IN 1735, AS ANDREW HAMILTON FLAYED THE ROYAL governor of New York, he declared that “we are governed by the best of kings.”1 Only forty years later, most of British North America was in revolt against Britain, its parliament, and its king, in the name of liberty.
Crisis was the child of victory. From 1689 on, Britain had fought a series of world wars against France. One of the theaters of conflict was North America. France’s American empire, which stretched from the St. Lawrence River via the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, was vast, enveloping, and empty. Britain’s, which hugged the Atlantic coast, was smaller, encircled, and populous. By 1763, thanks to superior generalship and colonists’ numbers, Britain had wrested all of America east of the Mississippi from France.
The thirteen colonies stretching from Maine (then part of Massachusetts) to Georgia were liberated from the fear of French attack and, they soon realized, from dependence on British protection. At the same time, they found themselves entangled in Britain’s efforts to pay off the debt left over from the great struggle. Her statesmen were determined to replace a patchwork empire, in which ear-tuggers and pocket-liners had been carelessly sent to misrule its far-flung parts, with a well-run business concern that would replenish the imperial coffers.
The effort backfired. The very prospects that had drawn settlers across the ocean—making a living, enjoying a measure of self-rule—made them resent new taxes and cherish their privileges. In 1765 a stamp tax on all sorts of paper, from legal documents to playing cards, prompted delegates from nine colonies to meet as a congress in New York’s City Hall to discuss their grievances and petition the king and Parliament for relief. Parliament repealed this tax, but others followed; new protests begot reprisals. In the fall of 1774, a Continental Congress met in Carpenters’ Hall, a craft guild’s house of assembly in Philadelphia. The delegates to this meeting were picked in a variety of ways: Connecticut’s were chosen by a patriotic colonial governor and legislature; Massachusetts’s by its legislature, acting at loggerheads with its royalist governor. After Virginia’s royal governor dissolved the House of Burgesses for expressing too-radical opinions, it simply moved to a tavern in the colonial capital, where it reconstituted itself as a convention—representing the people without royal approval—and chose representatives to go to Philadelphia.
The first Continental Congress called for a boycott of British goods and a second meeting to be held in the spring of 1775. By the time the Second Continental Congress opened in the Pennsylvania State House in May, the cycle of resistance and repression had given way to battle. A column of British troops sweeping the countryside around Boston for protest leaders and caches of arms exchanged fire twice with local militias; its march back to barracks had been a fighting retreat against swarming, enraged locals.
The Congress sent George Washington, a Virginian veteran of Britain’s last colonial war, to take command of the New Englanders flocking to besiege Boston. It tried to raise funds and supplies and secretly explored the possibility of foreign help. It was not yet committed, however, to a separation. The king’s ministers and Parliament, who had proposed and approved all oppressive measures, were the villains. The king himself, George III, was still young (turning thirty-seven) and popular. He looked enough like George Washington that coin collectors cannot say which man the big-nosed heads on crude colonial tokens inscribed GEORGIUS TRIUMPHO are meant to honor. Maybe he would turn out to be “the best of kings.”
The dream of royal reconciliation did not last. In the fall of 1775, George III informed Parliament that he “would put a speedy end to these disorders” by military force.2 The Royal Navy burned Falmouth, Maine, and Norfolk, Virginia. In early 1776 Thomas Paine, an immigrant British tax collector, published Common Sense, a pamphlet calling for independence and assuring its readers “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.”3 It sold 150,000 copies, in a population of three million (the equivalent of a sale of sixteen and a half million copies today). On June 7 Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian whose eloquence was enhanced by the black silk glove he wore over his left hand maimed in a hunting accident, moved in Congress “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” After a month of debate, his motion was carried on July 2—a date, wrote Massachusetts delegate John Adams, that would be celebrated with worship, parades, games, guns, bells, and bonfires “from this time forward forever more.”4
Why? Why independence? Why break up what bid fair to become the greatest empire on earth?
Congress, besides doing the deed, had thought to explain it, and, anticipating the result, had assigned the job to a five-man committee on June 11.
The oldest member, at seventy, was Benjamin Franklin, the most famous and probably the smartest American then living—printer, politician, wit, and scientist. For sixteen years he had lived in London, acting as a lobbyist for Pennsylvania and other American colonies to the British government. For most of that time he was a dedicated imperialist, approving the Stamp Act as a necessary measure and maneuvering to have his illegitimate son William named royal governor of New Jersey. In his vision, however, the colonies and the home country would be equal partners in empire. No one in Britain shared his vision. In 1774 the Privy Council, the king’s advisors, gave him a public dressing-down for his Americanist sympathies; he returned home, dedicated to independence and to revenge. In June 1776 he had just returned from a two-month mission to Canada trying to spread the revolution there.
