(This essay is the third 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. “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.”
My previous meditation explained the “political philosophy” of the Declaration—what the Declaration declared about political life in general. I ventured to call it a political theology, since it is grounded in the Nature’s God, the Creator of each human creature.
But ideas are never just ideas, at least not here. That is why the Declaration ends its short lesson in political theology with the reminder that all that has been written in the first two paragraphs was meant to reflect the “patient Sufferance of these Colonies.” With the “Right” and “Duty” of necessary rebellion duly defined, the Declaration claims, “such is now the Necessity which constrains” the Americans “to alter their former Systems of Government.” The next section of the Declaration brings its ideas down to earth, into time, into history.
“Necessity” is worth dwelling on for a moment. In earlier meditations I drew close connections between necessity and nature, and between both of those and history. The Declaration continues to draw these connections. Both nature and necessity, it seems, are at work in this present moment of crisis. It is natural that a distinct people comes into its being through shared circumstances. And the laws of nature sometimes demand radical and abrupt choices to change the form of government that has existed up to that point.
Many have thought that nature and history are mutually exclusive, at least when we think of them as fundamental principles. Nature, Leo Strauss suggested, means eternal, unchanging, self-consistent, necessary and inviolable standards. To believe in nature is to believe that you can eventually understand how everything happens and must happen. Events will occur, but nothing will surprise.
In politics, this understanding of nature points toward repetition and consistency. You can see how ancient states rose and fell. Because they are also subject to nature, moderns will follow the same patterns. Having learned this truth, you will be wiser about the future—which looks a lot like the past.
History, by contrast, means the new. To think about history is to assume that nothing stays the same. No fixed patterns govern human events. At best, you might learn how an acute statesman caught his own time by the tail, so you can imitate his prudence. But even that will be no guarantee. For now, all you can really learn to do is to wait, to watch for the right time to impose your own will.
Strangely enough, the devotee of nature and the devotee of history can both end in the same inaction. One knows that nothing can change, so he does nothing while he meditates on the past. The other knows that nothing can be known, so he does nothing while he waits for the future.
This “horseshoe” of apparently opposed principles suggests the dilemma may be false. At any rate, the Declaration does not treat nature and history as contradictions. Quite the opposite. If we take it on its own words, we find that the Declaration defines nature as the uncontrollable course of events. Necessity, in the Declaration, is the meeting of nature and history.
How can the Declaration manage this? Only by insisting that both nature and history are accountable to higher Power. The “Necessity” which impels the American people is neither Fate nor History alone. It is the hidden workings of what will later be called “Providence.” Only if Necessity is Personal can anyone, individual or collective, be responsible to it. And only responsible people can commit decisive actions. Neither all-knowing sages, nor self-made Titans, but those who are constrained by Necessity, are the ones who are ready to “alter their former Systems of Government.”
II. “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.”
The Declaration must notify the “candid World” of the offenses which make the present Declaration necessary. When the Declaration emphasizes “Facts,” it proves itself historical. The Declaration is not timeless. It invites us to consider what has been done by specific actors, and to judge the motives for those actions.
How shall we judge these facts? Nowadays we may judge them exaggerations. It is hard for us to think taxes on tea could be so grave a matter.
But first, we should be charitable. That means judging these facts by the criteria under which the Declaration submits them. Those criteria are the principles of the second paragraph. The Declaration invites anyone and everyone, to hear its case and judge its merits according to its principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Second, we must keep in mind that the Declaration hardly pretends to be impartial. It has already and repeatedly stressed that it is a Declaration of the American people. This is a partisan document. And we should read it as such.
III. “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good.”
All the colonists’ complaints against the Crown are summed up in this one. The reason why governments are instituted among men is to pass and enforce laws. These laws are not arbitrary. They are attempts to secure the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Laws that do so effectively are “the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good.” Of course, laws are not perfect. They only can do what seems “most likely to effect” a people’s “Safety and Happiness.” But they are much more likely to effect these than can a single person’s will—especially a person who at any time decides he can just change his mind about assenting to laws.
Why is the rule of laws higher than the rule of men? The question is a live one again, after lying dormant for several decades. Many now wish we were ruled by men instead of laws. I suspect this upheaval has two chief causes.
The first reason is the technological view of law that dominates our thinking today. Laws are thought to be like rules for computer programs, absolute and unbending. They admit no exceptions, cannot compute hard cases, and refuse to accommodate flesh and blood. Every day, ordinary people suffer under the execution of this view of the law, usually in the form of small but significant inconveniences. No wonder, then, that so many people seem desperate to recover personality in political life.
