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 the late eighteenthcentury
Atlantic world.
Partisan strife at home, and debate about the nature of independence
abroad, made it necessary for Americans to rehabilitate
their Declaration after 1815. A document that had addressed
itself to the “Opinions of Mankind” and to “a candid
World” had to be recovered from its cosmopolitan contexts and
made into something specifically American. This effort of domestication
would have two equal and opposite effects: first, it
would hide from Americans the original meaning of the Declaration
as an international, and even a global, document; second,
it would ensure that within the United States only proponents
of slavery, supporters of Southern secession, and anti-individualist
critics of rights talk would be able to recall that original
meaning.
The very fact of American independence in the eyes of the
world confirmed the effects of this change in the document’s
meaning for Americans. As Woodrow Wilson noted on July 4,
1914, in a speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, “In one
sense, the Declaration of Independence has lost its significance.
It has lost its significance as a declaration of national independence.
. . . now nobody anywhere would dare doubt that we
are independent and can maintain our independence. As a declaration
of independence, therefore, it is a mere historic document.”
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. “In our Transactions with European
States, it is certainly of Importance neither to transgress, nor to
fall short of those Maxims, by which they regulate their Conduct
towards one another,” explained James Wilson in January
1777.2 In this sense, the Declaration signaled to the world that
the Americans intended their revolution to be decidedly unrevolutionary.
It would affirm the maxims of European statecraft,
not affront them. It would conform as far as possible to
the regulatory norms of contemporary politics. Least of all
would it be an incitement to rebellion or revolution elsewhere
in the world, rather than an inducement to reform.3
The Declaration of Independence has been called “a document
performed in the discourse of the jus gentium [the law of
nations] rather than jus civile [the civil law].”4 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 they
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.”
Though largely forgotten now, this understanding of the
Declaration’s meaning held sway even among American commentators
for almost half a century after 1776. Thus John Adams,
writing in 1781, called the Declaration “that memorable
Act, by which [the United States] assumed an equal Station
among the Nations.” For a group of Americans in Paris, writing
to Thomas Jefferson on July 4, 1789, the document was “that
declaratory act which announced to the world the existence of
an empire.” To David Ramsay, in his History of the American Revolution
(1789), it was “the act of the united colonies for separating
themselves from the government of Great-Britain, and declaring
their independence.” For John Quincy Adams, speaking
on Independence Day, 1821, “the Declaration of Independence,
in its primary import, was merely an occasional state-paper. It
was a solemn exposition to the world, of the causes which had
compelled the people of a small portion of the British empire, to
cast off their allegiance and renounce the protection of the
British king: and to dissolve their social connexion with the
British people.” From the other side of the sectional divide,
John C. Calhoun concurred some years later: “The act was, in
fact, but a formal and solemn announcement to the world, that
the colonies had ceased to be dependent communities, and had
become free and independent States.”5
This emphasis on the state-making capacity of the Declaration
was partly an American response to a counter-revolutionary
critique of theories of natural rights in the 1770s that foreshadowed
the much more vehement offensive against the French
Declarations of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in the
1790s. The French Revolution would cast other shadows across
the cause of American independence. The claim of some
French revolutionaries that their movement owed its inspiration
to the United States rendered key documents like the Declaration
suspect and dangerous in the eyes of those who feared
the wholesale destruction of the political and diplomatic order
of the Atlantic world. Though it is now common to assimilate
the American and French Revolutions to each other, and to include
both in a broader “Age of the Democratic Revolution” or
“Age of Revolutions,” such an identification obscures major differences
between the two political movements when considered
in their international context.6
International affairs were a major determinant even of the
domestic, American, meaning of the Declaration. The elevation
of the Declaration to the status of “American scripture,” and the
centrality of its second paragraph to that sanctified position,
could take place only once all doubt had been laid to rest
that the American and French Revolutions were but two distinct
moments in a single movement against the established order.
In the words of the German counter-revolutionary writer
Friedrich Gentz—translated for an American audience by John
Quincy Adams in 1800—“The American revolution was from
beginning to end, on the part of the Americans, merely a defensive
revolution; the French was from beginning to end, in the
highest sense of the word, an offensive revolution.” It was regrettable,
Gentz thought, that the Americans had with an “empty
pomp of words” claimed the possession of natural and inalienable
rights in the Declaration, but fortunately, “they allowed
these speculative ideas no visible influence upon their practical
measures and resolves.” Theirs was a legal revolution, directed
against specific oppressive measures and not against monarchical
principles tout court. On these grounds, “there was, in itself,
nothing unnatural, nothing revolting, nothing plainly irreconcilable
with the maxims of the law of nations, and the laws of
self-preservation, in the alliance, which France contracted with
them.”7
The maxims of the law of nations themselves were changing
in the late eighteenth century, and with them, the interpretation
of the Declaration as a document of international law. It
was in this period that “the law of nations, long and inextricably
associated with the law of nature came . . . to be understood
as positive law, made by sovereign states, acting collectively
through authorized means, for their progressively more complex
ends.”8 As one contemporary commentator remarked, it
was “hardly possible that the simple law of nature should be
sufficient, even between individuals, and still less between nations,
when they come to frequent and carry on commerce
with each other.” States had to temper the law of nature in
practice and by consent: “The whole of the rights and obligations
thus established between two nations, form the positive
law of nations between them. It is called positive, particular,
or arbitrary, in opposition to natural, universal and necessary
law.”9 Thomas Jefferson himself encapsulated the prevailing wisdom
of the period when he stated in 1793 that “the Law of Nations
. . . is composed of three branches. 1. the Moral law of
our nature. 2. the Usages of nations. 3. their special Conventions.”
