Thursday, November 11, 2010

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (USA) 2

So apparently familiar are the words of the Declaration of Independence
that it is easy to forget what it was the Declaration
declared. Ask most Americans—and no doubt many non-
Americans—to quote the opening lines of the document and
they will likely reply, “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.” Just how those
rights might have been connected to independence, few would
now stop to ask.
“Self-evident truths”; “all men are created equal”; “unalienable
rights”; “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”: these
are ringing words and noble sentiments, to be sure, but they
are not in fact what the Declaration proclaimed in 1776. Even
Abraham Lincoln, speaking in 1857, admitted: “The assertion
that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting
our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in
the Declaration, not for that, but for future use.”1
The Declaration would have been a document without a future
had it failed in its central purpose of declaring independence.
Had the Declaration been entirely ignored (as by many
it was); had its fundamental claims been decisively refuted (as
some thought they had managed to do); and had American independence
been nipped in the bud by British military force (as
it could very well have been), then few might now recall those
supposedly “self-evident” truths.
To see what the Declaration did declare, it will be helpful to
recall the structure of the document. For the Declaration was
an announcement in the form of an argument, possibly patterned
according to rules of logic that Thomas Jefferson—its
primary drafter—had learned during his student days at the
College of William and Mary in Virginia.2
The Declaration fell into five parts. Its initial premise, as
stated in the opening paragraph, was that “a decent Respect to
the Opinions of Mankind” required that “one People” breaking
away from another should declare their reasons for doing so. Its
secondary premises, stated in the now more famous second
paragraph, held to be self-evident the truths
that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by
the Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.—
That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted
among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent
of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government
becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the
People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,
laying its Foundation on such Principles and organizing
its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem
most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Violations of basic rights like life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness could justify a separation only if they could be shown
to amount to “a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations.” Only
then would a people be justified in seeking “to provide new
Guards for their future Security.”
The third and longest part of the Declaration listed the
alleged “repeated Injuries and Usurpations” committed by
George III as “Facts . . . submitted to a candid World” in evidence
of just such a train of abuses. The penultimate section
stated that those grievances had gone unredressed by “our British
Brethren,” so that “we must, therefore, acquiesce in the Necessity,
which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we
hold the rest of Mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace, Friends.”
Separation from Great Britain could be justified both logi-
cally and historically. Accordingly, the Declaration concluded in
its fifth and final part that “these United Colonies are, and of
Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES.” It
was to affirm this conclusion that the representatives assembled
in Congress resolved to “pledge to each other our Lives, our
Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
The Declaration’s opening and closing paragraphs clearly affirmed
the entrance of a new actor (“one People”) or actors
(thirteen “FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES”) onto the
world stage. The document’s very first sentence stated truths
about that world so self-evident that they apparently needed no
justification or elaboration:
When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary
for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which
have connected them with another, and 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, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires
that they should declare the causes which impel
them to the Separation.
Packed into this sentence was a set of assumptions about eighteenth-
century international politics.3 The most fundamental
was the existence of a group of political bodies (“the Powers of
the Earth”) that interacted with one another according to cer-
tain external rules (“the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”).
They were entitled to do so for two main reasons: because they
were separate from—or independent of—one another, and because
they were equal in station to one another. Their number
was not closed or fixed; from time to time, it could expand to
include any “People” that had been compelled to become separate
and thereby wished to claim equal standing with the existing
powers. Like any public made up of discrete political persons,
however, this community of earthly powers possessed
opinions that needed to be informed and respected. Thus its
members communicated with one another formally by means
of public documents such as the Declaration itself.
The Declaration’s concluding paragraph enumerated the
rights possessed by those states that had successfully achieved
their independence and equality:
[T]hese United Colonies are, and of Right ought to
be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES . . . and that as
FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, they have full
Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish
Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things
which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do.
This list of the corporate rights of states was as open-ended as
the roster of individual rights found earlier in the Declaration,
which had stated that “all Men . . . are endowed by their Cre-
ator with certain unalienable Rights . . . among these are Life,
Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” (my emphases). The
Declaration specified the powers of states—war and peace,
treaty-making, and commerce—without foreclosing the need
to exercise other, similar powers should the need arise. With
that precise but flexible declaration of rights, the representatives
of the United States announced that they had left the
transnational community of the British Empire to join instead
an international community of independent sovereign states.
The Declaration of Independence was therefore a declaration
of interdependence. By issuing it, members of Congress
showed their “Respect to the Opinions of Mankind.” They submitted
the facts of their case to “a candid World,” meaning
an unprejudiced world. And they pledged to treat the British
“as we hold the rest of Mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace,
Friends.” The Declaration may have spoken on behalf of Americans
through the voice of their congressional representatives,
but they were not the audience to which the text implicitly directed
its argument. That was instead the “Opinions of Mankind,”
the collective public opinion of the powers of the earth.