The second reason is the fact that, despite their impersonality, the laws are always enforced by persons. And persons are always partial. No surprise, then, that the law just always seems to soften when applied to certain well-connected people. Government often seems to benefit certain categories of people, even while claiming to be impartial. In this respect, the rule of law may seem like a cruel joke.
Both the technological view of law and its biased execution revolve around the letter of law (whether enforced or not) at the expense of its spirit. Against this, an increasing group of theorists—here I will use, with some hesitation, the term post-liberals—argue that our politics would be better if we got over our submission to laws and instead let human personality rule again. If I was forced to pick one, I wonder which I would choose. Unlike algorithms or bureaucracies, human beings sin but can be redeemed.
But the Declaration does not force that choice. First and foremost, it does not treat laws technologically. It admits that laws are fallible, fungible, and above all, accountable—not to the arbitrary will of one person, but to communities of people seeking their own common good and to individuals with rights, which are granted by God and no other. The Declaration puts God and humanity, though not individual persons, above law.
One man cannot justifiably rule by force of personality over individual rights. For these rights are absolute and unalienable, and any effort to mediate between them and an individual only constitutes an attack, a trespass into an area where one does not belong. This attack is rightly called tyranny: the attempt to be a god and not a human being. The Declaration claims that is what the British king is doing.
The Declaration makes its case for revolution by dealing with the Crown’s attacks on the three “Rights”— “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”—in reverse order.
These three methods of attack endanger not only the individual colonists but also the existence of the American people as a whole. The Declaration will conclude this section by declaring that “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” [emphasis added]. Once again, Americans are described as a people in the singular. Now let us hear the case made by this free people.
IV. “He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing Importance, unless suspended in their Operation until 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 Accommodations of large Districts of People, unless those People should 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 meantime 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 of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migration 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 harass our People, and eat out their Substance.”
This section of complaints deals with all that the Crown has done to diminish America’s common happiness.
It is common for Americans to believe that tyranny comes from too much government. But what immediately stands out about these wrongs is that they are matters of not doing what should be done rather doing what should not be done. Tyranny can come as much from what government fails to do as from what it does.
Rather than objecting to excessive government, Americans had complained for years that the king failed to exercise his proper authority. Most of us learned in high school that Parliament, with its “taxation without representation,” was the villain. But we likely didn’t learn that the colonists did have a representative who was supposed to be working on their behalf before Parliament—the king.
This was a matter of English Common Law. According to angry colonists, the colonies did not fall under the jurisdiction of England’s Parliament, but under the ancestral rights of the British Crown. In lands that were granted to inhabitants by charter of the king, the “ancient Constitution” and the local laws applied, they argued—but not acts passed by Parliament after the chartering of the lands and without their inhabitants’ consent. The king was to represent the will of the locals to Parliament. The yearslong protests of the American colonists was that he failed to do so.
While this division of jurisdictions might sound foreign or obsolete to modern ears, it makes good sense in the context of the Declaration. If the king is sovereign over many different lands, why should one piece get to tax another? Aren’t both lands subject to the Crown, and not one to another? For a long time, that’s what the colonists had argued: they were full subjects of the Crown, the equals of their brethren in England, so they should either be better represented in Parliament or, preferably, be left alone with their own legislative assemblies. Those assemblies and Parliament would be separately and equally under rule of the king—all by consent, of course. This was a similar constitutional relationship to the one England had with Ireland at the time and with Scotland until it abolished its independent parliament in 1707.
Such an arrangement would not have contradicted the principles of the Declaration. Indeed, we already saw how flexible these principles were about kinds of government. What matters is not kingship but consent. By appealing to the king, the Americans had been demanding their rights as equal subjects. For the king had been given his authority to secure the rights of his subjects. But he was not doing his job, precisely by letting others do the job for him without consent.
Good governance, then, is a matter of delegation. Good political life depends on the right—and rightfully representative—persons being tasked with the right job. The king refused to delegate properly. Parliament had wrongfully claimed power itself over the colonies. Americans themselves would struggle for the next 250 years over the matter of whom should be delegated the authority to do what. But they, as Americans, would have to do it, as one united people.
