Moving for Independence
Proposing the resolution and writing the Declaration
This continues my series marking the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution. Previously was New Governments for America, on May 9, 1776.
If you want to start at the beginning, the series starts with The Boston Tea Party, on December 16, 1773.
This week in 1776 - June 7th - Richard Henry Lee of Virginia officially proposed a resolution in the Continental Congress for independence.
Resolved, 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 connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved...
At the request of several delegates who said they couldn’t vote for it yet, the resolution was officially postponed for three weeks.
By this time, most Congressmen were seeing independence as inevitable. After the Adams Resolution of the previous month decreeing that “every kind of authority under the [British] crown should be totally suppressed”, it was hard to avoid that conclusion. But many states (unlike Virginia, where Lee was from) had not yet agreed it was inevitable, and not yet authorized their delegates to vote for independence. So, Congress officially postponed it to let the delegates wait for new instructions.
As Thomas Paine would later put it, Congress was “not to be considered as the inventors, but only as the heralds that proclaimed” independence. They would only declare independence when the people agreed they wanted it.
Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all,
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall;
In so righteous a cause let us hope to succeed,
For heaven approves of each generous deed.— “The Liberty Song,” John Dickinson, 1768
In the meantime, Congress appointed a Committee of Five to write up a formal declaration of independence so it would be ready when needed.
On the committee were John Adams of Massachusetts, a respected Patriot leader who had been foremost in the press for independence; Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, an elder statesman and philosopher who had been a late convert to the Patriot cause after seeing Parliament reject peace; Roger Sherman of Connecticut; Robert Livingston of New York; and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, a young planter already remarkable for his eloquence who had helped write the previous year’s “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms“.
This Committee quickly chose Jefferson to write a first draft. Jefferson, later, described merely that the committee unanimously pressed him to do it. Adams later remembered the conversation with more detail, saying that Jefferson nominated him, he nominated Jefferson, and the conversation continued -
Adams: “Why will you not? You ought to do it.”
Jefferson: “I will not.”
Adams: “Why?”
Jefferson: “Reasons enough1. What can be your reasons?”
Adams: “Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can.”
Jefferson: “Well, if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.”
This memory couldn’t have been totally accurate - Adams was not yet “obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular”; that would come much later when he was Vice-President2 - but his other two reasons ring true. Virginia was better respected and considered less radical than Massachusetts, both in America and abroad. And I agree, as did most people at the time; Jefferson could write better.
Jefferson didn’t plead the trials he himself had been going through. His mother had died on March 31st, he was recovering from a debilitating attack of headaches (which had delayed his return to Congress six weeks later than he’d hoped), and his pregnant wife was home in Virginia unable to safely travel3. Still, despite Jefferson’s “uneasy anxious state”, he rose to the cause. His eloquence made a Declaration that has rung through the ages.
Listen to me and you shall hear, news hath not been this thousand year:
Since Herod, Caesar, and many more, you never heard the like before.
...
Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.
— “The World Turned Upside Down“, anonymous, 1640’s. According to tradition, the British Army played this tune when surrendering to the Americans at Yorktown.
The Declaration of Independence begins with a stirring, universal introduction:
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights... That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
This, Jefferson continues, is the authority by which the United States are declaring independence. He continues to list a “long train of abuses and usurpations” which have caused a “necessity” to exercise that.
But he doesn’t found independence on those specific abuses or anything specific to the circumstances of Britain and the United States. Unlike the Olive Branch Petition of the previous year, he doesn’t maintain how the colonies were never founded subject to Parliamentary jurisdiction, or try to prove that some legislation or other was outside legal authority. He assumes that by faulting the king specifically, and listing among the grievances Parliament’s “pretended legislation” - but those are just some of the framing that goes without saying while forming the list. The Declaration of Independence plants its root squarely in universally-applicable rights.
This was a new thing.
States had declared independence before. Occasionally, ordinary people had declared independence as nations and had written declarations saying so - in the European tradition, I can think of Switzerland and the Netherlands. But they had always claimed independence for specific reasons only applicable to them themselves. The Swiss Federal Charter of 1291 and their semi-mythical Rütlischwur don’t cite any specific authority beyond their own brotherhood. The Dutch Act of Abjuration founds itself in the medieval concept of a social contract between king and nation, saying the King of Spain has violated his contract by gross abuses, and therefore the Dutch are free to choose another prince. The Dutch example was followed by Scotland during the Glorious Revolution, and although England in that Glorious Revolution didn’t specifically say so, it was in the minds of many in Parliament.
Now, the United States were taking that much farther.
In language borrowed from political philosophers like John Locke, the Declaration says that people have the right “to alter or to abolish” their government - not just when the king becomes a particularly-galling tyrant, but whenever he becomes destructive of natural rights in any way. And, they don’t just have the right to choose another prince; they can form a new government however they want. All of this is because, by nature, “all men are created equal.”
