In Congress, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, 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.
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. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, 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; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
The Declaration of Independence is to America what Genesis is to the Bible, providing he foundation for the thinking that would comprise the “American Mind.” The thinking of the founders is captured in the Declaration and what they they proposed unified them as “one people,” this despite a remarkable amount of religous and some ethnic diversity. This Declaration was a union of ideals, unprecedented in all of history prior to the writing of the Declararation, that a nation, for the first time, would not founded upon a common emporer, or a king, or common blood, or common race, or soil but rather on a proposition comprised on principles.
“This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before, but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, not yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All it’s [sic] authority rests on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, & c.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825
Thomas Jefferson, in writing the Declaration, states that a thorough look back into history and to the ideas of some of its greatest thinkers helped to formulate a “common sense,” understanding of the purpose of governement which the Declaration explains as “securing,” natural rights. The “American Mind,” was formulated by a broad recognition of history and thus, a “harmonizing,” of histories greatest politcal thinkers and their philosophies on effective, and more importatly, “just” government.
In a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman
Monticello, June 24, 1826, just 10 days before his death.
“May it: (The Declaration) be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.
That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.
These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
Jefferson articulates in the Declarations for the first time in history, the proposition of self government, for “one people,” and his hope for an “annual return of this day (July 4) forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undimished devotion to them.” Each July 4 many should aquiant themselves, and for some, to re-aquaint ourselves with the philosophical principles that founded our United States found in the Declaration of Independence.
By the middle of the 19th century the principles found in the Declaration of Indepedence, specifically the self evident truth that all men are created equal and therefore, given by their Creator rights applicable to all men at all times everywhere, where severaly challenged by the slave power that existed in the southern states. Slavery was considered by the founders a “neccessary evil,” to assure union amonst the states and they had anticipated its eventual demise as it had in several of the northern states. Decades of compromise transpired but by the 1850’s new technoligical advancements made slavery more lucrative for the aristocratice slave power in the south who began to look westward for further expansion. Southern leaders like Democrat John Calhoun, on the floor of the United Sates Senate said on February 6, 1837,
“But I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.”
Other advocates for the benevolence of slavery would include Democrats: South Carolina Govenor James Henry Hammond, Democrat Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney, Democrat Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, and Democrat President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. When Illinois Democrat Senator, Stephen A. Douglas, proposed states coming into the union should be able to vote on further expanding slavery in what became known as “popular sovereignty,” he used the same arguments as Calhoun and the confederates in repudiating the eqality principles of natural rights for all in the Declarartion of Independence.
Abraham Lincoln, then opposing Senator Douglas, for election into the United States Senate, would call for the restoration of the equality principle for all made clear in the Declaration of Independence which had become severly marginalized by the slave power. Lincoln said prior to becoming a Republican, and prior to the famous debates he would have with Senator Douglas that would help thrust him onto national recognition said, “Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south — let all Americans — let all lovers of liberty everywhere — join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.”
October 16, 1854 Speech at Peoria, Ill.
Abraham Lincoln rejuvinated the principles of the Declaration of Independence and not only became its greatest advocate, after the founding era, but also its greatest expositor.
Lincoln would give a speech in Springfield, Illinios on June 26, 1857 and extrapolate on the Declaration of Independence..
“They (The Founders) meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
Lincoln would re-affirm his dedication to the principles of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on his way to being inagurated as President of the United States.
The very first resolution in the very first Republican Party Platform in 1856 says ….
“Resolved: That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence, and embodied in the Federal Constitution are essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions, and that the Federal Constitution, the rights of the States, and the union of the States, must and shall be preserved.”
Not only were the principles of the Declaration the ingredients in formulating the “American Mind,” and the founding of a nation based on “reason and choice” rather than “accident and force,” but also provided the foundation for the Republican Party in political theory and policy.
Today, the Republican Party is far removed from its initial platform and has deviated in sentiment away from the principles of the Declaration of Independence and now increasingly reflects an autocratic, authoritarian, cult of personality, fueled by zealous populism and a severe lack of critial and analytical thinking.
The last Constitutional Republican President Calvin Coolidge, offers the perpetuity of the “standard maxim for a free society,” the founders created and the assuring finality of the unalienable ideas and ideals contained in the Declaration of Independence, not subject to change by cirucmstance, nature, or time.