Augustine wrote in The City of God that polities are defined by their loves. The same notion applies here: a people is defined by its shared sense of common happiness. Powers are delegated to those best suited to help pursue that goal. Parliament did not have American happiness in mind. The king proved he did not either. The Americans themselves must then take up their own power—exactly what the first sentence of Declaration promises to do.
An important historical point follows. The “large Districts of People” and “the Population of these States,” refer (implicitly now and explicitly later) to lands and peoples acquired by Britain from France through the Treaty of Paris, which ended the French and Indian War. With all of eastern North America under British control after 1763, many in the thirteen colonies expected the newly added territories to resemble themselves. These new lands would be British, governed in the tradition of Common Law. Their peoples would speak English. And they would be Protestant.
This did not happen. Instead, both Crown and Parliament decided with the Quebec Act to let the Northern lands remain French-speaking and Catholic and under Roman Civil Law, while the Western lands were reserved to the Native tribes. The thirteen Anglo-American colonies would be locked into place, as one particular people next to other, different peoples.
We might acknowledge no small measure of greed in the colonists’ ambitions. Was the drive for independence really driven by a spurned land grab?
In answering, we should remember the call to charity. Given the Crown’s decision to separate the Americans from the French to their North and natives to their West, the colonists were justified in thinking of themselves now as one people among others. After all, the king had already drawn the lines for them. And the lines were not trivial: the Quebecois to the North would speak French, levy taxes to support the Roman Catholic Church, and follow an entirely different legal system which, for instance, did not include trial by jury.
Looking back, we may think the Americans were too harsh on the Canadians, and certainly on the Natives. But I don’t think most Americans, even today, would let a state give up trial by jury, adopt a non-English official language, or begin raising taxes for mosques, temples or meditation centers (roughly how it would have felt for Anglo-Protestants to have funded Roman Catholic churches). There are other matters that Americans today see as non-negotiable—characteristics that define them as a people. To the 18th century colonists, British policy in North America seemed like a slippery slope from a united kingdom into an empire composed of masters and subjects.
How can we learn what is negotiable and what is not? Time is one way. Tragically, it took a great deal of time for America to make its decision on slavery, just as it took time for the Americans to discover they were one people in the first place.
But then, how do we work our way through time? The Declaration answers that the arbiter is our shared love. What are we desiring together? We declared in 1776 that we believe each individual is equally created, endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the personal quest to find his or her ultimate end. We, in apparent contrast to the French Canadians to the North and the Natives to West, felt ourselves bound to these beliefs, and we would not rest our common happiness on anything less. If there is any way to understand the American community charitably, to save our sense of ourselves from the notion that we are only united by a common greed, then this sense of our shared love is that way.
Now we must shift from the hindrance of America’s pursuit of happiness beyond its borders to the problems the Crown was raising within the American colonies. A people pursues its happiness mostly within the confines of everyday actions. To do so, it needs the right amount of regulation. A government must strive constantly to meet that amount, increasing when there is too little and decreasing when there is too much. Perfection is impossible. But the impossibility of perfection affirms, rather than denies, the necessity of aiming towards it.
The first sign of a tyrant is when he does not have perfection in mind. Instead, he regulates for the sake of benefits on the international scene, or for greater control of the people’s activity, for personal gain, or for any other reason. These reasons may seem to the governor to benefit his people. Perhaps he thinks security from international attack or a more docile population, would be beneficial to the people’s safety, so a steep tariff, trade deal, or a work around established delegated powers, would be worth it. But a people does not seek bare life. It seeks the good life. By setting his sights on any other end than the shared “happiness” of the people, the ruler is already using inappropriate means.
This is just what the king is doing to the Americans. He is regulating too much: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance.” This refers to layers of bureaucracy added to enforce the various taxes, especially the Stamp Act. He has meddled in the minutiae of legislatures and legislators—“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.” And he has “made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and the Amount and Payment of their Salaries.” A sovereign does not have any prerogative over the little things. The principle of subsidiarity assigns those to the smaller bodies best suited to managing details. The rejection of subsidiarity shows that the sovereign is not working by the principle of Law but of Will. And the constant addition of new laws and regulations can only undermine the authority of law.
At the same time, the king is also regulating too little. This too undermines the law’s authority. For “he has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing Importance,” and he has “dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly,” and he “has refused for a long Time, after such Dissolutions, to cause others to be elected,” and he “has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.” The executive is failing to execute. But Law must prevail: the power of government can never be destroyed, only relocated. And in this case, “the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise.” If the work of government is not allowed to proceed normally, then it will proceed abnormally.
