(This essay is the fourth in a series of reflections on the meaning of the Declaration of Independence in honor of its 250th anniversary. The series will run until July 4, 2026.)
I. “Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren.”
The Declaration’s case has been made as to why the king’s actions (and inactions) violate the “self-evident” truths which the Americans hold. He has ignored or attacked the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. His government, therefore, has failed “to secure these Rights.” And by so failing, he has failed to achieve, or even to strive for, the common safety and happiness of the American people. All these failures are tied to the Crown’s choice to become an empire ruling over many separate peoples and colonies, rather than remaining the national representative of one people. Such a Prince has proven he has the character of the “Tyrant” and is “unfit” to govern a “free People.”
The phrase “a free People” leads to the final objection to the American revolution. However much the king may violate the principles of the American colonists, do his actions justify a radical break within the British people? Until now, the Americans were Englishmen, connected in blood, laws, and culture to their kin across the ocean. Are their principles worth the destruction of this shared heritage, as we now call it?
The weight of this objection is not often appreciated, particularly by those who revere the Declaration and treat it as a timeless document. Yet the Declaration takes the objection to be a matter of grave importance. An entire section is devoted to the matter of heritage. The key to this account will be the relation between “a free People” and its “British Brethren.”
The Declaration will explain that the American and British nations have already split from one people into two. And the Americans have become a “free People.”. Under these conditions, respect for heritage now demands allegiance to the “free People” and not to “our British Brethren.” Therefore, independence will be not only the right but also the duty of the American people.
Another key to this case will be to show how the Americans exhibited utmost deference before they accepted the separation. “We” have not “been wanting in attentions to our British Brethren.” The Americans have been, in a word, patient. And only now has patience run out, and necessity has shown that now these were two people and not one.
II. “We have warned them from Time to Time of Attempts by their Legislature to extend an unwarrantable Jurisdiction over us.”
The Americans repeatedly warned and petitioned both king and Parliament about overreach. They did not revolt right away. If they had, the Americans would have engaged in arbitrary action, preferring disruption and death to peace and life. Instead, they chose to appeal to the terms of the law on which, they thought, British and Americans could rely as a common ground.
Yet the Americans discovered that the two differed over the substance of the law. The Americans held that common law prohibits the colonies from being directly ruled by Parliament without being represented in its body. If any could rule them directly, it was the king. And since the Glorious Revolution, all but the Jacobites had agreed that not even the king should have this kind of unmediated authority. Therefore, the colonies had their own legislative bodies.
The British, however, argued that since Parliament funded the protection of the colonies, it had the right to legislate for them. And the king, long since emasculated, likely believed he had no real power to check the advances of Parliament. The petitions of the Americans, then, revealed divergences in how to interpret the law, which revealed divergences in the characters of two peoples.
Perhaps such breaks in interpretation are inevitable in a common law system. Both sides appealed to a constitution that was implicit and unwritten, making it difficult to adjudicate fundamental disputes. Because the British constitution was made of mores and norms rather than texts, legal disagreements were ultimately cultural. There were now two cultures, two peoples, each with their own understandings of what the constitution was. This is an important reason why, early on, the American government decided it should have a written Constitution. To avoid the sort of crisis that led to independence, Americans will always have the very words of the United States Constitution as our common ground on which to fight over our interpretations.
III. “We have reminded them of the Circumstances of our Emigration and Settlement here.”
The Declaration’s reference to the circumstances of emigration and settlement may seem like it is about arcane details—whose land was chartered by whom, who had jurisdiction over where. But I think this sentence cuts deeper. By reminding the British of these “Circumstances,” the Americans are re-minded of themselves, of who they are and whence they came.
In the 20th century, it became common to say that “America is a nation of immigrants.” In our time, few slogans are as contentious. I fear that, when it is used in its most banal sense, the slogan leads one to imagine that we are a nation of migrants—otherwise unconnected individuals, moving through life, up- and un-rooted, in search of some fulfillment not to be found where they are, and in the process treating the people and places around them only as means to private ends. Understood in this way, America is not a real place. It is not a home, not a country, only an airport or a hotel. Perhaps the fact that everyday life increasingly resembles an airport or a hotel explains recent anxieties about calling America a nation of immigrants.
Even so, the justification for calling America a nation of immigrants derives from this sentence in the Declaration. The American experience, as testified here, was and remains one of “Emigration and Settlement.” Americans came from somewhere else. They are settlers, meaning they are always in the process of making a home in this place. America, then, is an experience of both exile and home-making. What once was one’s home lies in the past, is lost. Home, if it can ever be found, cannot be found by returning but by receiving and cultivating what is new. Such reception takes hard work. One must struggle to make oneself able to accept this new home as a gift.