Roger Sherman, age fifty-five, was a shoemaker, surveyor, and self-taught lawyer who had been in Connecticut politics for twenty years. In appearance he was plain as a board and just as stiff. But, as a colleague later wrote, he was “cunning as the Devil… you may as well catch an eel by the tail.”5
John Adams, forty, was a Harvard-educated lawyer who, under the guidance of his cousin Samuel, had been a figure in the politics of protest in Massachusetts for seven years. His pen, lively and discursive in private letters, labored when he turned it to polemics. But when he spoke he was both compelling and indefatigable—one fellow delegate to the Continental Congress called him “our Colossus on the floor”—though thanks to some self-critical mechanism, he could not recall and preserve his great efforts.6
Thomas Jefferson, thirty-three, was a planter and lawyer, and the youngest member of Virginia’s seven-man delegation. The typical Virginia politician was an orator (the unimpressed would say a ranter). Jefferson was quiet and shy; under stress he suffered migraines. But when he sat down to write he was transformed, showing a style that was both sweet and urgent, singing and staccato. “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time,” he wrote in 1774; “the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”7 Note the alliterations (life, liberty), the internal rhymes (destroy, disjoin), the bold antitheses (God, force). No other writer in America had that combination of lightness and power.
Robert R. Livingston, twenty-nine, of New York, was a Hudson Valley grandee who was sent to Congress almost as a matter of inheritance. His father, Robert R. Livingston, had been a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress. The Livingston clan was so numerous and included so many Roberts that this father and son both bore the repetitive middle name Robert to distinguish themselves from other Robert Livingstons.
Of these five men, Jefferson was the obvious choice to do the committee’s work. Though Sherman and Livingston would go on to long and honorable careers, they contributed nothing to the declaration. Franklin was an ironist, unbeatable for a joke or a hoax, less suited to the task at hand. Adams later claimed that he demurred on the grounds that he had “a great Opinion of the Elegance of [Jefferson’s] pen and none at all of my own.”8 Jefferson lodged in a bricklayer’s house two blocks from the State House. Working in the second-floor parlor on a portable writing desk, he produced a seventeen-hundred-word document in a few days. Adams and Franklin, to whom he showed it, suggested several small changes: Jefferson described human rights as “sacred and undeniable,” which scientist Franklin made “self-evident.” Congress was given the draft at the end of June. After Richard Henry Lee’s motion passed on July 2, Congress turned to the declaration to edit it, approving the final version and sending it to the printer on July 4.
The Declaration of Independence has three sections: an introduction, a conclusion, and, in between, a bill of indictment against George III, and secondarily, against the British people. Most of the items in the bill of indictment accuse the king of suspending or ignoring America’s colonial assemblies and of ordering actions that those assemblies would never have approved: appointing judges and administrators (“swarms of new officers”) responsible to him, not them; maintaining troops in America in time of peace under his command, not theirs (British Redcoats had been occupying Boston, ostensibly to keep order, since 1768). The hopeful experiment in self-rule begun at Jamestown a century and a half earlier was unraveling.
One of Jefferson’s most passionate items arraigned George III for forcing the slave trade on America (“he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce”). It is the fashion to scoff at Jefferson for including this bit of arrant hypocrisy. Every colony represented in Philadelphia in 1776 had slaves, and many, including Virginia, depended on their labor. Virginia had indeed asked that the slave trade be restricted, but it could afford to: the colony had all the slaves it needed; new imports would only decrease the value of those already there. Yet, as historians of slavery have come to understand the immense profits that Britain derived from the slave trade, Jefferson’s complaint recovers some credibility. Yes, we were hooked, and willingly, but the mother country was an eager pusher.
Congress did not want to raise the question of slavery; our enemies were already raising it for us (“How is it,” Samuel Johnson, the great English Tory and abolitionist, had asked in 1775, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”).9 The “drivers of Negroes,” and their non-slave-driving colleagues, cut this accusation out of the declaration.