Later that October, King George would say in his speech from the throne to the opening of Parliament about America that “If their Treason be suffered to take Root, much Mischief must grow from it... indeed to the present System of all Europe.”
He was entirely correct.
The Declaration of Independence would cause “much mischief” to all the present system of things.
Richard Henry Lee’s resolution in itself didn’t pave any new ground. It was the exact concepts and terms that had been considered over the last year. It wasn’t even meant to be a stirring statement of principle in itself. The first sentence I quoted above - declaring independence - is followed by two much more practical sentences:
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.
Together, this was much the same as what John Adams and Thomas Paine had been saying all year: independence, a formal confederation, and foreign alliances should be sought forthwith for the sake of victory in the war. They were of course valuable in themselves - but when seen together like in the Lee Resolution, it strikes me that he was most likely thinking about the war.
It was Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence who tied this practical action together with the stirring statements of principles.
Those principles in themselves weren’t new either. Jefferson borrowed them almost entirely from previous philosophers such as John Locke. When I first read Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, I was surprised by how his conclusions weren’t new to me. I’d read them already, in the Declaration of Independence. Even the recitation of “facts... submitted to a candid world” of the evils King George had done had all been called out many times before. Jefferson’s one novelty (creatively blaming King George for the slave trade) was edited out by Congress.
But now, people weren’t just saying these things. They were acting on them. The philosophy had been brought down to earth and been united with practicality.
Now, it wasn’t just people saying America should become independent and seek foreign alliances; now America actually was independent and holding out its hand for allies. Now, it wasn’t just a philosopher saying the people could alter or abolish their government; now a nation was actually doing it.
Jefferson’s one novelty that survived is to remove “property” from Locke’s list of natural rights (”life, liberty, and property”) and replace it with “the pursuit of happiness.”
Sadly, he and the Committee of Five left no record of why he did it or what he meant by it. This would have huge implications for the rest of Locke’s reasoning about government (as I explained earlier), but Jefferson doesn’t develop those implications. Instead of following Locke’s reasoning about the natural form of government, he jumps forward to “the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” their government, and the “long train of abuses and usurpations” that force America to do so now.
All of this was quite proper and good.
Jefferson submitted the draft to Adams and then Franklin for comment (Franklin receiving it on 21 June as he was recovering from “a severe Fit of the Gout”); they made very few changes and then submitted it to the full committee; they, in turn, submitted it to Congress.
Now, finally, Congress was ready to declare independence.
On June 28th, they received the Declaration; the following Monday, July 1st, they convened again and spent almost all the day (save urgent practicalities) debating independence and the Declaration. They did the same on the 2nd and 3rd - on the 2nd, they approved the resolution for independence, but still spent over another day considering the wording of the Declaration itself.
Historian Julian Boyd, writing in the 1930’s, commented of Congress that “it is difficult to point out a passage in the Declaration, great as it was, that was not improved by their attention.” Comparing Jefferson’s original draft with the final copy, I agree. We don’t know who made the changes, but they were for the better4. There’s no reason to call out America’s hurt feelings toward the British people; “dissolve the political bands” sounds fittingly more general in the first sentence than “advance from that subordination”; the other changes also improve the Declaration.
Like the American victory at Boston, the Declaration was a triumph not of a single genius, but of the united wisdom of America.
Let independence be our boast,
Ever mindful what it cost;
Ever grateful for the prize,
Let its altar reach the skies.— “Hail Columbia,” Joseph Hopkinson, 1798
We look back on the Declaration of Independence as the most significant scene from the American Revolution, and rightly so. It was the culmination of the revolution “in the minds and hearts of the people”, as John Adams described it later: now, after much struggle and over a year of war, Americans were finally ready to declare full independence.
A whirlwind, Adams had called it earlier in the spring. The whirlwind would continue blowing through the future, both in the years of the Revolutionary War to come, and in the centuries since then as the Declaration continues to inspire people across the world.
But in June 1776, as Adams expostulated in another letter, getting to independence was still as much work as having to “make thirteen Clocks, Strike precisely alike, at the Same Second.” It was not yet the Fourth of July.
Adams’ written recollection must misattribute at least one line, as it has the wrong number of speakers between Adams’ first and last lines. I’ve guessed at the most plausible reconstruction by merging two lines. The formatting is mine.
Adams had been in Europe as an American ambassador for most of the eleven years prior to his taking the Vice-Presidency, and he made some unfortunate missteps early in his term which left people thinking of him as self-important and yearning for European-style court ceremony.
Martha Jefferson would miscarry in the summer of 1776; Thomas Jefferson was unable to return to her till September. She would die six years later, in 1782. Jefferson would never remarry.
Contrary to Senator Mike Lee’s 2019 analysis, I even agree that Congress’s deleting Jefferson’s condemnation of the slave trade improved the Declaration. It was well worth condemnation - but blaming King George for it would have been hypocritical.