams was worried, however, warning that "the new Governments we are assuming, in every Part, will require a Purification from our Vices, and an Augmentation of our Virtues or they will be no Blessings. The People will have unbounded Power. And the People are extreamly addicted to Corruption and Venality, as well as the Great. - I am not without Apprehensions from this Quarter. But I must submit all my Hopes and Fears, to an overruling Providence, in which, unfashionable as the Faith may be, I firmly believe."167 Nevertheless, argued Adams, the Declaration inaugurated "the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance, by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations, from one End of this Continent to the other, from this Time forward, forevermore. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Ye through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not."168 Historian Edmund Morgan wrote of Adams: "It was not a declaration of independence that he wanted so much as the fact of independence, and he concentrated on maneuvering the Congress to prepare for the actual independence that he was sure they would come to in the end."169 The record of the time substantiates Adams' belief that it was the vote rather than document that participants believed would be remembered. "The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epocha in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfire and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."170 Debating and Editing the Declaration Having voted for independence, Congress turned on July 2 or July 3 to the declaration proclaiming independence. The Congress collectively edited the Declaration of Independence - word by word. Historian John Ferling wrote: "It was probably shortly before noon on July 2 when Congress declared American independence. As two thirds of Congress's normal working day remained, it formed itself into a committee of the whole and took up the draft. After presumably spending the remainder of the day editing the document - neither the Journal nor any other existing document makes clear precisely what transpired as Congress labored over Jefferson's draft - the delegates must have realized that the process was going to take longer than they had imagined."171 Indeed it would take until July 4 to complete their collective edit. Congress took a scalpel to Jefferson's work and cut dextrously, reducing the text by about one fifth. Jefferson did not think his colleagues improved his work. He was much chagrined by the changes on his draft made by his fellow delegates. He never stopped believing that his version was superior to the one passed by Congress.172 Others then and since have disagreed. Jefferson biographer Christopher Hitchens wrote: "There is no other example in history, apart from the composition of the King James version of the bible, in which great words and concepts have been fused into poetic prose by the banal processes of a committee."173 Although the changes were salutary, they pained Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin tried to comfort him by telling a story about how a new shop-owner's prospective sign was reduced by editing from John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money to "John Thompson" with the image of a hat. Jefferson recalled: "During the debate I was sitting by Doctor Franklin, and he observed that I was writhing a little under the acrimonious criticisms on some of its parts; and it was on that occasion, that by way of comfort, he told me the story of John Thompson, the hatter, and his new sign."174 The gist of the "hatter" story was how a complicated sign was reduced to its essential elements. Jefferson wrote: The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of many. For this reason those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offence. The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.175
As soon as he ended, the cry from the Belcona, was God Save our American States and then 3 cheers which rended the air, the Bells rang, the privateers fired, the forts and Batteries, the cannon were discharged, the platoons followed and every face appeard joyful. Mr Bowdoin then gave a Sentiment, Stability and perpetuity to American independence. After dinner the kings arms were taken down from the State House and every vestige of him from every place in which it appeard and burnt in King Street. Thus ends royall Authority in this State, and all the people shall say Amen.193In addition to the Declaration's impact on general American public opinion, the declaration had an important effect on the morale of the Continental Army. Two days before the Continental Congress passed the Declaration of Independence, General Washington issued Generals Orders which anticipated the Declaration: "We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die: Our Country's own Honor, all call upon us for vigorous and manly exertion, and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble Actions."194 According to Pauline Maier: "On July 9 [Washington] ordered officers of the several Continental Army brigades stationed in New York City to pick up copies of the Declaration at the Adjutant General's Office. Then, with the British 'constantly in view, upon and at Staten-Island,' as one participant recalled, the brigades were 'formed in hollow squares on their respective parades,' where they heard the Declaration read, as the General had specified, 'with an audible voice.'"195 According to Washington's General Orders: "The Continental Congress, impelled by the dictates of duty, policy and necessity, having been pleased to dissolve the Connection which subsisted between this Country, and Great Britain, and to declare the United Colonies of