If not addressed, such corruption will inevitably bring a change of government. Because they have been failed by their government, power has returned to the people at large, which adds the decisive ingredient for revolution. It is the stupidest move a tyrant can make. It is oppression by omission, which empowers the oppressed to take up the work of government for themselves. The Americans are giving backhanded thanks to the king for returning “Legislative Power” to the people. Since the current State has given up its duty, it has given up its right.
All these complaints attest to the king’s failure to secure the “public Good” of the people. This is the first strike against the British government. It is the first because it is the most minor. Many governments have failed, and do fail, to secure the happiness of the people. This goal is always an ideal that is hard to meet. If these were the only complaints, I wonder if the Declaration would have been issued.
The significance of this section lies in the warning it gives about the consequences of the king’s actions and inactions. The people’s happiness is not secure. It is not even being pursued. By neglecting that pursuit, the king has set in motion “human Events” that will—and now already have—separated the American people from the British.
V. “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 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 neighboring 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 in 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.”
The theme holding these complaints together is the assault on individual “Liberty.” An attack on individual liberty is an attack on the people. It is the result of the king’s abdication of his duty to secure the people’s “Happiness,” and it will end in endangering the people’s “Safety” and threatening the life of each person.
This section may as well be one commentary on the tyrannical nature of empires. In the previous section, the gravest matter was British expansion and the choice to partition North America rather than treat it as one common territory and one common people. The Declaration now speaks more directly to that decision.
What does it mean for a nation to take the course of empire? For the Declaration, each people is “entitled” to its own “separate and equal Station” among the “Powers of the Earth.” One government, corresponding to one people—nationalism, in the broadest sense. But when a nation decides it will go beyond the task of governing its own people to governing others as well, its character will change, and likely for the worse.
The form of government demanded by empire is both more distant and more direct. More distant, because the state is no longer a direct counterpart to its people: it has become a manager rather than a protector. More direct, because now each people within the empire must be managed, their relations with the other peoples controlled. Whereas before the people and state could rely on customs that informally delegated duties and liberties throughout the communities, now the peoples and the state must operate as a formal system, fiendishly complicated but necessarily uniform. How can an empire administer this system? Only by force: by “Standing Armies.”
The standing army is the chief complaint of this section. It refers most directly to the army stationed at Boston to enforce the various acts of Parliament, which led to the Boston Massacre of 1770. After the Boston Tea Party of 1773, Parliament punished the city even more severely by imposing a blockade and increasing the presence of imperial soldiers, including foreign mercenaries.
The presence of a standing army must be understood as a result of Parliament’s choice (and by his inaction, the king’s choice) to treat the Americans as just one people among several in North America, all of which were to be managed, their resources extracted and their wealth taxed rather than their happiness secured.
“Colonialism” is a loaded word these days. If it only means resource extraction by a foreign, unaccountable power, then it is apt enough. Though the Declaration does not use this word, we can understand these complaints as the Declaration’s own way of recognizing that the American colonists have themselves become the colonized. We might judge the prior actions of the colonists more or less severely, and charge them with hypocrisy. But we should also recognize that here the Declaration clearly condemns the logic of colonialism itself. That so many since, both champions and critics of the American way, have neglected this point—well, that only makes it all the more crucial to appreciate it now.
It is not the mere existence of the standing army which endangers liberty, though. What endangers liberty is that these “Standing Armies” came to America “without the consent of our Legislature.” Because he has discarded responsibility for the common good, the king has deposed himself of their consent. And to pretend to care about a people’s safety when you have shown your disinterest in their happiness is soon to make yourself a threat to their lives. The military cannot help but overstep every restriction, since it has already gone beyond the consent of the people. Having decided to make the exception, the sovereign no longer knows any exception to his rule.
This moment is when Great Britain decided it would be to the Americans not a shared country but an empire. Force has become its own end. And once force becomes its own end, it only knows how to extract and control. All the state’s citizens become clients, whether their skins are brown or black or white.
All that follows, therefore, owes to this fundamental change. The Declaration goes on to emphasize the ways that Parliament acted against the American people with no respect for their consent. Parliament has become a “Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws.” And the king—again, by ignoring his own ancestral right by charter over the colonies—has stood by passively and given “Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.”