The very term “declaration” would have implied as much. To
be sure, the word did have technical meanings within seventeenth-
century English history and eighteenth-century English
law. Historically, a declaration was a public document issued
by a representative body such as Parliament; by calling its doc-
ument a “Declaration,” the Continental Congress implied that
it possessed the same sort of power to issue such documents
as did the British Parliament.4 Legally, what the leading
eighteenth-century English lawyer Sir William Blackstone had
called in 1765 “the declaration, narratio, or count” was the form
“in which the plaintiff [in a civil trial] sets forth his cause of
complaint at length.” Only the third section of the American
Declaration—the charge-sheet of grievances against the king—
amounted to a declaration in this sense.5
In contemporary diplomatic parlance, a declaration meant a
formal international announcement by an official body, “either
by a general manifesto, published to all the world; or by a note
to each particular court, delivered by an ambassador.”6 This is
of course now the main meaning of “declaration” in terms like
“declaration of war” or, indeed, “declaration of independence.”7
The Declaration of Independence possessed elements of all
three forms of declaration. In its language, its form, and its intent,
it most closely approximated “a general manifesto, published
to all the world.”
The Declaration was the culmination of a series of documents
designed by the Continental Congress to shape the
“Opinions of Mankind” across the British Empire (before July
1776) and then in the wider world (by the Declaration itself).
Before issuing the document, Congress had produced some
fifteen other state papers in the form of letters, petitions, pro-
posals, addresses, and a speech, but it had issued only one
other “declaration” as a formal precedent for the Declaration of
Independence: the “Declaration by the Representatives of the
United Colonies . . . Seting Forth the Causes and Necessity of
Their Taking Up Arms” of July 6, 1775. Thomas Jefferson was
one of the primary drafters, along with Pennsylvania delegate
John Dickinson, of this earlier declaration. In it, they had acknowledged
“obligations of respect to the rest of the world, to
make known the justice of our cause” and had “exhibit[ed] to
mankind” the plight of a wronged people.8
Like the Declaration of Independence, the “Declaration . . .
[on] Taking Up Arms” marked a decisive turning point in the
struggle between Britain and its American colonies: in this
case, the move by the colonists to formal armed conflict. It,
too, had been addressed to the judgment of a wider world,
with the reassurance that “we have not raised armies with
ambitious designs of separating from Great-Britain, and establishing
independant states”; accordingly, Congress rapidly dispatched
the document across the Atlantic to be printed in
London newspapers. Congress’s other state papers had been
addressed variously to the British people, the inhabitants of
Quebec, the people of Ireland, the Assembly of Jamaica, the Six
Nations of the Iroquois Confederation, the province of Canada,
and to Lord North and the king. Only one, in October 1774,
had been addressed to the inhabitants of the colonies them-
selves. Even that document had been composed with the expressed
hope of making “the strongest recommendation of their
cause to the rest of mankind.”9
The Declaration’s change of implied audience in July
1776—from particular communities within the British Empire
to “the candid world” at large—enacted the central claim of
the work itself: that the United Colonies had ceased to be
members of the British Empire and now stood alongside “the
Powers of the Earth.” In fact, for almost two years before making
the Declaration, Congress had been exercising most of the
rights claimed for the United States in that document. It had
been negotiating with British representatives, appointing agents
to pursue its interests in Europe, corresponding with foreign
powers, and seeking various kinds of aid for the revolutionary
cause.10 For supporters of a declaration in Congress, therefore,
“the question was not whether, by a declaration of independence,
we should make ourselves what we are not; but whether
we should declare a fact which already exists.”11
For some, the Declaration itself was only the last in a series
of acts that had severed the connection between Britain and the
United Colonies in the months before July 1776. In August
1775, George III had already declared by proclamation that the
American colonists were rebels, and hence outside his monarchical
protection. Parliament had confirmed this royal proclamation
in its Prohibitory Act of December 1775. John Adams,
writing in March 1776, cautioned a correspondent against confusing
mere freedom of trade with full-blown international independence:
“Independency is an Hobgoblin, of so frightfull
Mein, that it would throw a delicate Person into Fits to look it
in the Face.” Only the political dissolution of the bonds of empire
could amount to such a fearsome step. Moreover, Adams
thought that dissolution had already been effected by “the prohibitory
Act, or piratical Act, or plundering Act, or Act of Independency.”
“It is a compleat dismemberment of the British
Empire,” Adams wrote. “It throws thirteen Colonies out of the
Royal Protection, levels all Distinctions and makes us independent
in Spight of all our supplications and Entreaties . . . But it
is very odd that Americans should hesitate at accepting such a
gift.”12 They would not hesitate for long. Although they were
now rebels in the eyes of the British king and Parliament, they
were not yet legitimate belligerents in the view of the rest of
the world.
