Conceived in Liberty (236 page)

The conservatives had no objection to confederation per se; indeed, a strong central government over the colonies had long been a dream of many archconservatives. 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, 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 John Adams, George Whyte, 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 to wait for a short while until the middle colonies had swung into line. 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 levying 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 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 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 Ceasar 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 intercolonial 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 four to three against independence, with Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, and (surprisingly) James Wilson for, 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 epocha 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 thirty-three 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 up the Declaration of Independence was not
originality of principle but the framing of a succinct “expression of the American mind,” 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 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 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 effect their safety and happiness.

Here was the quintessence of John Locke and of the eighteenth 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 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 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 [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 theorists 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 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 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 execrable commerce.

This paragraph, however, was excised at the insistence of the delegates from ardently proslavery 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, Paine, Mason—highly critical of the institution of slavery. Even with the attack on slavery removed, however, Jefferson’s biographer is correct in saying 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 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 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 Arieli sums up this development:

The revolutionary separation from the mother country involved a radical break with [the] past, the transformation of English subjects into American citizens and of the rights of 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 country brought about the adoption of rationalistic values and norms....
**

*
Dumas Malone,
Jefferson the Virginian
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), p. 227.

**
Yehoshua Arieli,
Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 25–26.