10 These overlapping conceptions of the law of nations
would decisively shape the reception of the Declaration outside
the United States in the decades immediately after 1776.
Reports of American independence traveled immediately
across the Atlantic Ocean and then deep into Continental Europe
in the summer and autumn of 1776. Only two months after
Congress had passed its resolution on July 2, word of inde-
pendence had reached as far east as Warsaw.11 The itinerary of
the news illustrated the remarkable speed of communications
in the late eighteenth century, as well as the richly developed
network of newspapers and journals, and of spies and agents,
that relied on the transmission of such information. Word had
spread first to London, and from there to Scotland, Ireland, and
Holland, before it was carried to the German lands, Scandinavia,
and Southern and Eastern Europe, all in the space of barely
eight weeks.
The text of the Declaration of Independence first appeared
in London newspapers in the second week of August 1776.12
Less than a week later, it was printed in Edinburgh, where the
philosopher and historian (and strong supporter of American
independence) David Hume could have read it on August 20,
only five days before his death on August 25; it also appeared in
the Dublin press on August 24.13 The next week it was reported
in Madrid on August 27, and the Dutch press—beginning
with the widely distributed Gazette de Leyde from Leiden—
picked it up on August 30; the following day it also appeared in
Vienna.14 By September 2, a Danish newspaper in Copenhagen
carried a translation of the Declaration on its front page. On
September 14 readers learned of it in Florence. The following
month, a complete German translation was published in a
Swiss journal in Basel.15
Despite this initially rapid transmission through the chan-
nels of late eighteenth-century print culture, the Declaration’s
progress was somewhat hampered by the fact that it was written
in English. French, not English, was the reigning language
of diplomacy, and English was not yet a major lingua franca
even for the learned across Europe and the Americas.16 The
worldwide community of English speakers would have amounted
to barely more than the 12.5 million “subjects of the British
empire” Arthur Young had estimated in 1772: that is, roughly
the population of Austria (over 15 million), fewer than the inhabitants
of Russia (circa 19 million), more than half the contemporary
population of France (24 million), perhaps half the
number of the Ottoman sultan’s 28–30 million subjects, but
only a fraction of the nearly 270 million inhabitants of the Qing
empire in 1776.17
Though English would not greatly aid the spread of the Declaration,
American independence would in due course help to
secure the global dominance of English. John Adams predicted
in 1780 that “English is destined to be in the next and succeeding
centuries more generally the language of the world than
Latin was in the last or French is in the present age.”18 (In this
regard, it is notable that the Declaration seems never to have
been translated into Latin, in 1776 or since.) Two years later,
Caleb Whitefoord, the Scottish secretary to the British peace
commissioners in Paris, concurred when replying to a French
taunt that “the United States would form the greatest empire in
the world”: “Yes, sir, and they will all speak English; every one
of them.”19 Not quite every one within the United States spoke
English, of course. The colonies contained a diverse ethnic mix
of Dutch, Germans, French, and Africans, as well as Britons
and Irish. Indeed, the very first translations of the Declaration,
into German, appeared between July 6 and 9, 1776, as a broadside
and then in a Philadelphia newspaper, for the benefit of the
local German community.20
In the second half of 1776, the Declaration itself received little
or no direct commentary in France, Italy, Germany, Poland,
Switzerland, or Spain. The immediate effect of the less specific
news of independence on Europe was minimal.21 Only in England
and Ireland did it have any direct political consequences.
Supporters of the British cause had predicted that “the Declaration
for an Independency must totally silence any Advocates
[the Americans] had in England.”22 Some of the firmer partisans
of the American cause may have been cheered by the news.
Wavering sympathizers of the Americans recoiled as Congress
had clearly marked a point of no return in the conflict with
Britain.23 Edmund Burke, for one, later histrionically confessed
that “the day that he first heard of the American states having
claimed Independency, it made him sick at heart; it struck him
to his soul, because he saw it was a claim essentially injurious to
this country, and a claim which Great Britain could never get
rid of. Never! Never! Never!”24
British and American Loyalist opponents of the American
rebellion either deplored the presumptuousness of the colonists
or took comfort from the fact that a long-meditated conspiracy
for independence had at last been flushed out into the open.
