Natural Rights, Righteous Grievances, and the Most Consequential Document Ever Written by Men Who Owned People
Natural Rights, Righteous Grievances, and the Most Consequential Document Ever Written by Men Who Owned People
We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident (And Also Non-Negotiable)
The Declaration of Independence is, at its core, a breakup letter. A very long, very formal, philosophically dense breakup letter sent to a king who had not, technically, agreed to be in a relationship in the first place. This is the founding irony of American democracy: the nation began with a unilateral declaration, and it has been arguing about unilateral declarations ever since.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft in approximately seventeen days, which is either impressive or concerning depending on how you feel about seventeen-day relationship decisions. He was 33 years old. He owned over 600 enslaved people. He wrote that all men are created equal. The United States has been wrestling with this contradiction for 250 years and has not yet submitted a satisfactory resolution, though it has produced several very good speeches and one extremely good civil war.
The Structure of Righteous Complaint
The Declaration has three parts, which any good political science professor will tell you correspond to a rhetorical structure so elegant it borders on unfair. First, you establish your philosophical premises. Second, you present your evidence. Third, you announce your conclusion. It is essentially a legal brief, if legal briefs were also founding documents of global democratic movements.
Part One – the philosophical preamble – contains the most famous sentence in American history: “”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.”” This sentence is extraordinary. It is also doing quite a lot of heavy lifting over quite a lot of complicated ground, and the phrase “”pursuit of Happiness”” has been interpreted to include everything from religious freedom to the right to own a very large truck.
Part Two is a list of grievances against King George III. There are 27 of them. This is important because it tells you something about the colonists’ approach to conflict: they were not impulsive. They did not storm out at the first offense. They made a list. They kept a record. They were, in the most literal sense, documenting a case. Future generations of Americans would inherit this instinct and apply it to everything from HOA disputes to congressional hearings.
The Grievances: Evidence-Based Complaining at Its Finest
The grievances range from the genuinely serious to the delightfully specific. The King had dissolved representative assemblies. The King had kept standing armies among them in times of peace. The King had cut off their trade. These are substantial complaints, the kind that justify revolutions in the general estimation of history.
But there is also – and this is worth appreciating – a grievance about the King “”transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny.”” The colonists were, in this moment, essentially writing a Yelp review of their monarch. One star. Would not recommend. Hired mercenaries without warning. Dissolved my assembly. Taxes excessive with zero representation.
The genius of the list is not any individual item but the cumulative weight. One grievance is a complaint. Twenty-seven grievances is a pattern. The Declaration is structured to make the reader feel the exhaustion of people who have tried, repeatedly, through proper channels, to address their concerns and have been ignored at every turn. This is, incidentally, a feeling that 21st century Americans also experience frequently, though they tend to express it on social media rather than in formally witnessed parchment documents.
The Irony Engine: A Document About Freedom Written by Unfree Men’s Owners
Here is where the satirist’s duty compels honesty: the Declaration of Independence was written by slaveholders. Approximately 41 of the 56 signers enslaved other human beings. The document that declared human equality and universal rights was drafted, signed, and celebrated by men who went home afterward to plantations staffed by people who had no rights at all.
Jefferson originally included a passage condemning the slave trade, which was removed during committee because South Carolina and Georgia refused to sign a document that criticized their primary economic model. The founders, in other words, knew the contradiction was there, argued about it, and then decided that national unity was more important than resolving it. They were not wrong that unity mattered. They were catastrophically wrong about what postponement would cost.
The Declaration’s genius is that it planted a seed that its own authors could not contain. “”All men are created equal”” did not stay a polite phrase in a historical document. It became a weapon. Frederick Douglass used it. Susan B. Anthony used it. Martin Luther King Jr. used it. The document turned out to be more radical than the men who wrote it, which is either the highest compliment you can pay a piece of writing or the most damning indictment of the men who wrote it. Possibly both. This is what historians call a rich interpretive tradition and what everyone else calls a mess that refuses to clean itself up.
Conclusion: The Most Important Breakup in History
The Declaration was adopted on July 4, 1776, a date Americans now celebrate with fireworks, hot dogs, and a level of patriotic confidence that would have baffled the signers, who were, at the time of signing, committing treason and knew it. “”We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,”” the document concludes. Several of them lost the first two. The third proved more durable.
King George III, upon receiving news of the Declaration, reportedly said little of note. He had, by this point, received so many colonial complaints that one more document expressing displeasure was not immediately distinguishable from the rest. He would eventually understand his error. So would several future rulers who confused the volume of complaints with the absence of consequences. The colonists were done negotiating. They had, after all, made a list.
SOURCE: The London Prat