Final Draft

JEFFERSON’S DECLARATION In Philadelphia, thirty- three- year- old Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant, freckle- faced Virginia planter and attorney serving in the Continental Congress, had drafted a statement of independence that John Adams and Benjamin Franklin then edited.The Declaration of Independence was crucially important not simply because it marked the creation of a new nation but because of the ideals it expressed and the grievances it listed. Over the previous ten years, colonists had deplored various acts of Parliament impinging on their freedoms. Now, Jefferson directed colonial resentment at King George III himself, arguing that the monarch should have reined in Parliament’s efforts to “tyrannize” the colonies. In addition to highlighting the efforts of the British government to tax thecolonists and restrict their liberties, Jefferson also noted the king’s 1773 decree that sought to restrict population growth in the colonies by “obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners.” British authori-ties had grown worried that the mass migration to America threatened to “ de- populate” the home country. So, beginning in 1767, the government began banning “bounties” offered to immigrants by many colonies and ended the practice of providing large land grants in America to encourage settlement.

After listing the various objections to British actions, Jefferson asserted that certain truths were self- evident: that “all men are created equal and inde-pendent” and have the right to create governments of their own choosing. Governments, he explained, derive “their just powers from the consent of the people,” who are entitled to “alter or abolish” those governments when denied their “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi-ness.” Because King George III was trying to impose “an absolute tyranny over these states,” the “Representatives of the United States of America” declared the thirteen “United Colonies” of British America to be “Free and Independent States.”

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF FREEDOM Once the Continen-tal Congress chose independence, its members revised Jefferson’s draft dec-laration before sending it to London. Southern representatives insisted on deleting Jefferson’s section criticizing George III for perpetuating theAfri-can slave trade. In doing so, they revealed the major contradiction at work in the movement for independence. The rhetoric of freedom that animated the Revolution did not apply to the widespread system of slavery that fueled the southern economy. Slavery was the absence of liberty, yet few Americans confronted the inconsistency of their protests in defense of freedom— for whites.

In 1764, a group of slaves in Charleston watching a demonstration against British tyranny by white Sons of Liberty got caught up in the moment and began chanting “Freedom, freedom, freedom.” But that was not what southern planters wanted for African Americans. In 1774, when a group of slaves killed four whites in a desperate attempt to gain their freedom, Georgia planters cap-tured the rebels and burned them alive.James Otis, a Harvard- educated lawyer, was one of the few Whigs who demanded freedom for blacks and women. In 1764, he had argued that “the colonists, black and white, born here, are free British subjects, and entitled to all the essential civil rights of such.” He went so far as to suggest that slavery itself should be ended, since “all men...white or black” were “by the law of nature freeborn.”

Otis also asked, “Are not women born as free as men? Would it not be infamous to assert that the ladies are all slaves by nature?” His sister, Mercy Otis Warren, became a tireless advocate of American resistance to British “tyranny” through her poems, pamphlets, and plays. In a letter to a friend, she noted that British officials needed to realize that America’s “daughters are politicians and patriots and will aid the good work [of resistance] with their female efforts.”Slaves insisted on independence too. In 1773, a group of enslaved Afri-can Americans in Boston appealed to the royal governor of Massachusetts to free them just as white Americans were defending their freedoms against British tyranny. In many respects, the slaves argued, they had a more com-pelling case for liberty: “We have no property, We have no wives! No chil-dren! No city! No country!”

A few months later, a group of four Boston slaves addressed a pub-lic letter to the town government in which they referred to the hypoc-risy of slaveholders who protested against British regulations and taxes. “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow- men to enslave them,” they noted. But freedom in 1776 was a celebration to which slaves were not invited. George Washington himself acknowledged the con-tradictory aspects of the Revolutionary movement when he warned that the alternative to declaring independence was to become “tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway [absolute power].” Washington and other slaveholders at the head of the Revolutionary move-ment, such as Thomas Jefferson, were in part so resistant to “British tyranny” because they witnessed every day what actual slavery was like— for the blacks under their control.Jefferson admitted the hypocrisy of slave- owning Revolutionaries. “South-erners,” he wrote to a French friend, are “jealous of their own liberties but trampling on those of others.” Phillis Wheatley, the first African American writer to publish her poetry in America, highlighted the “absurdity” of white colonists claiming their freedom while continuing to exercise “oppressive power” over enslaved Africans.