On Staten Island with the British forces, Ambrose Serle, the
secretary to the British admiral Lord Richard Howe, expressed
his horror at the Declaration on July 13, 1776: “A more impudent,
false and atrocious Proclamation was never fabricated by
the Hands of Man.”25 Howe himself sent one of the first copies
of the Declaration back to London in August 1776. He also
recognized how it had changed relations between the British
and the colonists when he met a congressional delegation, comprising
John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Edward Rutledge,
on Staten Island in September 1776: “They themselves had
changed the ground . . . by their Declaration of Independency,
which, if it could not be got over, precluded him from all
Treaty . . . he had not, nor did he expect to have, Powers to
consider the Colonies in the light of Independent States.”26
The most efficient transmitters of the Declaration across the
Atlantic were not the agents of Congress but British civilian
and military officials in North America. During the autumn of
1776, these officers sent five copies of the Declaration back to
Britain, where they later found their way into the British state
papers. These copies now make up the largest collection of
original printings of the document outside the United States.27
At the time, they seem to have aroused no immediate ministerial
reaction. What that reaction might have been can be inferred
from the response of the exiled former governor of
Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, who was in London just as
details of the Declaration arrived: “The Congress has issued a
most infamous Paper reciting a great number of Pretended tyrannical
deeds of the King and declaring their Independence.”28
In a delicious irony, Hutchinson had received an honorary degree
from Oxford, the most conservative of contemporary
British universities, on July 4, 1776. Within a few weeks of
hearing of the Declaration, he also published one of only two
British pamphlets in reply to it: as well he might have done, for
he was the intended target of some of its most egregious
charges.29 Hutchinson surely shared the sentiments of George
III, who delivered a speech to the British Parliament on October
31, 1776, in which he condemned the “daring and desperate”
spirit of the leaders of his American colonies, who had
“presumed to set up their rebellious confederacies for independent
states.”30
On the western side of the Atlantic, silencing the Declaration
was a more effective governmental response to its challenge
than attempting to refute it. When word of the Declaration
had reached the British colony of Nova Scotia, in August
1776, the British governor allowed only the last paragraph of
the document to be printed, lest the rest of it “gain over to
them (the Rebels) many converts, and inflame the minds of his
Majesty’s loyal and faithful subjects of the Province of Nova Scotia.”
31 Back in Britain, however, the government could not respond
openly and officially to the Declaration, for that “would
be to recognise that equality and independence, to which subjects,
persisting in revolt, cannot fail to pretend . . . This would
be to recognise the right of other states to interfere in matters,
from which all foreign interposition should for ever be precluded.”
32 Lord North’s ministry did, however, secretly commission
a rebuttal to the Declaration, from which these words
are taken. The author of Answer to the Declaration of the American
Congress (1776) was John Lind, a young lawyer and pamphleteer
who had previously come to the administration’s notice with
his pamphlets Remarks on the Principal Acts of the Thirteenth Parliament
(1775) and Three Letters to Dr Price, Containing Remarks on his
Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government,
and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (1776).33
Two versions of Answer to the Declaration appeared in 1776.
The ministry seems to have judged that the first version went
too far both in trying to imagine the justifications the Americans
might have had for issuing their Declaration and in presuming
to offer the “Outlines of a Counter-Declaration” that
the king could present in refutation of the Americans’ assertions.
The ministry suppressed the initial text of the Answer—
only one copy of which now survives—and had the whole
work revised before eight thousand copies were issued in multiple
editions over the course of 1776.34 Five hundred copies of
this revised Answer to the Declaration were sent from London to
America, to instruct the British forces and to rebut American
arguments in favor of independence.35
The Answer to the Declaration was mostly a point-by-point
examination and refutation of the charges against the king.
Lind denied that the Americans were still anything other than
treacherous individuals, rather than states, and hence argued
that they were still rebels rather than legitimate corporate
belligerents. To do otherwise would have been to make a mockery
of the idea of allegiance, let alone legality; after all, if the
colonists were acknowledged to be independent citizens of a
foreign state, what could have prevented a pirate like Captain
Kidd from protecting himself against criminal prosecution by
declaring himself independent? “Instead of the guilty pirate,”
Lind warned, “he would have become the independent prince;
and taken among the ‘maritime’ powers—‘that separate and equal
station, to which’—he too might have discovered—‘the laws of
nature and of nature’s God entitled him.’”
Finally, Lind mocked the colonists for their hypocrisy in announcing
the natural equality of all mankind while failing to
free their slaves: such rights were hardly inalienable, and clearly
not natural, if they were denied to “these wretched beings.”36
Thomas Hutchinson similarly wished “to ask the Delegates of
Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, how their Constituents
justify the depriving more than an hundred thousand Africans
of their rights to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in some
degree, to their lives, if their rights are so absolutely unalienable.”
The English abolitionist Thomas Day, writing in 1776,
went even further in his criticism: “If there be an object truly
ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions
of independency with the one hand, and with the other
brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”37
The Answer to the Declaration was one of only a handful of
contemporary publications to comment on the natural rights
claims of the Declaration’s second paragraph. Among Continental
writers, the French duc de La Rochefoucauld d’Enville
alone, writing in the guise of a banker in London, considered
the claim that all men are created equal to be an established
truth in all religions. He saw nothing in the Declaration’s further
rights claims that could be construed as a challenge to general
rights of sovereignty. This was of a piece with his effusive
assessment that the Declaration was “the greatest event of the
campaign, of the war itself, and perhaps of this century.”38
Among British and Loyalist respondents, only Hutchinson dealt
with the question of rights, and even then he did so briefly and
dismissively, while a letter in the August 1776 issue of The Scots
Magazine reduced the Declaration’s self-evident truths to absurdity:
“these gentry assume to themselves an unalienable right of
talking nonsense.”39 Two years later in 1778, in the course of
versifying the whole Declaration, grievances and all, an obscure
English satirist named Joseph Peart wittily mocked the American
assertion
That all men are born free alike,
And are undoubtedly allow’d,
By providence to be endow’d,
(As many a learned author writes)
With some unalienable rights;
’Mong these we lay the greatest stress,
On life, pursuit of happiness,
And (what is best of all the three)
Of uncontrouled liberty.