In order to turn a civil war within the British Empire into a
war between states outside the empire, it was necessary to create
legitimate bodies of combatants—that is, states—out of individual
rebels and traitors. This was the motive behind the resolution
that Richard Henry Lee moved in Congress on behalf
of the Virginia delegation on June 7, 1776: “That these United
Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent
States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British
Crown, and that all political allegiance between them and the
State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”
The international context of this resolution, effectively Congress’s
original declaration of independence, was evident from
the rest of Lee’s motion: “That it is expedient forthwith to take
the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances. That
a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective
Colonies for their consideration and approbation.”13
This resolution led to the creation of three interlocking
committees that shared both personnel and purposes. One was
charged with writing a declaration of independence, another
with drafting a model treaty of commerce and alliance, and a
third with drawing up articles of confederation. Each of these
documents was designed to be an expression of state sovereignty
under the contemporary law of nations. The Declaration
of Independence defined it. The Model Treaty would enact it.14
The Articles of Confederation safeguarded it for each of the
thirteen states in Article II (“Each State retains its sovereignty,
freedom and independence”), but confined its international expression
to Congress alone (in Articles VI and IX, which gave
Congress “the sole and exclusive right and power of determining
on peace and war”).15
The need for recognition and assistance from other European
powers had become ever more pressing since the autumn
of 1775. In October 1775, John Adams wondered if foreign
courts might not rebuff American envoys: “Would not our Proposals
and Agents be treated with Contempt?”16 Richard Henry
Lee similarly noted in April 1776 that “no state in Europe will
either Treat or Trade with us for so long as we consider ourselves
subjects of G[reat] B[ritain]. Honor, dignity, and the customs
of states forbid them until we rank as an independant
people.”17 Therefore it was necessary for the colonists to create
juridical bodies with which the European powers could legitimately
conduct commerce and enter into alliances.
The most extensive presentation of the case for independence
according to “the customs of states” came in January
1776 in the closing pages of Thomas Paine’s best-selling pamphlet
Common Sense. Paine argued that “nothing can settle our
affairs so expeditiously as an open and determined declaration
for Independance.” Only independence would permit a mediator
to negotiate peace between the United States and Great
Britain; without such mediation, “we may quarrel on for ever.”
Foreign alliances could not be secured without it: France and
Spain would hardly support the colonies if they were to be
asked only to aid reconciliation with Britain. Charges of rebellion
would also persist if independence were not declared: “we
must in the eye of foreign Nations be considered as Rebels.”
Moreover, it was essential for a “manifesto to be published, and
despatched to foreign Courts,” explaining colonial grievances,
the lack of redress, and the necessity of separation, “at the same
time assuring all such Courts, of our peaceable disposition towards
them, and of our desire of entering into trade with
them.” Until such a manifesto was dispatched, “the custom of
all Courts is against us, and will be so, until by an Independance,
we take rank with other Nations.”18
Throughout the spring and early summer of 1776, Paine’s
arguments echoed in the various instructions, addresses, and
resolutions that local bodies throughout the colonies sent to the
delegates at the Continental Congress. For example, in April
1776, North Carolina’s delegation was urged “to concur with
the Delegates of the other Colonies in declaring Independency,
and forming foreign alliances,” and delegates from Charlotte
County, Virginia, were directed “to cast off the British yoke, and
to enter into a commercial alliance with any nation or nations
friendly to our cause.” In the following month similar instructions
came from Malden, Massachusetts, to express “the ardent
wish of our souls that America may become a free and independent
State,” and in June 1776 delegates from Connecticut were
instructed “to declare the United Colonies free and independent
States.”19
These instructions, like the Declaration itself, faithfully combined
two arguments Paine had made so forcefully in Common
Sense: that the American colonies should be independent and
that they should be nonmonarchical republics, that is, “free . . .
States.” By the end of the sixteenth century the word “state” had
taken on its recognizably modern meaning of an impersonal
political power distinct from its holder. In anglophone political
language, the term “free state” had come to mean specifically
a nonmonarchical regime like the “Commonwealth and Free
State” created after the execution of the English king Charles I
in 1649.20 As the American historian David Ramsay noted on
the second anniversary of independence in 1778, “Independence
has been the fruitful parent of governments formed on
equal principles . . . While we were dependent on Britain, our
freedom was out of the question; for what is a free state, but
one that is governed by its own will?”21 “Free and independent
states” were thus republican governments, outside any allegiance
to the British Crown and operating under the prevailing
norms of the law of nations.
The standard guide to those norms available in 1776 was the
compendious work by the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel, The Law
of Nations (1758).22 Vattel’s legal handbook had been a product
of the early stages of the Seven Years’ War. He wrote it in
French, the prevailing language of European diplomacy, but it
was almost immediately translated into English on its publication.
Thereafter, it became the standard text on the subject in
Europe and the Americas for more than half a century, with the
result that its definitions of key terms in what we would now
call international law and international relations became stan-
dard within the world of European—and, increasingly, also
American—diplomacy.23
Vattel made independence fundamental to his definition of
statehood:
Every nation which governs itself, under any form whatsoever,
without dependency on any foreign country, is a sovereign
state. Its rights are by nature the same as those of every
other state. These are the moral persons who live
together in a natural society subject to the law of nations.
For any nation to make its entrance into this great society,
it is enough that it should be truly sovereign and independent,
that is to say, that it governs itself under its own authority
and its own laws.