Jefferson, with all the pride of an author and all the sensitivity of a still-young one, squirmed over this and every other editorial change. Franklin, sitting beside him and observing his unhappiness, offered the balm of an anecdote, supposedly about one John Thompson, a friend of his youth, who after serving an apprenticeship to a hatter planned to open a shop of his own. Thompson designed a “handsome signboard” with a picture of a hat and the inscription, “John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money.” But every friend he showed it to suggested a shortening of his slogan—“‘Sells hats!’ says his next friend. Why, nobody will expect you to give them away; what is the use of that word?”—until all that was left was his name and the picture of the hat.10
Congress was not so drastic; it trimmed less than a third of Jefferson’s handiwork, leaving a little over thirteen hundred words. And it left his introduction virtually untouched.
The declaration’s opening paragraph is a polite salutation to its audience and a description of what is to follow. The declaration will explain “the causes” of the American Revolution—“the separation”—to “mankind.” Who is included in “mankind”? The British, obviously, against whom we were fighting. Also Americans, who were doing the fighting—or not (John Adams later guessed that only a third of Americans supported independence; the remainder were opposed or neutral). Also, crucially, potential allies: France, Britain’s longtime enemy; Spain, another British rival. But such was Jefferson’s power of suggestion that “mankind” potentially opens out to mean everyone, present or future. The declaration is Congress’s recital of its reasons to the world and to posterity.
But before the declaration gets to the reasons—the indictment of Britain and its king—it pauses to give a lesson in political philosophy. It is brief, only half a paragraph, yet without feeling pinched; Adams’s praise of Jefferson’s elegance was never more justified. The lesson covers revolution, government, and human nature, and glances at God. Jefferson, with a touch of the professor, begins with the most fundamental topic, human nature, adding implications and reservations as he goes. But, as ordinary humans immersed in our lives and the news, we might examine his argument in reverse order.
Revolutions, the declaration admits, are rare, and rightly so. “Prudence… will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes… all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Government had been compared to a ship or a boat since Plato and Horace. Jefferson is saying, don’t rock it. Prudence, established, experience, and accustomed stand like four grave helmsman against the turbulence represented by light and transient. In these two sentences the American revolutionary seems to echo the pragmatic rhetoric of his English contemporary Edmund Burke (a pro-American member of Parliament, it is true, but later to become the philosopher of modern conservatism).
But suppose the evils of misgovernment are not “light and transient”? Suppose evils are the result, not of accident, ignorance, or even the bad policies of a particular set of lawmakers (who might, in time, be replaced by other, wiser ones)? Suppose evils arise from the “form of government” itself? Evils so fundamental require radical remedies. It then becomes “the right of the people to alter or to abolish” the current form “and to institute new government.” When Andrew Hamilton invoked Brutus and Hampden in the trial of John Peter Zenger, he warned what men might be driven to. Now, says Jefferson, Americans have been driven to it.
A new government should not be just any government, however. Revolution is not for the purpose of disruption; change for its own sake is like a sick man turning over in bed. The new government, wrote Jefferson, should rest on a “foundation” of right “principles” (“laying its foundation on such principles [as] shall seem most likely to effect [the people’s] safety and happiness”).
What principles are they? The declaration has explained when revolutions should happen (rarely, and only to right evil forms of government) and why (to establish proper forms). It must also explain what the right forms of government are.
The declaration is not a constitution, an enduring structure or semipermanent list of hows and don’ts. Congress would get to work on writing a constitution later in July (the document, known as the Articles of Confederation, would take more than a year to complete). But the declaration outlines two features that a good form of government must have.
The first feature is that good government rests on consent (“deriving [its] just powers from the consent of the governed”). This was the principle tentatively enacted at Jamestown in 1619.
The second feature of a good government is that it acknowledges and upholds rights (“to secure… rights, governments are instituted among men”). Rights, plural. The declaration has gone beyond the Flushing Remonstrance and Andrew Hamilton’s address to the Zenger jury. Good government looks to more than the right to worship or the right to complain; there are multiple rights in its purview.
The two features, consent and the range of rights, are related. Could there be an ideal sovereign, a “best of kings,” who would guarantee every legitimate right without being answerable to his subjects? No. The ideal sovereign is, in the first place, incredible, because even good sovereigns die or change. George III had looked very good—until he stopped looking good at all. The all-powerful ideal sovereign is, in the second place, logically impossible because the power of the governed to give or withhold consent is one of the very rights that good government must uphold.
It is important to know that good governments secure rights and possess the consent of the governed. But this is all still rather abstract. What rights, besides consent, does the declaration have in mind?