For surely no one can believe,
But he’s a certain right to live,
Without receiving check or stop here,
As long as ever he thinks proper.40
The “Short Review of the Declaration” accompanying Lind’s
Answer similarly judged the principles upon which the Americans
claimed their independence to be tautologous, redundant,
inconsistent, and hypocritical. “If to what they now demand
they were entitled by any law of God,” thundered the reviewer,
“they had only to produce that law, and all controversy was at
an end. Instead of this, what do they produce? What they call
self-evident truths. . . . At the same time, to secure these
rights, they are content that Governments should be instituted.
They perceive not, or will not seem to perceive, that nothing
which can be called government ever was, or ever could be, in
any instance, exercised, but at the expence of one or other of
those rights” to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.41
This precocious attack on the language of individual natural
rights in the Answer to the Declaration was a significant contribution
to late eighteenth-century counter-revolutionary discourse.
The “Short Review” formed a link between the American
and French Revolutions because its main author was not
Lind but his friend the philosopher Jeremy Bentham.42 Bentham
had earlier collaborated on Lind’s Remarks and had prepared a
devastating (but unpublished) criticism of what he called “negative
liberty” for inclusion in Lind’s Three Letters to Dr Price.43
Until the end of his life, Bentham remained critical of the principles
that underpinned the Declaration. “Who can help lamenting
that so rational a cause should be rested upon reasons,
so much fitter to beget objections, than to remove them?” he
complained in 1789, referring to the Virginia Declaration of
Rights, the Massachusetts Declaration, and the Declaration itself;
almost half a century later he still called the Virginia Declaration
“a hodge-podge of confusion and absurdity, in which
the thing to be proved is all along taken for granted.”44
The basis of Bentham’s criticism remained consistent. Ascribing
laws to nature, and deriving natural rights from such
laws, was not simply nonsense but “rhetorical nonsense, nonsense
upon stilts,” as he called it in his demolition of the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen almost twenty
years after his earlier reply to the Declaration of Independence.
45 Defensible rights could be derived only from the positive
acts of identifiable legislators. In the relations between nations,
the only positive acts were the transactions of sovereigns
that made up a body of positive “international law,” as Bentham
had been the first to call it in 1780. His attack on the premises
of the Declaration may have helped to sharpen his sense that
this new term was needed to denominate an increasingly salient
body of law. If the Continental Congress were to be acknowledged
as a legitimate executive body, then its Declaration could
be construed as a positive act within the ambit of international
law. However, it could be acknowledged in this way only if the
Declaration itself were recognized as the positive act that had
endowed Congress with international personality as a sovereign
body. How could independence be declared, except by a body
that was already independent in the sense understood by the
law of nations?
This would be the nub of the legal argument raised by the
Declaration in the decades after 1776. A mere declaration
alone could not constitute independence; it could only an-
nounce what had already been achieved by other means. The
Declaration had thus to perform American independence in the
very act of announcing it. As the French philosopher Jacques
Derrida pointed out in 1976, on the anniversary of American
independence, “The question remains. How is a State made or
founded, how does a State make or found itself? . . .Who signs
all these authorisations to sign?”46 Bentham had asked a similar
question two centuries earlier in his Fragment on Government
(April 1776): “When is it, in short, that a revolt shall be deemed
to have taken place, and when . . . is it that that revolt shall be
deemed to such a degree successful, as to have settled into independence?”
47 At this point he refused to say, but the question remained
when he joined Lind’s attack on the Declaration later
that same year.
American independence could be accomplished only
through external recognition, in the form of tangible military
assistance and diplomatic and commercial transactions. Accordingly,
Congress instructed its commissioners in Paris, Silas
Deane, Benjamin Franklin, and Arthur Lee, “to obtain as early
as possible a publick acknowledgement of the Independancy of
these States of the Crown and Parliament of Great Britain by
the Court of France.”48 Congress found the long silence from
the French court in 1776 and for more than a year afterward
particularly troubling. The first American representative
in Paris, Deane, did not receive the copy of the Declaration that
was sent to him on July 8, 1776, along with instructions to
“immediately communicate the piece to the Court of France,
and send copies of it to the other Courts of Europe. It may be
well also to procure copies of it into French, and get it published
in the gazettes.” A second copy arrived only in November
1776, by which time the news of American independence had
been circulating for at least three months elsewhere in Europe.
French audiences could by then have read a translation of the
Declaration in the Gazette de Leyde or another in the Parisian Political
and Historical Journal dated September 10, 1776. Two
more translations would appear the following year in the Affairs
of England and America—a journal secretly sponsored by the
French foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes—and other
versions could be found in subsequent years in two collections
of American state papers published in Paris that were associated
with Benjamin Franklin, the Collection of Constitutional Laws of
the English Colonies (1778), which was dedicated to him, and the
Constitutions of the Thirteen Colonies of the United States of America
(1783), which he revised.50 However, though the marquis de
Lafayette and others admired the Declaration, the French paid
much more attention to the American state constitutions than
to the Declaration itself in the years before and after 1789.51
When the French court did eventually enter into a treaty of
alliance with the United States in February 1778, following the
watershed American victory over British forces at the battle of
Saratoga, it did so “to maintain effectually the liberty, Sovereignty
and independence absolute and unlimited of the said
United States,” among other things.52 This was, of course, what
Congress had hoped for all along, having simultaneously created
committees for drafting the Declaration and the Model
Treaty.