The British quartered “large Bodies of Armed Troops among us”—especially in Boston. The American colonists were required to put up with these troops, which often included formerly convicted criminals, and sometimes were lodged in their houses, thanks to the Quartering Act. To force someone to accept a stranger’s presence in their home is an affront to the “unalienable” right to liberty. For hospitality is a work of love, and forced hospitality is no hospitality at all. This isn’t only an intrusion on one’s property. It is an intrusion into the very relation of love to which all these rights aspire.
Once soldiers are so intimately involved in the people’s lives, trouble will come. It did come in Boston on a cold night, March 5, 1770. Whoever started it, the Boston Massacre ended with five dead, six others wounded. The colonists responded by offering to try the British soldiers according to their constitution, assigning as the soldiers’ defender one who would later sign the Declaration, John Adams. The jury acquitted all eight of the British soldiers but two, and these two were found guilty only of manslaughter. How did Parliament respond to this proof of fair process? Four years later, it passed the Administration of Justice Act, which allowed any British soldier accused of crimes against Americans to be sent back to Britain for trial. If liberty in community means anything, it means accountability to one’s peers. The British empire no longer treated its soldiers as peers of the Americans but as enforcers over them.
These standing armies troubled both the domestic and the foreign relations of the Americans. Navies blockaded the port of Boston in response to the Tea Party, and Parliament allowed American ships to be seized at will. Liberty of “Trade with all Parts of the World” was cut off. This was not just a matter of tariffs. A people can deliberate and consent to certain lawful restrictions on trade. But in this case, there was no consent, and no deliberation, and not even liberty to retain one’s own goods—the Americans weren’t allowed not to trade with the British inside Boston, even as they weren’t allowed to trade with anyone else outside the city.
This arbitrary restriction on economic activity goes hand in hand with taxation “without our Consent.” This is the grievance that is perhaps most familiar to Americans today. Why? Economic liberty is inextricably tied to political liberty. If someone takes away your property without your consent, they are already attacking your liberty. This is not because property is subject only to the arbitrary will of its owner, as if it should be up to me, dammit, to throw my tea into the harbor if I like. No, that only rejects one tyranny to embrace another. It is because, as creatures of will, our goods and homes and products are partly extensions of ourselves. Our choices result in our hairstyles or our vocations, our clothes or our accounts. We have been created to be in the world, interactive with and productive in our environment. None of this should be understood in a materialistic way; we cannot be reduced to our property. It is only to recognize that if we are deprived of our property arbitrarily, we are deprived of our liberty to act, to be as we were created to interact.
Assaults on economic consent lead to deprivation of political consent. The naval courts, which now regulated commerce among the Americans at will, could now arbitrate cases itself, and it did not use juries. The liberty to be judged in a fair court of common law was now denied by the same entity that denied the liberty of property.
The Americans saw these restrictions on liberty, both economic and political, as expressions of imperialism. The British, as already stated, decided they would rule as an empire rather than a united kingdom, and this entailed “abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province”—Quebec. But abolishing that system for one province means abolishing it for all. For it sets up an “arbitrary Government” in one place, and thereby makes “an Example and fit Instrument for introducing the same absolute Rule into these Colonies.”
The Americans were not paranoid. The navy’s prerogative to dispense with trial by jury was evidence enough that common law was in danger. At the same time, they saw Parliament take “away our Charters”—the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774 effectively revoked the original charter—and thus abolish “our most valuable Laws” and “fundamentally” change “the Forms of our Governments.” They saw Parliament suspend “our own Legislatures” and, through the repeal of the Stamp Act (ironically), declare “themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatsoever.” By these actions, the British not only established a different and arbitrary government to the North in Quebec, but introduced the same arbitrary rule over the American people.
The argument of the Declaration is that it was Britain and not America which instituted a revolt. Britain chose to abolish the Form of Government by English Common Law—to cease being the English kingdom—and to become instead an arbitrary government—to become the British Empire. And empire, whatever its virtues, cannot allow government by economic or political consent. It knows only power.
Whatever the American people had in mind for their futures, they did not envision this destiny. They did not want to be imperial subjects but citizens of a nation of one people. And they believed this one people was bound by a common sense of liberty. Since the British Crown so abruptly jettisoned this vision for the sake of another, the Americans had no choice but to declare themselves a different people, even if it was a people reminiscent of what the British had been before they became an empire.
Many today might call these Americans hypocrites, because of the plain fact that they were themselves colonists. Indeed they were, and we must allow for the possibility that this fact was an inherent flaw in the original conception of the American republic. But at this moment of conception this one people decided that it did not want to stay on the train of empire. So they jumped off.
