The Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence provided the bridge over which colonial Whigs crossed into their new world of republicanism and independence. It was a classic exposition of legal argument set to political purposes. Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues on the drafting committee of the Continental Congress pleaded a legal case intended to accord them political freedom and enjoyment of the ancient rights of the British constitution that Parliament had so often ignored. Here was the decisive example of the revolutionaries breaking the law while remaining lawful.

Jefferson's declaration owed something to Locke and to Scottish commonsense philosophers, the latter of which both Jefferson and James Madison counted among their teachers. The document articulated a limited concept of natural law and social

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contract theory, but in so doing it took aim at George III and not Parliament. On first glance this seems anomalous behavior because it was Parliament that had claimed absolute sovereign authority, enacted legislation taxing and regulating the colonists, and pressed the notion of virtual representation. The King, however, presented an easier and safer target. The Declaration listed grievances against George III and used these as the basis by which to withdraw from the empire. The right of revolution was asserted against a tyrant and not against the British constitution that Parliament represented. Jefferson's claim on existing British constitutional authority gave the revolutionaries the right to remove themselves from Parliament's direct control. To the end, the revolutionaries believed that they understood the British constitution more fully than their masters.

The Declaration's attack on the King also satisfied republican theory. Revolution had been forced on the King's reluctant subjects, and the bonds of allegiance between George III and each one of his American subjects had been destroyed. The Declaration's appeal to "reason and good Conscience" was crucial, for Congress was asking the King's American subjects to judge, by their own authority, whether or not he was still entitled to their allegiance. The subject who disavowed his allegiance to the Crown transformed himself into a republican citizen. Once this was done Americans could proceed to form their own governments in order to preserve "internal peace, virtue, and good order." ³³

The Declaration's insistence on a legal break with England was fortified by its social conservatism. Locke had included in his famous trilogy of inalienable rights life, liberty, and property. Jefferson altered the last of these to read the pursuit of happiness. This new phrase, which Jefferson borrowed directly from Scottish commonsense philosophy, blunted the document's potentially radical threat to existing property holders (save loyalists) and the social upheaval that would have accompanied genuine internal rebellion. As important, it established that for government to succeed it had to be based on the pursuit of happiness--the doing of good for the commonwealth--through the ongoing promotion of virtue, the chief tenet of commonsense philosophy.

The Declaration was an equivocal document in other ways. Although it was a legal brief based on the ancient British constitution, it also contained natural law principles, the idea of the social contract, and a hazy commitment to popular sovereignty. The failure of Jefferson to sketch any of these in detail stemmed from the need to hold moderate support. The Continental Congress invoked the failure of the monarchical government to justify the popular assumption of authority: the sovereignty of the people is not directly asserted. Yet Congress, outside the Declaration, was more direct, advising the thirteen colonies to organize themselves as states based on "the authority of the people." ³⁴ The Declaration emphatically underscored what delegates to the Congress had already decided: to fashion a new constitutional order based on the will of the people and organized on the basis of states.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 877