Such independent sovereign states took on the qualities of the
persons who comprised them: “Nations being composed of
people naturally free and independent (libres & indépendans) and
who, before the establishment of civil societies lived together in
a state of nature, nations, or sovereign states, must be considered
as if they were free persons who co-exist in the state of
nature.” From this fact, Vattel derived two overarching laws imposed
upon all states: that they should contribute to the happiness
and perfection of all other states; and that, because as
states they are mutually free and independent (libres & indépendantes
les unes des autres), they must leave one another in the
peaceful enjoyment of their liberty. Vattel argued that, because
states are free, independent, and equal (libres, indépendantes,
egales), they must enjoy a perfect equality of rights. Such rights
could not trump the laws of nations: all states might be free and
independent (libres & indépendantes), but they were still bound to
observe the laws of society that nature had established among
them.24
No writer on the law of nations before Vattel had so consistently—
and persistently—emphasized freedom, independence,
and interdependence as the condition of states in their relations
with one another. The authors of the American Declaration
would soon adopt his repeated insistence that states were “free
and independent” as the conception of their own states’ condition.
By doing so, they enacted Vattel’s central contention
that—in the words of his contemporary English translator—
“independence is ever necessary to each state”; to secure that
independence “it is sufficient that nations conform to what is
required of them by the natural and general society, established
among all mankind.”25 In due course, this would become
the standard modern definition in international law of independence
as “the capacity to enter into relations with other
states.”26
It was no coincidence that the conception of statehood as in-
dependence found in the Declaration of Independence resembled
Vattel’s so closely. In October 1774, James Madison had
been informed that “Vattel, Barlemaqui Locke & Montesquie[u]
seem to be the standar[d]s to which [Congress] refer either
when settling the rights of the Colonies or when a dispute
arises on the Justice or propriety of a measure.”27 Just over a
year later, in 1775, Benjamin Franklin sought out the latest edition
of Vattel’s work for the benefit of Congress because “the
circumstances of a rising state make it necessary frequently to
consult the law of nations.” Franklin obtained three copies of
the book, which he dispatched to the Library Company of Philadelphia,
to the Harvard College library, and to the Continental
Congress itself. (Congress’s copy has been lost, but the
other two copies remain in the libraries to which Franklin sent
them.) The work was immediately useful: as Franklin informed
Vattel’s editor, C. G. F. Dumas, in December 1775, it “has been
continually in the hands of the members of our congress, now
sitting.”28 The Declaration’s vision of “Free and Independent
States” assuming the “station to which the laws of nature and of
nature’s God entitle them” owes an obvious debt to Vattel’s
conception of states as free and independent under the laws of
nature. Thus Franklin’s words were not idle flattery.
The relative novelty in 1776 of the definition of international
statehood as freedom and independence is obvious if
one compares the American Declaration with two earlier docu-
ments retrospectively baptized as declarations of independence:
the Declaration of Arbroath (1320) (“the Scottish Declaration
of Independence”) and the Dutch Act of Abjuration (1581)
(“the Dutch Declaration of Independence”). The Declaration of
Arbroath was addressed in the name of Scottish earls and barons
to Pope John XXII, urging him to use his influence to convince
the English king, Edward II, to enter peace negotiations
with Robert Bruce, the king of Scots. The document asserted
Scottish freedom on the basis of the historic continuity of the
Scots nation and a conception of liberty drawn from the Roman
historian Sallust. Its claims were thus backward-looking and defensive.
29 The document was never called a declaration of Scottish
independence before the twentieth century: that recent
pedigree did not deter the United States Congress from resolving
in 1998 that the Declaration of 1776 had been modeled on
that “inspirational document” of 1320, or from reaffirming that
connection almost every year since in resolutions from both
House and Senate in favor of marking a National Tartan Day on
April 6, the date when the Arbroath declaration was signed.30
The Dutch Act of Abjuration (Plakkaat van Verlatinge), by
which the States General cast off their allegiance to King Philip
of Spain in July 1581, had abjured the sovereignty of King
Philip but sought in his place “another powerful and merciful
prince to protect and defend these provinces”: it was, in this
sense, a declaration of prospective dependence upon a new sov-
ereign, the duke of Anjou.31 The document was also based on
historic and contractual rights that had been guaranteed and
regularly reinforced since the fourteenth century, rather than
on an appeal to natural law or other abstract rights outside of
history and beyond positive agreement. However, the form of
the American Declaration—with its assertion of a right to
throw off the sovereignty of a tyrannous prince and its enumeration
of grievances—was still close enough to that of the Dutch
Act for the pro-British (and anti-American) Dutch stadtholder
William V, prince of Orange, to call the Declaration in August
1776 but “the parody of the proclamation issued by our forefathers
against King Philip II.”32
There is at best only circumstantial evidence that the Dutch
Act provided a model for the American Declaration of 1776.33
Even if it had, the defining claim to independence could not be
found in the earlier declaration. It, too, would not be known as
the Dutch declaration of independence until long after its original
promulgation, and in the wake of the rise to prominence of
the American Declaration. It was not so-called until the 1890s.