North America, free and independent States...."196 The troops were told: "The General hopes that this important event will serve as a fresh incentive to every officer and soldier to act with fidelity and courage, as knowing that now the peace and safety of his country depend, under knowing that now the peace and safety of his country depend, under God, solely on the success of our arms; and that he is now in the service of a state possessed of sufficient power to reward his merit, and to advance him to the highest honors of a free country."197 Historian David Hackett Fischer wrote: "Washington's aide Colonel Samuel Blachley Webb wrote in his diary, 'The Declaration was read at head of each brigade, and was received with three Huzzas by the Troops - every one seemed highly pleased that we were separated from a King who was endeavoring to enslave his once loyal subjects. God grant us success in this our new Character.'"198 Historian Ron Chernow wrote: "Reading of the document led to such uproarious enthusiasm that soldiers sprinted down Broadway afterward and committed an act of vandalism: they toppled the equestrian statue of George III at Bowling Green, decapitating it, then parading the head around town to the lilting beat of fifes and rums. The patriots made excellent use of the four thousand pounds of gilded lead in the statue, which were melted down to make 42,088 musket bullets."199 No one understood better than General Washington the implications of what had been done. Historian Gordon S. Wood wrote: "To form a new Government requires infinite care and unbounded attention, George Washington wrote John Washington a month before the Declaration of Independence was approved, "for if the foundation is badly laid, the superstructure must be bad....A matter of such moment cannot be the Work of a day."200 Washington understood that declaring and winning independence were two different things. Toward the end of August, Washington wrote: "The hour is fast approaching, on which the Honor and Success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding Country depend. Remember officers and Soldiers, that you are Freemen, fight for the blessings of Liberty - that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men."201 Indeed, the last half of 1776 would involve a series of bloody disasters for the Continental Army - reversed only by the brilliant victories at Trenton and Princeton. Aftermath John Adams was a realist about the struggles ahead of America - with or without a Declaration of Independence. As Congress debated independence, Adams wrote on July 1 that he did not expect "this declaration will ward off calamities from this country." Adams prophesied: "A bloody conflict we are destined to endure. This has been my opinion from the beginning. You will certainly remember my declared opinion was, at the first Congress, when we found that we could not agree upon an immediate non-exportation, that the contest would not be settled without bloodshed; and that if hostilities should once commence, they would terminate in an incurable animosity between the two countries. Every political event since the nineteenth of April, 1775, has confirmed me in this opinion. If you imagine that I flatter myself with happiness and halcyon days after a separation from Great Britain, you are mistaken again. I do not expect that our new government will be so quiet as I could wish, nor that happy harmony, confidence and affection between the colonies, that every good American ought to study, labor, and pray for, for a long time. But freedom is a counterbalance for poverty, discord and war and more."202 Reality was setting in. Historian John C. Miller wrote: "With the Declaration of Independence, Americans put an end to the anomaly of waging war against a sovereign to whom they professed allegiance and against a country they called 'mother.'"203 Nevertheless, the Declaration of Independence did not end the American debate on political philosophy. It was intensified in 1776 and 1777 as most states focused on writing constitutions - all but Massachusetts rewrote their documents by the end of 1777. During the debate over Independence, John Adams wrote his wife: "I am well aware of the toil, and blood, and treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this declaration, and support and defend these states. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of light and glory; I can see that the end is more than worth all the means, and that posterity will triumph."204 Historian Forrest McDonald wrote: "Sometimes in the course of human events, as the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed, it becomes necessary for people to dissolve political bands. Prudence had dictated that governments long established should not be abolished for light and transient causes; and all experience had shown that mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right itself by parting with accustomed forms. The experience of the American Revolution itself showed something more: that when a people parts with accustomed forms, its soul is awakened and a nation is born."205 The impact of the Declaration was felt in Europe. Historian David Armitage wrote: "The Declaration of Independence first appeared in London newspapers in the second week of August 1776."206 Historian Pauline Maier wrote: "A document that cited the right of revolution in justifying American Independence and formally marked the end of monarchical authority could hardly have been designed primarily to awaken enthusiasm among the political servants of King Louis XVI. Within the United States, however, the Declaration of Independence had many practical uses: it provided a vehicle for announcing Independence to the American people, and, if properly