Jefferson listed three. “Among these [rights] are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Life and liberty seem obvious: you cannot be killed or imprisoned without good reason—in the English legal tradition, only as punishment for a crime and only after a trial. Gallows, jails, and stocks were features of ordinary eighteenth-century life, but no one was sent to them at whim. Even Governor Cosby gave John Peter Zenger his day in court.
To our ears pursuit of happiness sounds startlingly open-ended, even zany—like ad copy for a cruise ship or a reality show. But the phrase had a long, serious existence before it appeared in the declaration. It was used, more or less, by William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century English academic and jurist, whose Commentaries on the Laws of England was canonical for lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic. Blackstone wrote that, since living justly makes us happy, “the foundation of what we call ethics, or natural law,” could be summarized thus: “that man should pursue his own true and substantial happiness.”11 Jefferson knew Blackstone’s work, though he disliked it, for Blackstone was a man of the English establishment and a protégé of George III. But Blackstone’s words, or words almost like them, had appeared in the work of other legal commentators and political philosophers, including John Locke. Their most recent incarnation had been on June 12, 1776, in a Declaration of Rights promulgated by Virginia (it would become the opening of Virginia’s first state constitution). This document listed, among the rights enjoyed by “all men,” “pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Jefferson had Virginia’s Declaration of Rights in his Philadelphia parlor as he wrote his own declaration; assuming he needed any reminder about happiness, it was no further than his desktop.
But maybe the most expansive word in the declaration’s list of rights is among. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness do not exhaust the list. They are only the three rights Jefferson chose to specify, among uncounted, unnamed others.
Good government may be founded anew when it forgets its purposes, which are to heed consent and uphold rights. But government is a human institution. Men make it, staff it, live with it. So we must also ask, what are men?
Many areas of study—history and art, philosophy and science—give their various answers. For political purposes, the declaration says this: “they”—men—“are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” (This is the only change Congress made to Jefferson’s draft, a matter of style not substance; he had written “inherent and inalienable rights,” which must have struck his colleagues as one alliteration too many.)
Here the declaration joins hands, from however great a distance, with the Quakers and other sectarians of the seventeenth century. Alienate is a legal term referring to the transfer of ownership. A man can alienate whatever he owns, from a landed estate to a writing desk. But rights are not like that. They are bolted to us; they are part of us; they are aspects of our nature.
They have that character because the Creator made us that way. Our rights are not granted by kings, invented by a scribe in a parlor, or voted by continental congresses. They are outside human fashioning, created by God.
That does not guarantee that they will be honored in the world. They can be ignored, mocked, trampled. So they were, Jefferson and his fellow delegates believed, by George III. But any such curtailment was against nature. More, it was a profanation, because the Creator willed otherwise.
How religious was Thomas Jefferson? Years after 1776 he spent some time editing the Gospels, separating what he considered the authentic sayings of Jesus from the spurious ones. He also wrote that the ethics Jesus taught were superior to those taught by the Greeks and the Jews. No doubt these efforts and opinions retained some afterglow of belief, but Jefferson meant them as exercises in philosophy. His Jesus was like Socrates or Jefferson himself: a wise, good man, the best of his kind, but the same kind as all other men. All Christian theology, which made Jesus the Son of God, Jefferson dismissed as perversions of its founder’s career and teachings. Jefferson’s God, similarly, was a philosopher’s God, a cause and a sustaining hum. God almost vanished into His greatest creation, nature itself (the first paragraph of the declaration spoke of “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”). Now and then Jefferson could break out in pious anxieties, but for the most part he had no more religion than a cat. John Bowne and Tobias Feake, Robert Hodgson and Robert Fowler, would not have known what to make of him. On one thing, however, they all agreed, and it was important: rights were inextricably human because their origins were extrahuman, fashioned by the Creator of everything.
Jefferson was not the only American to put this thought into contemporary language. He never claimed that the declaration was original; a year before he died, he said he had only formulated “the common sense of the subject… whether expressed in conversation, in letters [or] in printed essays.”12 He said so, in part, as backhanded self-promotion: if he had only written what everybody thought, then the declaration was all the more to be honored. By forfeiting the status of lonely genius, he acquired that of universal bard.
But Jefferson’s denial of originality, especially concerning this key point, was also simple truth. In 1766, during the Stamp Act crisis, John Dickinson, a wealthy Pennsylvania lawyer, had written that our rights “are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power.”13 In 1775, during the present crisis, Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant college student in New York, said that our rights “are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”14 Jefferson probably never read Hamilton’s youthful effusion, but he had certainly read Dickinson’s; Dickinson was a far more prominent patriot than he was—author of America’s first political best seller, Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, and, in 1776, a fellow delegate to the Continental Congress.