Even then, the term arose in the United States rather than in
the Netherlands, during a brief burst of what has been called
“Holland Mania” in which the histories of the two republics
were favorably compared and the origins of many American institutions,
such as freedom of religion and freedom of the
press, were traced back to their alleged Dutch roots.34 These
belated baptisms of historic documents as declarations of independence
indicated the increasing prestige and prominence of
the American Declaration in world history rather than any genuinely
long or distinguished pedigree for it.
The lack of precise generic precedents for the Declaration in
1776 should not be taken as a sign that Congress had ignored
the lessons of history or the wider global context when justifying
the admission of the United States to the international community.
Both sides of the debate on Lee’s resolution in June and
July 1776 amply considered such lessons in the service of arguments
for and against declaring independence.35 The opponents
of a declaration argued that neither France nor Spain would be
likely to ally with the colonists out of fear that a rising power
would threaten their own possessions in the Americas. Even
more alarming, such a fear might impel the French and Spanish
courts to ally with Britain, which “would agree to a partition of
our territories, restoring Canada to France, & the Floridas to
Spain, to accomplish for themselves the recovery of these colonies”
that had been ceded to Britain at the end of the Seven
Years’War in 1763.36
In the aftermath of the war, and in light of other recent international
events, the threat of partition was immediate and
real to many colonists. Thus in Congress on July 1, 1776,
John Dickinson warned: “A Partition of these Colonies will
take Place if G.B. cant conquer us”; this would be like “Destroying
a House before We have got another. In Winter with a
small Family.”37 Even after the Declaration had been declared,
another Pennsylvania delegate, Benjamin Rush, feared that it
would only excite Britain to greater military exertions in concert
with predatory European allies. “What do you think of the
States of America being divided between two or three foreign
States & of seeing the Armies of two or three of the most powerful
Nations in Europe upon our Coasts?” he asked on July 23,
1776.38
European diplomatic practice gave grounds for such fears. In
1768, the Genoese had invited France to suppress the revolt on
the Mediterranean island of Corsica that had been led since
1765 by Pascal Paoli, a heroic figure whose plight was well
known to, and much celebrated by, American colonists.39 (The
town of Paoli, in Pennsylvania, is still a reminder of colonial enthusiasm
for the cause of Corsican independence.) In 1772
Prussia, Russia, and Austria had begun the dismemberment
of Europe’s largest state in the first Partition of Poland, a series
of events that the colonists also followed with interest and
anxiety.40
With these troubling precedents in mind, Daniel Leonard
warned in 1775 that Britain might ally with France and Spain
so that “the whole continent would become their easy prey, and
would be parcelled out, Poland like,” while Richard Henry Lee
speculated in April 1776 that “a slight attention to the late proceedings
of many European Courts will sufficiently evince the
spirit of partition, and the assumed right of disposing of Men &
Countries like live stock on a farm that distinguishes this corrupt
age. . . . Corsica, & Poland indisputably prove this.”41 A
year later, in April 1777, Thomas Paine confirmed the salience
of this fear in the discussions leading to the Declaration: “There
were reasons to believe that Britain would endeavour to make a
European matter of it.” He, too, cited Corsica and Poland as
proof that “such traffics have been common in the old world.”
“All Europe,” he concluded, “was interested in reducing us as
rebels, and all Europe (or the greatest part at least) is interested
in supporting us as Independent States.”42
Opponents of independence had counseled delay, lest secession
by one “confederacy” of colonies or another should encourage
European powers to descend upon the enfeebled colonies.
Congressional proponents of independence answered this
charge with another appeal to history. Unanimity could not be
achieved immediately, but “the history of the Dutch Revolution,
of whom three states only confederated at first[,] proved
that a secession of some colonies would not be so dangerous as
some apprehended.”43
The Dutch Revolt had been the first successful secession of a
province from an imperial monarchy in modern European history.