The partisans of so-called “Heritage Americans”—jargon coined, not in real life, but online—would like to imagine our country otherwise. But even their own experience of America must be described by the terms of emigration and settlement. They too are exiles, apparently from their current moment. And they too would like to settle America in a new, different way. We cannot escape this shared state of being. It might be the only thing we do share. The Declaration has framed it for us—to try to escape from this condition of exile and settlement would be an attempt to escape America.
To embrace this condition rightly, however, we need our own reminder of specific historical “Circumstances.” Here, the pretended Heritage Americans have a point. These circumstances, in the days of the Declaration as now, varied for each individual immigrant. Perhaps some wanted God, others glory, others gold. But what united all these ends politically into one single circumstance was the settlement of America on the basis of self-evident truths. Historical experience led to the mutual holding of these truths by exiles and immigrants. The covenant to abide by them, not merely as individual conveniences but as the basis of a nation, is what made it possible to settle here as one people.
If there is any hope of giving the phrase “nation of immigrants” its rightful sense in our time, it will come from commitment to settle here on the basis of the same vision of each person as created equal and endowed by the Creator with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We then prove that we are of one heritage with those who declared the United States one people, under the circumstances of their emigration and settlement in this country. The people were mostly British in origin. But they became something else—Americans.
To understand how that difference emerged from overlapping origins, it must be remembered that the British people did not share these circumstances. They were not emigrants, exiles, or settlers. Since they never had to make a new home, they never had to discover a new community on the basis of the truths described in the Declaration. Perhaps they eventually would have. But even so, they would have had to do so separately. Historical experience had diverted the paths of the British and the Americans. So now the Americans had to remind both the British and themselves that they were now two distinct peoples.
IV. “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.”
The first reason for separation was legal: a divergence in how to interpret the rule of law. The second was historical: a divergence in where they came from and what it meant to make their homes. The last is moral, and it is the gravest: The Americans and British now have entirely different senses of justice.
Earlier, the Declaration clarified that the British “Prince. . . is unfit to be the ruler of a free People.” These last two words incriminated the British people as much as they described the American people. For perhaps such a prince is fit to rule an unfree people—like the British, whose head the king remains. But the Americans, in contrast, are free and must be reckoned as free.
All the grievances considered in the last chapter have built up to this conclusion. At every step, the Americans appealed to their fellow Britons’ “native Justice and Magnanimity.” Their fellows, apparently, did not have sensibilities they were hoping for.
If we do not share the same basic senses of what is right and how grace should be shown, are we really fellows? If what offends our deepest notion of right does not offend them, what do we really share? These questions point toward a judgment that runs through the Declaration. Separation is not a mere idea, proposal, or possibility. It has already become a fact, whether anyone likes it or not.
This is not merely a case of incommensurable cultural communities, as in other cases of national separation. Americans claimed to speak for something beyond a feeling of “our” justice versus “their” justice. They have gone so far as to claim that they can hear the “Voice of Justice” herself, while the British cannot.
To be a free people, then, is not to have a peculiar antinomian streak. It is to submit to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” to the point that one is willing to break with those who do not. I might press the point to its utmost extremity. Is an unjust, unfree people—meaning a people that does not know or love justice—worthy to be called a people at all? However one might answer that question generally, the Americans have chosen to say “No” when it comes to themselves.
Yet justice is not the only consideration for Americans—unlike French and European radicals of the next generation. They appeal as well to the “Ties of our common Kindred.” How could they not? From where else had they learned such great respect for justice, freedom, and equality than from the British? They could not have become the people they now are if not for the British common law and the larger British culture that formed them.
Apart from these cultural considerations, there is the simple fact of blood. There were many British parents and grandparents, even brothers and sisters, still living across the sea from their American children and siblings. I fear we often forget how much those “Ties” meant. Duty to family is the first, though not the last, part of justice. One always cares for one’s own. Many of those who are most passionate about pursuing justice today are in danger of forgetting this.
The Declaration does not make this mistake. “Justice and Consanguinity” belong together. The Americans tried, to the very end, to call the British back to familial duty. We are not mere subjects but your “Kindred,” they implored. The British gave no answer. It was the British and not the Americans who broke the “Ties of common Kindred,” by the choice to continue their imperial expansion. In so doing, they became “deaf” to the voice, not only “of Justice,” but “of Consanguinity” as well.
And now the Americans are separated from the British by law, by culture and history, and finally, by the sense of justice. This last rupture shows the Americans really are on their own. They did not wish to be. By their own account, they made every effort not to be. But now they are: one people, distinct from the rest, even from those with whom they had shared the firmest “Political Bands.” And as one people, they have one choice.