framed, might evoke a deeply felt and widespread commitment to the cause of nationhood and, above all, inspire the soldiers who would have to win the Independence that Congress proclaimed."207 It would be another seven years until Britain officially recognized American dependence. Meeting in Paris with their British counterparts in the second half of 1782, American negotiators Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay wisely demanded that Britain acknowledge American independence at the outset of the negotiations and before any substantive discussions could take place. Independence itself was not negotiable. Historian David Armitage wrote: "In the early decades after 1776, the Declaration inspired more attention and commentary outside the United States than it did at home. Little of that attention was directed toward the Declaration's second paragraph; indeed, most of it either dealt with refuting the grievances against King George III or reflected more broadly on the implications of American independence for the emerging international order of late eighteenth-century world."208 The Declaration was explanatory as well as declaratory. Armitage wrote: "The primary intention behind the Declaration of Independence in 1776 had been to affirm before world opinion the rights of one people organized into thirteen states to enter the international arena on a footing equal to other, similar states. The authors of the Declaration had sought the admission of the United States of America to a pre-existing international order; accordingly, they had couched their appeal to the powers of the earth in terms that those powers would understand and, Congress hoped, also approve." Armitage wrote: "The Declaration of Independence has been call 'a document performed in the discourse of the jus gentium [the law of nations] rather than jus civile [the civil law].' Owing to its success in securing American independence, this fact has generally been overlooked. The document's opening and closing statements have been taken for granted because in retrospect that seemed to have enduringly confirmed that independence. Yet they are, after all, the most prominent sentences in the document, the statements of what the United States intended to become: 'to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them'; and of what they could do once they had achieved that goal: 'to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do.' The rest of the Declaration provided only a statement of the abstract principles upon which the assertion of such standing within the international order rested, and an accounting of the grievances that had compelled the United States to assume their independent station among 'the Powers of the Earth.'"209 John Ferling wrote that Thomas "Jefferson was proud of the Declaration of Independence but it took time for that pride to be shared with the public. While in Paris in the 1780s, he appears to have taken steps to let the world know that he had been the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, not a well-known fact at the time. After 1813, when he and Adams were the lone survivors of the committee that had drafted the Declaration, Jefferson took exceptional steps, as Pauline Maier has noted, to make the document 'the defining event of a "Heroic age.""210 Maier wrote "that the Declaration of Independence, which became a powerful statement of national identity, has also been at the center of some of the most intense conflicts in American history, including that over slavery which threatened the nation itself. In the course of those controversies, the document assumed a function altogether different from that of 1776: it became not a justification of revolution, but a moral standard by which the day-to-day policies and practices of the nation could be judged." Maier contended: "No less than its original creation, the redefinition of the Declaration was a collective work by Americans who struggled over several generations to establish policies consistent with the revolutionary heritage as they came to understand it in the only way open to them - through politics." 211 Jefferson recalled: "With respect to our rights, and the acts of the British government contravening those rights, there was but one opinion on this side of the water. All American whigs thought alike on these subjects. When forced, therefore, to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c." 212Over time, the Declaration became an excuse for public celebration. Historian Gordon S. Wood wrote that Jefferson's "Republicans made the Fourth of July, with its celebration of Jefferson's egalitarian Declaration of Independence, the paramount national holiday and used it to promote their party."213 In 1826, Jefferson wrote in response to a request to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Declaration: "The kind invitation I receive from you, on the part of the citizens of the city of Washington, to be present with them at their celebration on the fiftieth anniversary of American Independence, as one of the surviving signers of an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world, is most flattering.