The colonists were well aware of this precedent, which
had led to the creation of a federation of free states like their
own.44 As Abigail Adams wrote in April 1781, after the United
Provinces had declared for the American cause, “if the old
Batavian Spirit still exists among them, Britain will Rue the
Day that in Breach of the Laws of Nations, she fell upon their
defenceless dominions, and drew upon her . . . the combined
force of all the Neutral powers.” She argued that the similarities
between their two causes “will cement an indissoluble bond of
union between the united States of America and the united
Provinces who from a similarity of circumstances have each arrived
at Independance disdaining the Bondage and oppression
of a Philip and a G[e]orge.”45 John Adams wrote in similar vein
to the Dutch States General in the same month: “The Origins
of the two Republicks are so much alike, that the History of the
one seems but a Transcript from that of the other.”46 In light of
the frequent comparisons drawn between the two federations,
it may be significant that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
the United Provinces were sometimes called in English
“the united states.” Thus the volume of treaties Congress used
when drafting the Model Treaty included an Anglo-Spanish
agreement of 1667 that referred in just this way to “the united
states of the Low Countries.”47
Supporters of independence buttressed their arguments from
history with more immediate assurances about the state of international
affairs. Without a declaration, they reiterated, it
would be “inconsistent with European delicacy for European
powers to treat with us or even to receive an Ambassador from
us.” France and Spain had more to fear from a British victory in
America, and a consequent resurgence of British power, than
they did the rising power of the colonies alone. More practical
considerations dictated immediate action, as “it is necessary to
lose no time in opening a trade for our people, who will want
clothes, and will want money too for the payment of taxes.”48
During the debate in Congress on July 1, John Dickinson
made last-ditch arguments opposing a declaration of independence,
and warned against any general manifesto because “foreign
Powers will not rely on Words.” He recommended instead
private negotiations with European powers (especially France):
“We must not talk generally of foreign Powers but of those We
expect to favor Us.”49 Envoys had already been sent to Europe,
however, and congressional sentiment was now overwhelmingly
in favor of independence. Lee’s resolution passed on July
2 without any dissent, thanks to the Pennsylvania delegation,
who, along with South Carolina and the formerly divided Delaware
delegation, changed their votes.50 On July 3, John Adams
still lamented that the affirmation of independence had been
delayed so long (“We might before this Hour, have formed Alliances
with foreign States.—We should have mastered Quebec
and been in possession of Canada”), but he rejoiced that it had
come at last: “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most
memorable Epocha, in the History of America” and “ought to
be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance . . . from one
End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever
more.”51
Posterity would judge that Adams had chosen not only the
wrong day but also the wrong document as the focus for commemorating
American independence. At the time, Adams’s
choice was more defensible because it acknowledged the pivotal
importance of Lee’s resolution as marking the point of no
return. The Declaration in which the resolution would be justified
to the opinions of mankind was strictly a secondary document.
Ratification of the Declaration was preceded by three days of
intense debate in Congress about the wording of its text. Three
weeks prior to July 4 Congress had appointed a committee
consisting of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin,
Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston to draft the
Declaration.52 On June 28 Jefferson reported the fruits of the
committee’s work to Congress, but the draft Declaration was
set aside until after the vote on Lee’s resolution.
The text Jefferson submitted was written under immense
pressure of congressional business, with the advice of the other
members of the committee. He had constructed it in part
from a series of other relevant materials: the preamble he had
written for the Virginia Constitution; George Mason’s Virginia
Declaration of Rights; and Lee’s resolution for independence itself.
The product was a remarkable piece of textual bricolage.
In form it was both a declaration—in the sense that the “Declaration
. . . [on] Taking Up Arms” had also been a declaration—
and a manifesto, that is, a detailed presentation of evidence to
support “an appeal to the tribunal of the world,” as Jefferson
would call it in 1825. The heart of that manifesto was the list of
charges that constituted “The History of the King of Great-
Britain,” much of which Jefferson had drawn from his Virginia
preamble.53
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.”54
Congress rendered its account of an unfolding global conspiracy—
because empire-wide in scale—to audiences beyond
50 The World in the Declaration of Independence
the thirteen colonies. It had informed the inhabitants of Québec
in October 1774 that “the substance of the whole, divested
of its smooth words, is that the Crown and its Ministers shall
be as absolute throughout your extended province, as the despots
of Asia or Africa.” The following year it described to the
Jamaica Assembly an even more comprehensive and “deliberate
plan to destroy, in every part of the empire, the free constitution,
for which Britain has been so long and so justly famed”:
In the East-Indies, where the effeminacy of the inhabitants
promised an easy conquest, they thought it unnecessary to
veil their tyrannic principles under the thinnest disguise.
. . . In Britain, where the maxims of freedom were still
known, but where luxury and dissipation had diminished
the wonted reverence for them, the attack had been carried
on in a more secret and indirect manner: Corruption
has been employed to undermine them. The Americans
are not enervated by effeminacy, like the inhabitants of India;
nor debauched by luxury, like those of Great-Britain:
It was therefore judged improper to assail them by bribery,
or by undisguised force.
For these reasons, Congress informed the people of Ireland in
an “Address” in July 1775, “the important contest, into which
The World in the Declaration of Independence 51
we have been driven, is now become interesting to every European
state, and particularly affects the members of the British
Empire.”55
Each side in the American conflict had accused the other of
such conspiratorial designs, whether for tyranny, as the Americans
argued, or for independence, as Britons countered, but
only the Americans projected their suspicions onto a global
screen.56 They did so, in part, to garner support from other
quarters of the empire: if the American colonies should succumb
to ministerial or royal despotism, then who would ever
be safe from British tyranny? However, they could not have assumed
their accusations would persuade the Québécois or the
Irish if they had lacked any wider resonance.
Since the mid-seventeenth century, English and later British
political discourse traditionally presented the freedoms of
Northern Europe and its American colonies as hardwon, persistently
embattled, and perpetually on the defensive in a world
populated mostly by slaves ruled over by despots and tyrants.