France’s de facto recognition of American independence by
the treaties of 1778 elicited immediate denunciation from Britain.
The ministry commissioned the historian of empire and
Board of Trade member Edward Gibbon to write a “justificatory
memorial” in French exposing the bad faith of the
French court in making an alliance with “the dark agents of the
English Colonies, who founded their pretended independence
on nothing but the boldness of their revolt.” Gibbon argued that
the alliance was a specific repudiation of the articles of peace
signed between Britain and France at the end of the Seven
Years’ War; it was also a general offense against the law of nations,
which debarred any power from offering aid to rebels
within the dominions of another legitimate sovereign. To believe
otherwise would be “to introduce maxims as new as they
are false and dangerous into the jurisprudence of Europe” and
would lead to further revolts in the American provinces of
France and Spain. The Americans themselves should also be
warned that their “pretended independence, bought with so
many miseries and so much blood,” would soon be subject to
the despotic will of a foreign court.53
To Gibbon’s solemn admonitions and aspersions on American
independence the English radical John Wilkes retorted:
“Why must it be ‘la déclaration (ouverte) de leur indépendance
(prétendue)’ . . . after the third anniversary of the independance of
The United States had been celebrated? The independance of the
country is tolerably well established, when a foreign prince
cannot make an exciseman”: that is, when the former ruler
could no longer appoint even the lowliest administrative officers
because he had long since lost effective control. American
independence,Wilkes argued, was based not on the Americans’
rebellious boldness but on the facts so rigorously set forth
in “the famous Declaration of Independance of the memorable
fourth of July, 1776.”54
If the Declaration’s purpose was to enable the rebellious colonies
to enter into diplomatic and commercial alliances with
other powers, as Paine, Richard Henry Lee, the local declarations,
and the drafting committee of the Continental Congress
intended, at what point did the colonies become states and the
rebels acquire legitimacy? The United States formally entered
the international system upon joining the Franco-American alliance;
only after that could the question of American independence
be treated as a positive, albeit contested, international
fact.
Yet the fact of independence was one thing; the basis on
which the Declaration had asserted it quite another, for only
positive acts could constitute statehood. If a mere declaration
was insufficient, and the acknowledgment of independence by
Britain inconceivable, would recognition of independence by a
third power, such as France, be necessary to ensure legitimacy?
Would even recognition by third parties be inadequate until the
metropolitan government had conceded independence, as Britain
did only by the Peace of Paris in 1783?55
These questions concerning independence, statehood, and
recognition were at the heart of the emerging positive law of
nations in the late eighteenth century, and the Declaration—
like American independence itself—was received in this light
after 1783 and in Europe. These aspects of the Declaration became
the focus of the rapidly evolving argument about the theory
of the legal recognition of states. To claim an equal station
for the United States among “the Powers of the Earth,” the colonists
needed more than the bare assertion that those states
were entitled to their independence by virtue of the “Laws of
Nature and of Nature’s God.” The modern exponents of natural
law, such as Vattel, had argued that states did, indeed, possess a
right to existence, independence, and equality. But the means
by which new states might acquire that right, if they had not
previously possessed it, became a central topic of international
legal argument only in the late eighteenth century, partly in re-
sponse to the issues of recognition raised by the Declaration of
Independence itself.56
The Declaration became a prominent exhibit in the earliest
discussion of the recognition of states. This came from the German
jurist and belletrist J. C. W. von Steck in 1783. Previously,
discussions of state recognition in European public law
had concerned individual rulers’ rights of dynastic succession.
Steck’s approach was original in that he treated the recognition
and legitimation not just of princes but of states in general. His
account accordingly focused on republics like the United Provinces
and the United States. In the latter case, Steck denied that
American independence had had any international standing until
it was formally and positively recognized by Britain. Writing
in the immediate aftermath of the Treaty of Paris, he deemed
French recognition in 1778 to have been premature, and hence
without constructive force, because it had not been accompanied
by any British renunciation of rights.57
In 1789 the Göttingen law professor G. F. von Martens
pressed Steck’s point further to argue that, “when once obedience
has been formally refused, and the refusing party has entered
into the possession of the independence demanded, the
dispute becomes the same as those which happen between independent
states,” subject, however, to the major proviso that
the offended party could rightfully construe any aid or succor
offered to the newly independent state as an act of war: “The
conduct that Great Britain observed . . . after the Colonies of
North America declared themselves independent, may serve to
illustrate this subject.”58 Some fifty years later, the question of
state recognition raised by American independence had become
canonized as one of the great causes célèbres of modern international
law as it passed decisively into its positivist phase.59
The victory of the Americans in their war of independence
against Britain changed the status of the Declaration outside
the United States. Britain’s recognition of American independence
in 1783 by Article I of the Peace of Paris indisputably
confirmed what the Declaration had contentiously affirmed in
1776: “His Britannick Majesty acknowledges the said United
States . . . to be Free, Sovereign, and Independent States” de jure,
and no longer just de facto.60 The momentousness of that event
was not lost on Edmund Burke: “A great revolution has happened—
a revolution made, not by chopping and changing of
power in any one of the existing states, but by the appearance
of a new state, of a new species, in a new part of the globe. It
has made as great a change in all the relations, and balances,
and gravitation of power, as the appearance of a new planet
would in the system of the solar world.”61 Once the Declaration’s
immediate purpose had been served, the opening and
closing paragraphs fell into oblivion. As a sympathetic foreign
observer, the marquis de Condorcet, noted in 1786, in France
American “independence is recognized and assured; [our politicians]
seem to regard it with indifference.”62 Because American
independence was now an acknowledged fact in international
politics, there was little need to consult the charter in which
that independence had originally been asserted.
