The Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence is both a legal document and a philosophical treatise. It has the structure of a government document but uses philosophy to underpin its political purpose. It is organized around two premises: that a government derives its power from the people and that the people can, therefore, dissolve the government and form a new one if it fails to protect the people’s rights. Jefferson first argues the undeniability of the first premise and then goes into extensive detail to prove the second. With both premises proven, the document reaches its conclusion: The people of the colonies are forming a new government. The three sections of the text (preamble, list of grievances, and conclusion) each use slightly different devices and ideas that are worth looking at closely.

The first section, the preamble, is primarily a philosophical treatise. Jefferson was an avid reader of political philosophy, and he was well versed in the dominant ideas of the Enlightenment. Principal among his influences were the writings of Locke. Locke believed in the social contract theory, which states that people give up some rights to join a civil society in exchange for protection and benefits. To Locke, a government is legitimate only if its subjects consent to the government’s power. In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke wrote that a government has a duty to secure the people’s rights of life, liberty, and property. If it does not, the people have the right to make a new government. Jefferson makes essentially the same argument in the Declaration of Independence. In the preamble, he describes as “self-evident” the thesis that humans derive unalienable rights from God, including “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” These rights are almost identical to those Locke espoused, the only change being “the pursuit of happiness” in place of property. Locke discussed the pursuit of happiness in other writings, however, a fact that highlights how deeply he influenced Jefferson.

On Locke’s theory, these rights are not granted by a king, queen, or any other human but by a higher power. They come from the “Creator,” and the document refers to “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle” the American colonists. A reader of the Declaration would not need to be aware of Locke’s philosophy to agree that these rights come from God. The preamble goes on to say that “Governments are instituted among Men” to protect the “unalienable rights,” just as Locke argued. These governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and people have the “duty” and the “right” to form new governments that will uphold their end of the social contract. With the first philosophical point—that there is a social contract—thus demonstrated, the Declaration goes on to argue for the need to abolish the current government.

The Declaration lists 27 separate “abuses” by the current government of Great Britain. This section is the least frequently quoted or celebrated but, to the signers, it was arguably the most important part of the document. The Declaration goes to great lengths to show that the signers are not acting in haste. It states that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires” that people “should declare the causes which impel them to the separation” from their government. Additionally, the document argues that “Prudence […] will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” The signers want to make sure that readers of the Declaration will see the action of declaring independence as well-reasoned and temperate. The complaints are designed to prove that the king has established “an absolute Tyranny” over the colonies and that, therefore, his government is illegitimate.

The grievances encompass everything from abuses of individual rights, to unfair trials, to taxes imposed without representation, to the forced maintenance and quartering of troops. These complaints suggest the king is not living up to the “consent of the governed” part of the social contract. The Declaration of Independence makes the argument that King George III did not even do the minimum that one can expect of a sovereign: protect the lives of his subjects. The last five grievances listed accuse the king of “waging War against” the colonists, burning the towns and destroying the lives of the American people, attempting to complete “the works of death, desolation, and tyranny,” forcing other British citizens to “become the executioners of their friends and Brethren,” and not securing the borders of the frontier from “the merciless Indian Savages.” While a reader might dismiss some of the earlier complaints as being unimportant, it is hard to disregard the fury at the end. Conversely, if the list of grievances had started with the strongest complaints, a reader might lose interest in the weaker ones. The placement of these items at the end makes the Declaration rise in a crescendo of outrage.

Finally, with both premises proven—that people have a right to change their government if it’s tyrannical and that the current government is tyrannical—the Declaration ends by doing what its title suggests: declaring independence from Great Britain. The signers make it clear they tried other less extreme measures but that their entreaties were ignored by their supposed countrymen. The fact that their complaints fell on “deaf” ears proves the inevitability of American independence, as the “we” that is writing and signing the Declaration is already separate from Great Britain. In the closing paragraph, the signers declare that they are acting “by Authority of the good People of these Colonies” and appeal to a higher power, “the Supreme Judge of the world.”