“WE ALWAYS HAD GOVERNED OURSELVES” Historians still debate the causes of the American Revolution. Americans in 1775–1776 were not desperately poor: overall, they probably enjoyed a higher standard of living than most other societies and lived under the freest institutions in the world. Their diet was better than that of Europeans, as was their average life span. In addition, the percentage of free property owners in the thirteen colonies was higher than in Britain or Europe. At the same time, the new taxes forced on Americans after 1763 were not as great as those imposed on the British people. And many American colonists, perhaps as many as half, were indifferent, hes-itant, or actively opposed to rebellion.So why did the Americans revolt? Historians have highlighted many fac-tors: the clumsy British efforts to tighten their regulation of colonial trade, the restrictions on colonists eager to acquire western lands, the growing tax burden, the mounting debts to British merchants, the lack of American rep-resentation in Parliament, and the role of radicals such as Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry in stirring up anti- British feelings.Yet other reasons were not so selfless or noble. Many wealthy New Englanders and NewYorkers most critical of tighter British regulations, such as Boston merchant John Hancock, were smugglers; paying more British taxes would have cost them a fortune. Likewise, South Carolina’s Henry Laurens and Virginia’s Landon Carter, both prosperous planters, worried that the British might abolish slavery.

Overall, however, what Americans most feared and resented were the Brit-ish efforts to constrict colonists’ civil liberties, thereby denying their rights as British citizens. As Hugh Williamson, a Pennsylvania physician, explained, the Revolution resulted not from “trifling or imaginary” injustices but from “gross and palpable” violations of American rights that had thrown “the miserable colonists” into the “pit of despotism.”Yet how did the diverse colonies develop such a unified resistance? Although most Patriots were of English heritage, many other peoples were represented: Scots, Irish, Scots- Irish, Welsh, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Finns, Swiss, French, and Jews, as well as growing numbers of Africans and diminishing numbers of Native Americans. In 1774, Thomas Hutchin-son, the royal governor of Massachusetts, assured British officials that “a union of the Colonies was utterly impracticable” because the colonists “were greatly divided among themselves in every colony.” He predicted that Americans would ultimately “submit, and that they must, and moreover would, soon.”Hutchinson was wrong, of course. What most Americans— regardless of their backgrounds— had come to share by 1775 was a defiant attachment tothe civil rights and legal processes guaranteed by the English constitutional tradition. This outlook, rooted in the defense of sacred constitutional princi-ples, made the Revolution conceivable. Armed resistance made it possible, and independence, ultimately, made it achievable.

The Revolution reflected the shared political notion that all citizens were equal and independent, and that all governmental authority had to be based on longstanding constitutional principles and the consent of the governed. This “republican ideal” was the crucial force that transformed a prolonged effort to preserve rights and liberties enjoyed by British citizens into a movement to create an independent nation. With their declaration of independence, the Revolutionaries— men and women, farmers, artisans, mechanics, sailors, mer-chants, tavern owners, and shopkeepers— had become determined to develop their own society. Americans wanted to trade freely with the world and to expand what Jefferson called their “empire of liberty” westward, across the Appalachian Mountains. The Revolutionaries knew the significance of what they were attempt-ing. They were committing themselves, stressed John Adams, to “a Revolu-tion, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of nations,” and none of them could “foresee the consequences” of a war for independence.

Perhaps the last word should belong to Levi Preston, a Minuteman from Danvers, Massachusetts. Asked late in life about the British efforts to impose new taxes and regulations on the colonists, Preston responded, “What were they? Oppressions? I didn’t feel them.” He was then asked, “What, were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?” Preston replied that he “never saw one of those stamps...I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them.” What about the tax on tea? “ Tea- tax! I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.” His interviewer finally asked why he decided to fight for inde-pendence. “Young man,” Preston explained, “what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”