Soon after the official British recognition of American independence,
European students of public law incorporated the
Declaration into the modern positive law of nations. For example,
the British politician and Board of Trade member Charles
Jenkinson included it in his 1785 collection of treaties, and indeed
used it to mark the most recent moment in a period of international
affairs that had begun with the Spanish recognition
of the independence of the United Provinces in 1649: “By the
Treaties made at Paris in 1783, another Revolution was acknowledged
and confirmed, viz. that of the United States of
America.” Jenkinson placed the document between a Spanish
declaration of 1771 concerning the Falkland Islands and the
Franco-American treaty of 1778, as an equivalent document
within the positive law of nations.63 Martens’s Summary of the
Law of Nations . . . of the Modern Nations of Europe (1789) listed it,
along with the Articles of Confederation, which these European
commentators also construed as an international agreement
entered into by thirteen free and independent states.64
The first generation of lawyers in the new American republic
observed that the United States had entered the interna-
tional system at an especially propitious time in the history of
the law of nations. For example, when James Kent produced
the earliest digest of American law in 1826, he began his Commentaries
with a chapter on the law of nations. This first chapter
opened with the assertion that “when the United States ceased
to be a part of the British empire, and assumed the character of
an independent nation, they became subject to that system
of rules which reason, morality, and custom, had established
among the civilized nations of Europe, as their public law.” He
acknowledged that opinions differed as to whether the law of
nations was “a mere system of positive institutions” or “essentially
the same as the law of nature, applied to the conduct of
nations.”65
Because the authors of the Declaration of Independence had
striven to make the document conform to the prevailing norms
of the late eighteenth-century international order, it had been
jurisprudentially eclectic. It was neither wholly naturalist nor
exclusively positivist. Its argument was partly grounded in natural
law, but it concluded with a positive statement of “all the
. . . Acts and Things which Independent States may of right
do.” By the third quarter of the eighteenth century the authority
of natural law theory in Britain, France, and Germany was
beginning to wane after almost two centuries of ascendancy.66
It was therefore somewhat ironic that the language of individual
natural rights—which in its modern form had sprung from this
tradition—should have become so prominent during the era of
the American and French Revolutions: only as the philosophical
underpinnings that had made sense of it gave way did that language
gain a temporary, though far from permanent, hegemony
over political discourse. By the end of the eighteenth century,
in Europe at least, the notion of natural rights was apparently
“an idea whose time had come too late in politics to coincide
with its philosophical respectability.”67
The rights claims of the Declaration itself played little part
in American political discourse in the first forty years of the
Republic. Five of the first state constitutions—Maryland (1776),
North Carolina (1776), Pennsylvania (1776), Georgia (1777),
and South Carolina (1778)—referred to the fact that the colonies
had been declared independent, but only the New York
constitution (1777) quoted the Declaration at length in its preamble.
Many of these state constitutions enumerated various
rights to life, liberty, and property, or based a right to pursue
happiness and freedom on the belief that all men were born
equal and independent, but they did so in language mostly
drawn from other documents, especially George Mason’s draft
of the Virginia Declaration of Rights.68
The first imitation of the Declaration within North America
affirmed the primacy of the rights of states over the rights of
individuals. Inspired by the example of the United States, the
inhabitants of the New Hampshire Grants declared their inde-
pendence from Great Britain and from the state of New York in
January 1777 to form their own “separate, free and independent
jurisdiction or state,” at first called New Connecticut but
from June 1777 better known as Vermont.69 “The State of Vermont
. . . has a natural right to independence,” argued one of its
defenders in 1780. “They have declared to the world that they
are, and of right ought to be, a free independant State.”70
The United States refused to recognize an independent Vermont
because it presented such an obvious challenge to the
territorial integrity of the states that had succeeded the boundaries
and jurisdictions of the previously existing colonies. Others
beyond New York and Congress shared this fear of further
fragmentation. “If every district so disposed, may for themselves
determine that they are not within the claim of the thirteen
states . . . we may soon have ten hundred states, all
free and independent,” observed a New Hampshire Convention
of towns in 1780.71 This opposition to further claims to independence,
and the insistence on the legal principle of uti
possidetis—which “provides that states emerging from decolonization
shall presumptively inherit the colonial administrative
borders that they held at the time of independence”—foreshadowed
the almost uniform insistence on the maintenance of
territorial integrity after a declaration of independence in later
world history.72 Vermont, however, remained separate both
from Britain and from the United States until 1791, when it
became the first independent republic to join the American
union.