“Liberty is the natural birthright of mankind,” exclaimed the
English political economist Arthur Young in 1772; “and yet to
take a comprehensive view of the world, how few enjoy it!” He
calculated that only 33.5 million people out of an estimated
global population of 775.3 million were not “the miserable
slaves of despotic tyrants . . . and of these few so large a portion
as 12,500,000 are subjects of the British empire.”57
The most eloquent statement of this view had come in
Paine’s Common Sense, when he concluded his account of the injuries
visited on the Americans with these rousing lines:
O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the
tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old
world is over-run with oppression. Freedom hath been
hunted around the Globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled
her:—Europe regards her like a stranger, and England
hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive,
and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.58
Five months later, the authors of the Declaration would share
Paine’s judgment that the king was to blame for the designs
against his American subjects. But they did not imitate Paine’s
apocalyptic rhetoric, focusing only on those details in his global
panorama of encroaching tyranny that applied specifically to the
American colonies.
The Declaration’s central catalogue of the king’s “Injuries
and Usurpations” was deliberately unspecific regarding places
and dates. Any of the multiple charges arrayed against the monarch
could apply to any, or all, of the colonies.59 Few of those
charges would have been entirely new to anyone who had been
following the American pamphlet wars of 1774–1776 at all
closely: for example, many of them had appeared in Congress’s
The World in the Declaration of Independence 53
letter to the inhabitants of the colonies in 1774 and in Jefferson’s
Summary View of the Rights of British America that same
year.60 In the Summary View, Jefferson had listed them in the
context of an address to the king himself from the Virginia
House of Burgesses and in support of a federal conception in
which the king was but the “chief magistrate of the British empire”
composed of multiple “states,” “the distinct and independent
governments” of British America among them. The “bold
succession of injuries” that Jefferson described was laid at Parliament’s
door, not the king’s, to “plainly prove a deliberate and
systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”61
By contrast, the Declaration’s litany of abuses began with a
series of general offenses against the colonies, then followed
with a set of more specific charges that the king had assented to
acts of legislation “to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our
Constitution,” before culminating in a list of more wide-ranging
physical and economic assaults on the inhabitants of the colonies.
62 The first group comprised charges that the king had
directly interfered in colonial affairs by blocking colonial legislation,
disrupting colonial assemblies, discouraging immigration,
interfering with the judicial process and judicial freedom,
and imposing a standing army on the colonies. The second
group specified the metropolitan legislation that had been
passed without regard to the needs of the colonies, including
“cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World,” “transport-
ing us beyond the Seas to be tried for pretended Offences,” and
“abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring
Province” (that is, Québec).
As the charges mounted rhetorically to their crescendo, so
the third, and climactic, group moved outward from the purview
of domestic administration and colonial legislation into
the realm of the law of nations. The king, the Declaration
charged, “has plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt
our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.” He was importing
foreign mercenaries to complete “the Works of Death,
Desolation and Tyranny, already begun with circumstances of
Cruelty and Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous
Ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nation.” He
had forced “our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas”
to take up arms against their own countrymen, and, in the
crowning evidence of his despotism, “He has excited domestic
Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on
the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages,
whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction
of all Ages, Sexes, and Conditions.”
The British people provided no defense against these depredations
because they would not “disavow these Usurpations,
which, would inevitably interrupt our Connections and Correspondence”—
that is, would cut off the colonies from all kinds
of commerce with the wider world. There was thus no alterna-
tive to suspending the previous familial bonds between Britons
and British Americans and replacing them with the relations
of independent peoples under the law of nations: “We must,
therefore, acquiesce in the Necessity which denounces our Separation,
and hold them, as we hold the rest of Mankind, Enemies
in War, in Peace, Friends.”
In the version of the Declaration ultimately ratified by Congress
and published to the world, the rhetorical climax of the
long train of alleged abuses was the accusations that George III
had attempted to stir up “domestic insurrections”—that is,
slave rebellions like those the British governor Dunmore had
encouraged by proclamation in Virginia in 1775 to undermine
the colony’s plantation economy—and had drawn “the merciless
Indian Savages” down upon the colonists.63
These charges implied that the king had effectively placed
the colonies “beyond the line” of civilized practice in warfare.
The customary law of European nations in the eighteenth century
formally excluded such incursions from the pale of civilized
behavior. The Declaration implied that to readmit illicit
violence and savagery—in the form of freed slaves and indigenous
modes of warfare—within the bounds of the colonies
themselves was an affront to an emerging international order
and not just to the sensibilities of particular colonists. Such a
charge could of course easily be turned around, as the British
demonstrated during the American War when they similarly
accused the colonists of engaging in savage practices contrary
to the prevailing European laws of war.64
In Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration, the final charge
against the king made an even more explicit appeal to the law
of nations and to the norms of contemporary European civilization.
