Volume 4, Chapter 33, Independence Declared
On June 7, in happy obedience to the instructions resolved by Virginia on May 15, Richard Henry Lee submitted to the Continental Congress a momentous resolution for the independence of the United Colonies.
His resolution embodied three historic affirmations.
First was a Declaration of Independence, 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.
One of the great virtues, as well as a corollary of independence, would be the ability to form
alliances with France and other countries in support of the war.
So Lee's second resolve affirmed the utility of forming such alliances.
Finally, if the colonies were now to be separate and independent states, it was clear that
no war, especially no war with the regular army, could be waged unless the states were
were in some way united, and it was believed that a formal compact of unity was needed
to bolster the standing of the Continental Congress, just as formal government was supposedly
needed by each state to replace spontaneous and anarchic rule by organized networks of
local committees. Therefore, Lee's third resolution instructed that a plan of confederation be
be drawn up and submitted to the separate states. The conservatives had no objection
to confederation per se. Indeed, a strong central government over the colonies had long
been a dream of many arch-conservatives. Neither did the prospect of alliances frighten them.
After all, war was being waged and the more help the better. The sticking point was independence.
Independence, and this issue polarized opinion and was bitterly fought in the Congress.
Leading the battle against independence were Robert R. Livingston of New York, James Wilson
and John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, who privately
blasted the resolution as madness.
Ranged in favor of independence were New England, Virginia and Georgia respectively, led by
by John Adams, George Wythe and Richard Henry Lee.
Adams was exultant, writing to a friend that,
we are in the very midst of a revolution,
the most complete, unexpected and remarkable
of any in the history of nations.
The opposition to Lee's resolution
pretended to favor independence in principle
and placed its hopes in postponement,
arguing cogently that it would be more sensible
The radicals came to see the validity of this particular argument, and so Congress agreed to postpone the consideration of independence until July 1.
Still, the radicals lost little time overall, for they were able to carry the appointment of a committee to draft a Declaration of Independence to embody Lee's first resolution.
The Committee to draft the Declaration, appointed on June 11, had an overwhelming radical majority. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman. It also included one conservative, Robert R. Livingston. Committees were similarly appointed on Confederation and on a plan for foreign treaties.
The latter part of June did, as we have seen, bring the middle colonies into the fold, even though Maryland had first pleaded unsuccessfully for postponement of the discussion date beyond July 1.
In addition, loose ends were wrapped up in those New England colonies that had not bothered to issue formal support for independence.
By June 14, Connecticut flatly ordered its delegates to propose independence for the American states.
The next day, the New Hampshire legislature pledged support for independence.
Furthermore, Congress itself drove ever closer to independence.
On June 24, it declared that any American adhering to the enemy king or living war on his behalf was guilty of treason.
In accordance with the resolve, Thomas Hickey, a private in the Continental Army, was hanged
by that army for mutiny.
The momentous day of July 1 brought with it the news of Maryland's affirmation of independence.
New York's delegates, having received no firm reply to a request for instruction from the
and the Provincial Congress decided that they had best abstain from the vote on independence.
Those radicals who really believed that conservative objections to independence had been met by
the events of June were in for a rude shock.
After a fierce debate on the Lee Resolution in the Committee of the Whole, a vote was
taken in which Pennsylvania and South Carolina voted against independence while the two Delaware
are members present split on the issue.
Clearly, the delegates from Pennsylvania and South Carolina were voting their own reactionary wishes in defiance of the will of their constituents.
Here was a stunning setback to the radical cause.
The next day, July 2, the independence resolution came to the floor of Congress.
How was unanimity to be achieved in one day?
Delaware achieved it by sheer energy. Thomas McKean sent for Caesar Rodney in a hurried call, and Rodney, who had been leading militiamen against Tories in southern Delaware, rode all night in a thunderstorm from Dover to Philadelphia to cast Delaware's tie-breaking vote for independence.
South Carolina's Edward Rutledge, a leader of the fight against independence, announced his decision to take his delegation into the camp of independence for the sake of inter-colonial unity.
That left Pennsylvania, and new delegates were not to be chosen by the radicals in the provincial conference until the end of July.
On July 1, the Pennsylvania delegation had voted 4-3 against independence, with Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, and surprisingly, James Wilson, 4, and John Dickinson, Charles Humphreys, Robert Morris and Thomas Willing, opposed.
The next day Dickinson and Morris deliberately absented themselves, and Pennsylvania's precarious three-to-two vote for independence made the congressional vote unanimous. The deed was done. The colonies were now separate, free and independent states, and as the united colonies were now at last informally united states.
John Adams was understandably enraptured at having achieved the goal of years of labor and devotion.
A greater issue, he wrote blissfully, perhaps never was nor will be decided among men.
The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America.
I am well aware of the toil and bloodshed and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this declaration. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory.
The colonies had announced their independence, but only the bare assertion had been made.
The Republic of the United States needed a justification, a philosophical explanation and groundwork for the unprecedented act which could inform and inspire the citizenry and the world at large.
Heading the committee to frame such a declaration at the age of 33, one of the youngest members of Congress but already renowned for his brilliant pen was Thomas Jefferson.
The committee presented his draft to Congress on June 28 and debate ensued in the Committee of the Whole after the approval of Lee's resolution.