The language of the Declaration of Independence did not appear
in the Federal Constitution. Indeed, the Declaration itself
was barely mentioned in the debates of the Constitutional Convention;
it was alluded to only once in the Federalist Papers; and
it was otherwise rarely appealed to in the extensive debate on
the ratification of the Constitution. In light of these conspicuous
absences from American public debate, it comes as little
surprise that Alexis de Tocqueville did not mention the Declaration
in Democracy in America (1835–1840).
In an age of bitter partisan strife between Federalists and Jeffersonian
Republicans, the Declaration had come to seem like a
dangerously francophile, anti-British document, and a charter
for potential revolution against all established governments. Its
claims to natural rights and to a right of revolution had sounded
suspiciously like the “Jacobinical” tenets of the French Revolution.
Its catalogue of grievances against King George III (who
after all reigned until 1820) also rendered it distinctly anti-British
even when Britain and the United States stood formally
against the threats of the French Directory and, later, Napoleon.
Only after the War of 1812 did the Declaration itself
come to be celebrated with the same cross-party national fervor
as the Fourth of July itself. It was in precisely this period
that the Declaration became a national icon. The first engrav-
ings and reprintings of the document were produced for display
in homes and official buildings in 1817. The following year,
John Trumbull exhibited his painting of the signing, originally
sketched in 1786, to large crowds in Boston. In 1823, John
Quincy Adams commissioned William J. Stone, a British-born
printer in Washington, D.C., to produce facsimiles on vellum
of the engrossed parchment version of the Declaration. Two
hundred lavish copies were distributed to the nation’s state
houses and colleges, as well as to the surviving signers and the
marquis de Lafayette.73
It was in light of this renewed interest that the second paragraph
of the Declaration began its progress toward becoming
the heart of the Declaration’s meaning in the United States.
Once independence had become an uncontested fact, Americans
had little need to remember the assertions of independent
statehood in the Declaration’s opening and closing paragraphs.
When peace had been restored with Britain, and the precise incidents
that lay behind the grievances in the main body of the
Declaration had been forgotten, all of substance that remained
to be revered was the second paragraph.
The Declaration’s original motivation and its cosmopolitan
appeal to the “Opinions of Mankind” were lost to a nationalistic
veneration of the document as a whole. Selective attention was
paid only to its abstract claims rather than to its import as a
document with international implications.
The natural rights claims of the second paragraph “gradually
eclipsed altogether the document’s assertion of the right to revolution”
only in the 1820s; before then, most American “citations
of the Declaration were usually drawn from its final paragraph.”
74 In 1831 Sándor Bölöni Farkas, a Hungarian aristocrat
traveling in the United States, neatly captured the significance
of the document for Americans when in his account of the
widespread American cult of the Declaration he noted that it
bore no traces of the monarchical grants and charters found in
Europe. Instead, “its language is entirely that of natural law.”75
In this judgment he echoed John Quincy Adams, who in 1821
distinguished the Declaration from earlier historic agreements
between nobles and their princes, such as the Magna Carta:
“Here was no great charter of Runnimead, yielded and accepted
as a grant of royal bounty.”76
Beginning in the late 1820s, various groups across the
United States imitated the Declaration as they pressed their
own particular claims against a range of domestic—and occasionally
foreign—tyrants and oppressors. It is a striking fact
that it was three Britons, and not American-born citizens, who
first used the Declaration in this way. The utopian socialist
Robert Owen proposed in 1829 a “Declaration of Mental Independence”
to free Americans from private property, organized
religion, and marriage. On July 4, 1832, a Scotswoman and follower
of Owen, Frances Wright, argued in Philadelphia that
the American Revolution would be incomplete without guarantees
of free education, free labor, and retirement benefits for
all working people. In a similar spirit, the English-born journalist
George Henry Evans produced “The Working Men’s Declaration
of Independence” in the same year.77
The Declaration almost literally became American scripture
when a Baptist journal published a Declaration of Independence
from the “Satanic Crown and Kingdom” in August 1836
that was reprinted in the Cape Colony less than six months
later.78 As if to counter the cosmopolitan currents of circulation
that these declarations represented, members of the white anti-
Catholic, anti-immigrant Native American Convention issued a
Declaration of Principles patterned after the Declaration in
Philadelphia on July 4, 1845, “for the purpose of awakening
their countrymen to a sense of the evils already experienced
from foreign intrusion and usurpation.”79 Three years later, on
July 19, 1848, the Women’s Rights Convention, meeting in
Seneca Falls, New York, issued the most enduring of all these
early nineteenth-century imitations of the Declaration, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments, which held that
“all men and women are created equal” and submitted to a candid
world the “history of the repeated injuries and usurpations
on the part of man toward women.”80
By means of these imitations, and as a result of its sanctification
among other monuments of the founding era, the Declara-
tion became domesticated and Americanized for specifically
national purposes. Gradually, only supporters of slavery and
Southern secession came to insist that the Declaration’s central
message had been its announcement of independence. They did
so not least to sap the increasing cultural prestige of the Declaration’s
enumeration of rights, resistance, and equality, lest they
should be claimed by those to whom they had so obviously
been denied: the enslaved.81 As the proslavery propagandist
George Fitzhugh put it in Cannibals All! (1857), the American
Revolution “had nothing more to do with philosophy than
the weaning of a calf. It was the act of a people seeking national
independence, not the Utopian scheme of speculative philosophers,
seeking to establish human equality and social perfection.”
