Declaration of Independence

By the summer of 1776, the colonies had been at war with Britain for more than a year. Fighting had begun at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, yet many colonists still hoped for reconciliation within the empire. That hope faded from late 1775 into 1776: a royal proclamation declared the colonists in open rebellion, Parliament’s Prohibitory Act made American ships and cargoes forfeit to the Crown, and word arrived that the king had hired German troops. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, published in January, persuaded many readers that independence, not reform, was the only sensible course.

On June 7, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduced a resolution declaring that the colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” Congress postponed the vote but, on June 10–11, appointed a committee of five to prepare a statement explaining the decision to the world. The committee gave the writing to Jefferson, a thirty-three-year-old Virginia delegate known for his prose. He drafted the text between June 11 and June 28, took suggestions from Adams and Franklin, and presented it to Congress.

Congress approved the independence section of Lee’s resolution on July 2 — the actual vote for independence — and then spent July 3 and most of July 4 revising Jefferson’s draft. Among the cuts was a passage condemning the king for the Atlantic slave trade. Jefferson later recalled that it was struck out to satisfy South Carolina and Georgia, which wanted to keep importing enslaved people, and that some Northern delegates, whose merchants had carried enslaved Africans, were uneasy with it too. The final text was adopted on the afternoon of July 4 and printed overnight by John Dunlap for distribution to the states and the army.

The Declaration has three parts. The preamble and the famous second paragraph set out a theory of government drawn from the English and European Enlightenment tradition, especially the idea of natural rights associated with John Locke:

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.

Governments, the text continues, are created to secure those rights and derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” When a government becomes destructive of those ends, the people may alter or abolish it.

The second and longest part is a list of grievances against George III, intended to prove that the king — not just Parliament — had become a tyrant: dissolving colonial legislatures, keeping standing armies in peacetime, cutting off trade, imposing taxes without consent, and waging war on the colonists. One grievance accused the king of inciting “merciless Indian Savages” against frontier settlers, language that reflected colonial fears and prejudices and that historians today read as part of the document’s record of its time.

The final part formally declares that the “United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States,” with full power to make war, conclude peace, form alliances, and conduct trade.

The men who adopted the Declaration did not intend to abolish slavery or extend political rights to everyone; Jefferson himself enslaved hundreds of people over his lifetime. Yet the document’s universal language outlived its authors’ limits. The 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments rewrote it to read “all men and women are created equal.” Frederick Douglass used it in 1852 to indict a nation that celebrated liberty while holding millions in bondage. Abraham Lincoln treated it as the moral foundation of the Union, opening the Gettysburg Address by dating the nation from 1776 rather than from the Constitution.

The Declaration has no legal force on its own. Its influence works through argument and example — in American politics and in the dozens of independence declarations around the world that have borrowed its structure and language.