An amended declaration was approved by Congress on July 4, by the same vote as that two days before, and this noble and immortal summation of the philosophy and motivation of the American Revolution was first proclaimed to the public in Philadelphia by local associators on July 8.
Jefferson's aim in drawing out the Declaration of Independence was not originality of principle but the framing of a succinct expression of the American mind and of the sentiments of the day on the common sense of the subject.
The document was indeed a superb epitome of the libertarian natural rights philosophy propelling the revolution as well as the specific grievances that had roused the American people.
Jefferson began with a brief explanation of the decision for composing the document.
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
to the Separation.
The natural right to independence and self-government was in turn grounded on a fundamental structure
of the natural rights of man.
Nowhere has this philosophy been better put into brief compass than in the succeeding
paragraph of the Declaration.
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, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among
of Young 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
Here was the quintessence of John Locke and of the 18th century libertarian creed.
It is axiomatic that all men are endowed by nature with inalienable rights.
The proper aim of government, as derived from the consent of the governed, is to secure
those rights. Nothing other than this function justifies government's existence, hence the
right of the people to revolt against any government destructive of those aims. Jefferson
went on to recognize the habit of mankind to suffer evil government rather than right
themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But a long train of abuses
Degrees and usurpations tending toward despotism confronts the people with the duty, let alone
the right, to revolt and abolish such government.
He then proceeded to list the long train of usurpations, trenchantly summing up the history
of the Revolutionary struggle since the Seven Years' War, and as he had done in the preamble
to the Virginia Constitution, he pinned the responsibility squarely on the ultimate head
and governing symbol, the king himself.
In the concluding paragraph of the declaration, the representatives of the United States of
America in general Congress assembled, declared the status of the colonies as free and independent
States and repeated the text of the Lee resolution passed two days before. For the support of
the declaration they mutually pledged to each other, our lives, our fortunes and our sacred
honor. Clearly, the formulation of Jefferson's philosophical paragraph owed much to George
Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights. Jefferson's draft asserted, as had Mason, that men are
are endowed with inherent and inalienable rights.
It should also be evident from the context that when Jefferson wrote that all men are
created equal, he did not assert everyone's right to an equal income and he did not intend
the absurdity that everyone is equal in capacity or natural endowments.
He meant, in the words of Mason, that all men are by nature equally free and independent.
In his original draft, he had written that all men are created equal and independent.
In short, man's equality lies in his equal right to liberty.
Neither is any profound significance to be read into Jefferson's use of the phrase pursuit
of Happiness rather than the more usual property. Mason's original draft of the Virginia Declaration
had said that among man's inherent natural rights are the enjoyment of life and liberty
with the means of acquiring and possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness
and safety. Jefferson, compressing Mason's statement, originally wrote, among which right
Rights are the preservation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In short, the right to pursue happiness includes and implies the right to acquire and possess
property.
Jefferson knew as well as Mason or the other natural rights theorist of the day that the
individual has no natural right to any quantum of property.
Rather, his natural right is the equal liberty to acquire and keep property.
The Declaration's formulation, therefore, was in no sense a repudiation or weakening
of the right of private property.
Some paragraphs in Jefferson's draft were excised by the Congress, and historians have
had been decidedly unfair to Jefferson in ascribing his chagrin at these changes to
mere personal pique and undue pride of authorship. High principle was often involved and it was
not personal pique that led his fellow committee member John Adams to fight tooth and nail
against any changes in Jefferson's draft. One critical paragraph condemned King George
in the Severest Terms for Establishing Slavery in America.
This paragraph boldly, clearly and specifically applied the general doctrine of the inalienable
rights of life and liberty to the Negro slaves.
He, George III, has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred
and rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him,
captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable
death in their transportation thither, determined to keep open a market where men should be
bought and sold. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt
to prohibit or to restrain this excrucible commerce.
This paragraph, however, was excised at the insistence of the delegates from ardently
pro-slavery Georgia and South Carolina, as well as by some northern reluctance to condemn
a trade largely in the hands of northern merchants.
Already a libertarian left was beginning to emerge in America. Jefferson, Payne, Mason, highly critical of the institution of slavery.
Even with the attack on slavery removed, however, Jefferson's biographer is correct in saying that
In that, Jefferson's words in the Declaration should make tyranny tremble in any age. They
have alarmed conservative minds in his own land in every generation, and some compatriots
of his have regretted that the New Republic was dedicated to such radical doctrines at
its birth.
With the Declaration of Independence, the United States of America made their final
A fundamental shift from arguing on the basis of historic British rights and privileges
to the necessary grounding of their revolution on the universal principles of the natural
rights of man.
Revolution and independence necessarily went beyond the narrow bounds of an intra-British
argument.
Now the revolution must justify itself at the bar of the world and must therefore do
do so on principles universally applicable.
In doing so, this philosophy brought the separate states closer together by providing a common
revolutionary ideology.
The declaration was the embodiment of this break with the past.
Professor Ariely sums up this development.
The revolutionary separation from the mother country involved a radical break with the
of the Past, the Transformation of English Subjects into American Citizens, and of the
Rights of the Englishmen into the Rights of Nature.
The very strongly developed consciousness of English national traditions and rights had
to be reinterpreted by concepts taken from the natural rights philosophy.
The fact that the American nation was created by a revolutionary separation from the mother
brought about the adoption of rationalistic values and norms.