82 “All the bombastic absurdity in our Declaration of Independence
about the inalienable rights of man,” he later argued
during the Civil War, “had about as much to do with the occasion
as would a sermon or oration on the teething of a child or
the kittening of a cat.”83
Abraham Lincoln sought to combat such sentiments by his
repeated invocations and exegeses of the Declaration before
and during the American Civil War. He did so by recalling that
the Declaration had in fact held two messages, one in 1776 and
one for the future. Lincoln argued that to reduce the Declaration
to its contingent purpose in 1776 was to render it a dead
letter, of no present relevance. If it were simply a declaration of
national independence, then its work had been done decades
earlier: “Why that object having been effected some eighty
years ago, the Declaration is of no practical use now—mere
rubbish—old wadding left to rot on the battle-field after the
victory is won.” On the contrary, Lincoln stressed that there
was a universal and enduring message in the Declaration that
could be found in its second paragraph. “All honor to Jefferson,”
he later wrote in 1859, “to 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.”84
The application of that “abstract truth” as a yardstick to measure
the antebellum United States was hardly likely to be reassuring.
The free black abolitionist David Walker had made this
point twenty years before Lincoln wrote.Walker concluded his
Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829) with a call to
white Americans to “compare your own language . . . extracted
from your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties
and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers
and yourselves on our fathers and on us.”85 The same
point would be summoned with greatest force by the former
slave Frederick Douglass before an audience in Rochester, New
York, on July 5, 1852. In his towering oration, “What to the
Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass told his mostly white au-
dience that that hallowed day was “the birthday of your National
Independence, and of your political freedom” and that
“the Declaration of Independence is the RING-BOLT to the
chain of your nation’s destiny.” He reminded those present of
Richard Henry Lee’s resolution of July 2, 1776, but failed to
elaborate further on the grievances that had led to independence.
Instead, he dramatically turned the tables on his listeners,
arguing that this holiday was theirs and theirs alone: “I am
not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your
high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between
us. . . . This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may
rejoice, I must mourn.” The ineradicable national stains of slavery
and the internal slave trade, the weakness of the abolitionist
movement, and the connivance of the churches at the perpetuation
of human bondage all confirmed that “there is not a nation
on earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are
the people of these United States, at this very hour.”86
Douglass hammered home his assault on his audience’s consciences
by setting the “national inconsistencies” of the United
States in both international and ultimately global contexts. White
Americans, he charged, readily condemned tyranny in Russia
or Austria but not in Virginia or Carolina. They “shed tears
over fallen Hungary” but wept not for the wronged American
slave. They burned for the liberty of France or Ireland “but are
as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved
of America.” Such was their attachment to the Declaration that
Americans asserted “before the world, and are understood by
the world to declare,” that they held it self-evident that all men
were created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain
rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
“and yet, you hold securely, in . . . bondage . . . a seventh part of
the inhabitants of your country.”87
Perhaps when the world had felt larger, communications had
been slower, and nations had been more self-sufficient, a people
could escape accountability for such spectacular hypocrisy,
Douglass argued. After 1776, and in light of the contraction of
the globe, they could no longer hide so easily from the judging
eyes of humanity:
While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of
Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius
of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by
the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now
stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages
ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding
world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers
without interference. . . .Walled cities and empires
have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has
borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating
the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway
over and under the sea, as well as on the earth.Wind,
steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no
longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to
London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively
annihilated.88
With this precocious appreciation of what we would now call
globalization, Douglass heralded a new moment in the international
histories of the United States and the Declaration of
Independence.89 Seventy-six years on from 1776, the United
States was still not completely free soil, yet at least it had a
moral imperative to live up to, derived from the claims of its
founding document.
The Declaration was now known to the whole world, and
that world would judge America according to the document’s
standards. Commerce and communications bound peoples together
as never before; one result of this interconnectedness
would be a greater sharing of political and religious languages
around the globe.90 Douglass was surely correct to link the “encouragement”
that could be derived from the Declaration with
the more far-reaching “tendencies of the age” to dissolve cultural
particularisms and to bring distinct peoples into closer
contact with one another. Yet he would soon prove to be mistaken
about one defining feature of the age. “Walled cities” may
have begun to fall around the globe by the mid-nineteenth century,
but empires were far from going out of fashion: quite the
contrary, in fact. Among the world leaders who sent congratulations
to the United States on the centennial of independence
in 1876 were the Russian emperor, Alexander II, the German
emperor, William I, the emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph II,
and the emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II.91 That same year, the
British Royal Titles Act made Queen Victoria empress of India.
A century after 1776, empires were certainly not in retreat;
they were on the march and gaining ground across the world.
The Declaration of Independence had introduced the United
States into an exclusive world of states in 1776. At the same
moment, it had also led America into a world inhabited by
empires, both the great territorial units of Eurasia and the European
maritime empires that projected their power across
oceans to span the whole globe. During the first half of the
nineteenth century, the United States would be joined by a host
of new republics in the Americas and by other emerging states
in Europe. The world of empires, however, would not pass until
the second half of the twentieth century. By the American
bicentennial in 1976, it had almost entirely disappeared, though
remnants of it linger with us still. Its gradual but accelerating
dissolution would be marked by a series of declarations of independence
generically similar to—and sometimes modeled
on—a document that Americans came to revere as their own,
but which had become over time the possession of the whole
world.