The declaration made one more point about men. All of them “are created equal.” Elections determined by majority vote, as in Jamestown’s first General Assembly, presumed equality, of the voters at least; the declaration’s phrase was more sweeping. It would have many aftershocks.
Jefferson’s document calls itself the Declaration of Independence, but it starts with an essay on liberty—why we are entitled to it, what it is, and its relevance to the matter at hand. Liberty is America’s reason for being.
Congress ordered two hundred copies of the declaration to be printed and distributed across the new country. On July 9, Commander in Chief George Washington had one read to his troops, who were then in New York City awaiting a British attack (the Royal Navy had begun landing troops on Staten Island a week earlier). After the reading was finished, a patriot mob went to Bowling Green, a park at the southern tip of Manhattan, and toppled an equestrian statue of George III, which was melted into bullets.
When he was an old man, Jefferson stated that the declaration was signed the day of its date, but his memory played him false. Signatures were affixed to a handwritten parchment copy on August 2. Some of the signers were late arrivals to Congress who had not participated in the vote for independence; other voters had not been there to sign (for example, Robert Livingston had been called back to New York to serve in the legislature there). John Dickinson refused to sign, believing that a constitution and formal alliances should precede independence, though he served as a private in the Delaware militia the following year when that state and Pennsylvania were under attack.
The act of signing, which technically made all the signatories traitors, was accompanied with some gallows humor. Charles Carroll of Carrollton signed from Maryland (the suffix to his name distinguished him, like Livingston’s extra Robert, from other family members—his father was Charles Carroll of Annapolis, his grandfather Charles Carroll the Settler). Carroll, a planter and merchant, was reputedly the wealthiest member of Congress; as he signed, someone quipped, “There go a few millions.”15 Carroll lost no millions, but Richard Stockton, a signer from New Jersey, was captured by the British in November 1776 and held—shackled, freezing, and starving—in prison for five weeks before being released on parole. About the same time, John Hart, another New Jersey signer, evaded capture by fleeing his farm and hiding out in nearby caves. Later in the war, George Walton of Georgia and three South Carolinians—Thomas Heyward, Arthur Middleton, and Edward Rutledge—were made prisoners of war and held for months. They were treated with only ordinary roughness and released in prisoner exchanges.
These are the signers of the Declaration of Independence (two of the colonies used what strike us as antiquated names):
New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton
Massachusetts Bay: John Hancock signed as president of Congress; Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry joined him from their state
Rhode Island and Providence Plantations: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery
Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
New York: William Lloyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris (grandson of John Peter Zenger’s patron)
New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark
Pennsylvania: Robert Morris (no relation to the New York Morrises), Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross
Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Reed, Thomas McKean
Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee (brother of Richard Henry), Carter Braxton
North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn
South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward Jr., Thomas Lynch Jr., Arthur Middleton
Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton
If these men escaped prosecution for treason, they would belong to the elite of a new nation. Most were already leading figures in their colonies, now to become states. They were overwhelmingly lawyers, merchants, or plantation owners, with a handful of doctors and a few wild cards thrown in: Franklin was sui generis, John Witherspoon was a clergyman and college president, lawyer Francis Hopkinson doubled as a composer and organist.
The declaration they signed increased in stature over the years, from an American announcement to a sacred text. We celebrate our independence not, as John Adams predicted, on the day that Richard Henry Lee’s motion calling for it passed but on the day that Jefferson’s words immortalizing it were endorsed. Conversely (and perversely), scholars point out that the declaration was not that important to begin with. America’s revolutionary leadership had many things on its mind in the summer of 1776, from setting up postindependence state governments, which would be the seats of all real political power for years to come, to running the war (soon to take a sharp turn for the worse: Stockton was seized and Hart fled because the British chased Washington and his army out of New York and across New Jersey).
Scholarly downgrading privileges inside baseball over insight, logistics over psychology. Americans were a verbal people; they wrote, read, spoke, listened, and argued among themselves. They could not consider a thing really done unless they said what it was; sometimes they considered it done simply because they said it. The declaration pinned a lawyerly list of offenses on a faithless king and his people, prefaced with sweeping claims. The congressmen who signed it wrangled over the offenses but endorsed the claims with hardly a quibble. That is what they believed, and they put their names to it as a pledge of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.
Independence is what every breakaway colony achieves. But the Declaration of Independence is about more than throwing the rascals out. Our nationhood begins with an essay on liberty.