…I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom, of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."214 The Declaration was a call to action as well as a statement of principles. Shortly before he died, Thomas Jefferson responded to an invitation to attend an Independence Day celebration in Washington, D.C.. The bedridden Jefferson declined to join "the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are ground of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights and undiminished devotion to them."215 There was an important moral component to the Declaration. Historian Pauline Maier contended that "the Declaration of Independence itself was peculiarly unsuited for the role it came to play, essentially as a statement of basic principles for the guidance of an established society which, after all, and a Bill of Rights that was supposed to perform that function."216 Maier wrote: "By including human equality among the 'great principles' that the Declaration stated and describing it as 'the foundation of all political, of, of all human institutions,' Sergeant and Sprague contributed to a modern reading of the document that had begun to develop among Jeffersonian Republicans in the 1790s but became increasingly common after the 1820s, and gradually eclipsed altogether the document's assertion of the right of revolution. It is important to understand, however, that the issue of equality had a place in American life and politics long before it was associated with the Declaration of Independence. In the eighteenth century, the republican form of government was commonly considered best suited to egalitarian societies, and Americans, conscious that they lacked the extremes of wealth characteristic of their society and of the governments they were founding."217 Edmund S. Morgan wrote: "The declaration that all men were created equal might mean for the moment that Americans should have the same independence as a nation that other peoples enjoyed. What else it might mean remained to be seen."218 The Declaration stands as a living testament to the principle of human equality. Historian Matthew Spalding wrote: "The true significance of the Declaration lies in its trans-historical meaning. Its appeal was not to any conventional law or political contract but to the equal rights possessed by all men and 'the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and nature's God' entitled them. What is revolutionary about the Declaration of Independence is not that a particular group of Americans declared their independence under particular circumstances but that they did so by appealing to - and promising to base their particular government on - a universal standard of justice. It is in this sense that Abraham Lincoln praised "the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.'"219 Speaking on the Dred Scott Decision in June 1857, Abraham Lincoln said: "We have besides these men - descended by blood from our ancestors - among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe - German, Irish, French and Scandinavian - men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world."220 The Declaration for Lincoln was a leitmotif to which he returned again and again. In a speech at Chicago, Illinois, July 10, 1858, Abraham Lincoln said of justification for slavery that "whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro. I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it! [Voices---``me'' ``no one,'' &c.] If it is not true let us tear it out! [cries of ``no, no,''] let us stick to it then, [cheers] let us stand firmly by it then."221 Lincoln had carefully studied the history of the Independence debate. On July 7, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln responded to a serenade of Washingtonians celebrating Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg by saying: How long ago is it? - eighty odd years - since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ``all men are created equal.'' [Cheers.] That was the birthday of the United States of America. Since then the Fourth of July has had several peculiar recognitions. The two most distinguished men in the framing and support of the Declaration were Thomas Jefferson and John Adams - the one having penned it and the other sustained it the most forcibly in debate - the only two of the fifty-five who [signed] it being elected President of the United States." He added that "now, on this last Fourth of July just passed, when we have a gigantic Rebellion, at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men were created equal, we have the surrender of a most powerful position and army on that very day, [cheers] and not only so, but in a succession of battles in Pennsylvania, near to us, through three days, so rapidly fought that they might be called one great battle on the 1st, 2d and 3d of the month of July; and on the 4th the cohorts of those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal, 'turned tail' and run."222 Historian Martin P. Johnson wrote: "Though the reference to the Declaration of Independence was unmistakable, Lincoln avoided confusion over dates by a deliberate ambiguity. He had a more pressing purpose: to recall to the nation the reasons and purposes behind the war, the issues at stake at Vicksburg and Gettysburg." Johnson said: "That night Lincoln spoke just fewer than 540 words according to the Washington Chronicle, yet in that brief span he repeated three times the phrase, 'all men are created equal.' These radical words, more controversial even in the race-conscious 1860s than in the 1770s, were the central axis of Lincoln's political life and the Declaration of creed."223 For Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence was what Pauline Meier called "American Scripture." It was a text to be read and revered. It was the foremost of the documents on which the nation was founded. A dying John Adams had prepared a simple two-word address for the 50th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826: "Independence Forever!"224 One day and 26 years after Adams died, black abolitionist Frederick Douglass called the Declaration "the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation's destiny...The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost."225 For Further Reference:
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