Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution: A Fully Annotated Declaration of Independence

 

This single opening sentence of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence displays brilliantly the ability of the document’s principal author, Thomas Jefferson, to convey a wealth of meaning in just a few elegant words. It announces the Americans’ intention of declaring their independence, of dissolving “the political bands” that had connected them to England. The justification for this extraordinary act was to be found in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Jefferson, a deist who did not believe that God played an active hand in the affairs of mankind, nevertheless did believe that certain natural laws were God-given. This first sentence also signals Jefferson’s awareness that a compelling public statement of the reasons for the decision to seek independence from England was necessary if America’s political leaders were going to earn the support not only of the people of their own colonies but, equally important, of foreign nations like France, whose support for the American military effort against England was considered crucial. Before declaring those “causes which impel them to separation,” however, Jefferson lays out the general philosophy on which America’s quest for independence was founded.

The ideas embodied in the powerful opening lines of the second paragraph of the Declaration were not Jefferson’s alone. The late seventeenth-century English political philosopher John Locke had written in his
Second Treatise of Civil Government
that “life, liberty, and estate” were among the “natural rights” of mankind; they were rights that existed even before governments were created, at a time when mankind was living in a “state of nature.” Jefferson’s fellow Virginian George Mason, again following Locke, had included in the preamble of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, penned just a few weeks before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights,” which he described as “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” But Jefferson’s language has more forceful simplicity. The assertion that “all men are created equal” was in 1776 more an as-yet-unfulfilled promise than a statement of political fact, but it has helped to define some of the highest aspirations of the American nation throughout its history.

The opening lines of the second paragraph were, in fact, merely a preface to the real punch line of that paragraph: the assertion of the right to rebel against the government of England. Jefferson reminds his audience that the very purpose of government is to protect the natural rights of mankind. Since governments, at the time of their creation, base their authority on the consent of the people whom they are governing, then it is also the right of the people “to alter or to abolish” that government if its actions threaten the very liberties it was created to protect. Realizing the dangers of living in a society
without government
, Jefferson was quick to add that once the people had severed their connection with their government, they must move to form new governments whose principles and powers would be supportive of the people’s “Safety and Happiness.”

The men representing their colonies in the Second Continental Congress had reached the decision to declare independence reluctantly, even painfully. They had a deep reverence for English common law and indeed for the body of law and custom that they called the “English constitution.” And nearly up to the moment of independence, many of those leaders expressed great affection for the institution of the monarchy. For all those reasons, the men who endorsed the Declaration of Independence wished to emphasize that their decision was not one arrived at rashly—that they had done everything within their power to find some alternative to the decision to revolt against the authority of the Crown, and that only the “long train of abuses” and the “repeated injuries and usurpations” committed by King George III had driven them to this final, decisive action.

Although Jefferson and those endorsing his Declaration were no doubt sincere in their protestations that independence was only a last resort after all other peaceful means of protecting their liberties had been exhausted, the Declaration’s description of the actions and motives of the English king and government is hardly an evenhanded recitation of the facts of the case. There is an element of hysteria—or perhaps of exaggeration for the purposes of propaganda—in the charge that the actions of the king and his government were deliberately designed to “reduce them [the American colonists] under absolute Despotism,” or that the entire reign of King George III, an imperfect but not evil sovereign, had been aimed at establishing an “absolute Tyranny” over the Americans. But given the purposes of the Declaration—to persuade an uncertain American public that revolution was the last and best hope and to persuade foreign nations to give their aid to that revolution—evenhandedness was not Jefferson’s highest priority. And so what followed was a long list—taking up more than two-thirds of the whole document—of the grievances that had impelled Americans to take such desperate measures.