George III, Jefferson contended,
has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating
it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a
distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying
them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur
miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical
warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare
of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain . . . and that
this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished
die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in
arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he
deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he
also has obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes
committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes
which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
This passage seems doubly anomalous, both because Jefferson
himself was embroiled in the institution of slavery and because
these words would inevitably be excised from the final version
of the Declaration by the representatives of those states that
wished to continue the slave trade or had been implicated in it
before 1776. As Jefferson reported, “the clause . . . reprobating
the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance
to South Carolina and Georgia . . . our Northern
brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures;
for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they
have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”65
Nonetheless, in the context of Jefferson’s original draft of the
Declaration, the passage marked the logical climax to the train
of abuses with which the king had been charged.66
However implausible it may have been to lay personal responsibility
for the slave trade on the shoulders of George III,
the comparison between “the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain”
and “infidel Powers” like those of Morocco and Algiers who
engaged in “piratical warfare” against Europeans, outside the
norms of the law of nations, recalled the charge in the Summary
View that the king had “preferr[ed] the immediate advantages of
a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American
states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by
this infamous practice,” by refusing to countenance the abolition
of the slave trade.67
It also hinted at one of the most troubling implications of
American independence: that the Royal Navy would no longer
58 The World in the Declaration of Independence
protect American shipping from assaults by the Barbary corsairs
who preyed on merchant vessels in the Mediterranean.
When the United States entered into its first defensive alliance,
with France in February 1778, the provisions of the Franco-
American Treaty of Amity and Commerce included the crucial
clause offering French protection for “the Benefit, Conveniency
and Safety of the said United States, and each of them, their
Subjects, People, and Inhabitants, and their Vessels and Effects,
against all Violence, Insult, Attacks, or Depredations on the
Part of the . . . Princes and States of Barbary, or their Subjects.”
The longest passage that Congress excised from the Declaration
was inflammatory not least because Jefferson had rendered
equivalent both the free inhabitants of British America and the
enslaved by calling each a “people.” In the opening paragraph of
his original draft, Jefferson had written, “When in the course
of human events it becomes necessary for a people to advance
from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained,”
which Congress amended to become the more familiar, “When
in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for One
people to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected
them with another” (my emphases). In the Declaration adopted
by Congress, Britons and Americans alone were called “peoples”
in two mutually reinforcing senses: as the inhabitants of
two territories constituted politically as sovereign bodies, and
also as two of the units within the traditional law of nations, or
what legally minded contemporaries would have called the law
of peoples (what in Roman law had been called the jus gentium
and what, in contemporary French and German legal language,
was called the droit des gens or Völkerrecht). The excision of the
passage relating to the slave trade and the alteration of the
opening sentence of the Declaration removed any such parity
between Africans and Americans, as “peoples” or as the victims
of “subordination.”69 Yet these would be just the terms in which
Jefferson would later argue for emancipation in Notes on the
State of Virginia (1785): the Virginia legislature could free the
enslaved by sending them to colonize the western lands, with a
duty on the Virginians “to declare them a free and independant
people, and to extend to them our alliance and protection.”70
The wider world imagined in the Declaration—both in its
drafts and in its final published version—was a world of peoples
linked by both benign and malign forms of commerce. It
was also an arena of warfare between Americans and Britons, as
well as among their various allies and enemies. This international
community was populated mostly by mutually recognizing
sovereign states, but it was threatened by outlaw powers
who acted more like pirates, those traditional enemies of humankind
engaged in warfare against humanity itself.71 In many
ways this was a recognizably modern world, in which com-
merce and war are the most conspicuous forms of interaction
between different peoples and states. Even among European
thinkers, that conception of the interactions between states
was barely a century old in 1776.72 Yet it was also a world in
which metaphysical norms—“the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s
God”—could still be appealed to, alongside the “known
Rules of Warfare” and cultural standards like civility and barbarism.
This was the world into which the members of Congress believed
they were introducing the United States of America by
means of the Declaration of Independence. In its self-justifying
pamphlet Observations on the American Revolution (1779), Congress
took independence to be a settled but embattled fact: “we
must hold ourselves ready to repel force by force wherever assailed,
and firmly retort to every infringement of the law of nations
with unfailing perseverance.” If the independence of the
United States could be defended, and the law of nations upheld,
then the United States would become what Thomas Paine
and others had predicted: an asylum for oppressed humanity, a
beacon of knowledge and benevolence, and a universal
entrepôt for the commerce of the world.73
This would also be the millennialist vision Ezra Stiles, the
Congregationalist preacher and president of Yale College, promised
in the immediate aftermath of British recognition of
American independence in 1783:
This great American revolution, this recent political phenomenon
of a new sovereignty arising among the sovereign
powers of the earth, will be attended to and contemplated
by all nations. Navigation will carry the American
flag around the globe itself; and display the Thirteen Stripes
and New Constellation at Bengal and Canton, on the Indus
and the Ganges, on the Whang-ho and the Yang-tse-kiang . . .
knowledge will be brought home and treasured to America;
and being here digested and carried to the highest perfection,
may reblaze back from America to Europe, Asia and Africa,
and illumine the world with TRUTH and LIBERTY.
As Stiles noted in the second edition of his sermon, The United
States Elevated to Glory and Honour, published two years later
in 1785, this vision was already becoming a reality, with the
return to the United States of the first American East-India
ships from Canton, Macao, and Calcutta.74 The Declaration had
imagined a new world only for the pursuit of American sovereignty.
Now, its consequences would shape that world, thanks
to the “new sovereignty . . . among the sovereign powers of the
earth” that it had helped to bring into being.