V. “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.”
The Americans are separating, not because they want to, or because they think it is reasonable or advantageous to do so, but because it is necessary. All that has been argued leads up to this conclusion. And by making this argument, the Declaration meets the requirements it laid out for itself in its first sentence. It has declared “the causes which impel” the Americans “to Separation,” and it has shown how it has become “necessary” to “dissolve the Political Bands” formerly uniting the Americans with the British.
Necessity, therefore, is a continuous theme of the document. On one level, this speaks to the political character of the independence: as a movement of order and fidelity to the course of history, the demands of prudence, and ultimately to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The American Revolution, in these respects, is thus rightly called a conservative revolution. For it was to conserve political arrangements the colonists already had, which were in danger of being lost.
Yet the invocation of transcendent truths shows why this revolution is at the same time a radical one. Transcendent truths never condone acceptance of the status quo as such. Self-evident truths always stand over and against it, holding it to account, even calling, when necessary, for revolution against it. The Americans were conservative in their belief that the government they had enjoyed until it was threatened by parliamentary and royal interference was good. But they were radical in their belief that it was good because it reflected something true, rather than simply because it was old, familiar, or deeply rooted.
But necessity has a still deeper meaning here. It is not just political. In the first chapter, I found that necessity has a metaphysical character. It combines the absolute claims of both nature and history. Where does this necessity come from?
The answer I gave then, which must be repeated now, is the “Creator”. At the end, though, the Declaration clarifies that man’s relationship to God doesn’t end with the creation of nature, both human and non-human. It continues to be governed by “Providence.” Historical necessity is nothing other than the workings of this mysterious divine will.
Apparently, Providences desires that there come and go a variety of peoples, each with its unique character, its special grace and offering to world history. Each is entitled its “separate and equal Station among the Powers of the Earth.” Necessity, then, marks the creation of America as a people on the deepest level—the theological. Does history have meaning? Yes, because we are accountable to the workings of Divine Providence.
This deep sense of necessity finally answers a question that was never fully settled: why is it the “Duty” of a people to revolt when conditions call for it? Is revolt ever necessary, if the people seek only their own interest or see the foundation of their being as nothing but their own will? In that case, they might have a right to determine themselves, but never a duty. They could change who they are at any given time—a right of self-creation that would be inconsistent with the conservative side of the Declaration.
But if the people is not purely self-made, then they are responsible for maintaining something they didn’t create. According to the Declaration, the American people was constituted by the workings of Providence over history. Therefore, Americans do have a duty to defend what they were given by necessity—a duty not to themselves, but to God. They must “acquiesce in the Necessity, which denounces” the “Separation” between America and Britain, because God has ordained this one moment for there to be this people, in this time and place. To forgo this moment would reject the gift that God is giving. And by rejecting the gift, all the peculiarities of this new nation—its contributions to the course of the world, both small and great—would have been lost.
The Founders never could have known how much history was at stake in their decision. But they did know that the Americans, as one people, were responsible to a Power greater than any person or people. And so they took on the “Duty” to be this people, to accept the works of necessity, at the very moment allotted to them. Where some revolutions can be seen as assertions of defiance, even pride, the American revolution starts with humility.
In so doing, the Declaration subtly suggests, the Americans begin their contributions to the world, holding the British “as we hold the rest of Mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.”
Certainly, this is a pithy notice of a change in relationship. But it is also more. I am struck by the phrase, “as we hold the rest of Mankind,” especially as it pairs with, “in Peace Friends.” The creation of the American people is meant to bring friendship with “the rest of Mankind.” Anyone who thinks the worst (or the best in the worst way) of nationalism should remember that. However anyone else defines nationalism, the Declaration defines it as one people, corresponding to its one state, existing as a friend to all the other peoples of the earth—even the British, whose venture into imperialism contradicted the American spirit of nationhood. How can the Declaration express such magnanimity?
I believe it is because, as the American people come to hold the truths which bind them as self-evident, their experience provides evidence through example of the reality that “all Men are created Equal, and endowed by their Creator. . . ,” that governments are “instituted among Men” to “secure these Rights” endowed by the Creator, and to do nothing else. This example is the contribution of America to world history. It required then, and requires now, no adventures, no manifest destiny. Only practice. It is the “Duty” of the American people, one greater than the duty of revolution. It is the duty to be American. An infinitely complex web of causes, in this chapter glossed as legal, historical, and moral, has led to the creation of this people. Its significance is greater than the American can bestow on himself. He must ascribe it to necessity, which is to say: to the call of God. Such a duty demands great struggle, including struggle with “Enemies in War.” But it always aims beyond that struggle to the time when enemies become friends.
It takes nothing more or less than becoming who we are.
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