Many Americans soon jumped back on. The hypocrisy is ours too. But that is a blessing and not a curse. For the Declaration, as this section attests, was the work of hypocrites embracing sincerity, of the uprooted choosing to be rooted instead, of those who had been made into imperial subjects choosing instead to be the people of a country. This is the challenge and promise of the grievances that follow.
VI. “He has plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.
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 and 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.”
Before coming to the grievances which list attacks by the British upon American life, I must dwell again on a radical implication of the Declaration’s general principles: No government anywhere, no human being anywhere, has the right of death. No government, no military, no police force, no vigilante, no one, has the right to kill anyone, to put anyone to death. According to the logic of the Declaration, the right to life, since it is unalienable, cannot and ought not be separated from any human being. A government only has the right to secure the right to life.
Now as all know, this side of Paradise, life and the right to live are under frequent attack. So government must often, by necessity, use violence to defend and secure the right to life. And indeed, this violence often ends in death. But death can only be justified as a consequence of the aggressor’s attack against life, not as a right the government assumes for itself. Therefore, violence, war, and killing are never rights in themselves. Individuals, institutions, and communities are always accountable to the demands of life and the right to life. Life, not death, is the judge of all law. It is the ultimate sovereign. And in any cases that we might believe are states of exception, we should look to the rule of life rather than death as our standard.
The essence of tyranny turns this principle upside-down. It gives the ruler power over life. But what can it mean to make exceptions to life? To put anything above life is to deem life expendable. Death becomes the final standard. Such a choice abdicates the duty to “secure these Rights,” and it will end in attacking life.
In the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, the British Empire did end up attacking the lives of the American colonists. Whatever the War for Independence’s causes, the facts of Lexington and Concord were enough to end the British right to govern the Americans. In these battles, the British Crown turned from defending and securing the right of American life, to aggressively attacking this very right—“declaring us out of [the king’s] Protection and waging War against us.” Nothing more is needed to declare consent null and void.
“He has plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.” This may be the most powerful sentence of the Declaration. The weight of this sentence is not in the number of towns burned or lives destroyed or coasts ravaged, but in the fact that anything of the sort happened at all. It would have been enough if the king had turned aggressor against a single American life. The logic of the Declaration, its incredible respect for the principle and right of life, demands this kind of severity. Any time a government turns into an aggressor against any of its citizens, assuming for itself the right to death, has thereby abdicated itself.
Once a tyrant has attacked a people, he will use all the worst instruments of empire to sustain the assault.
First, he will use the military force of other peoples, “large Armies of foreign Mercenaries,” to “compleat the Works of Desolation and Tyranny.” The use of mercenaries deepens his aggression, since he is no longer policing his own, with his own, but outsourcing violence to private armies by contract.
Second, the tyrant will force captives of the attacked people attack their own people, “to bear Arms against their Country, to become the Executioners of their Friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.” This is even more unconscionable than using mercenaries. It unravels the ties that bind a people together. By turning the people against itself, the tyrant attempts to destroy not only the life but the love that holds that people together.
Finally, the king will use lawlessness to rip apart the fabric of the community. At this point, we must reflect on what is, from today’s perspective, the most difficult passage of the Declaration: the king “has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” These insurrections refer to slave revolts. And not only that. The king is bringing “upon the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages.” This section condemns actions that some might count to the king’s merit: inspiring slave revolts and encouraging Native American wars against settlers.
How should this passage be read, with both the past and present in mind? It is worth emphasizing that this is the same section where Jefferson would have lambasted slavery and the slave trade as abominations imposed on the Americans by the British, calling them a “cruel war against human nature itself.” And now, by encouraging slave revolts, the British Crown is “paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.” Alas, the committee of the Declaration cut this lament from the final version of the document, so it cannot be used to salve our consciences today.
What can be kept in mind is this: the Declaration cherishes order and safety above perfect justice. A slave insurrection, rather than ordered emancipation and reparation, is sure to bring death sooner than life, to attack the basic orderliness of any society upon which any freedom would rest. The same logic applies to Native warfare. Indeed, Native warfare often was “undistinguished Destruction”—or enslavement—“of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.” None today, not even the most ardent defenders of Native American rights, would be eager to defend Native American customs in this regard. Lawlessness was, and is, brutal. Its only law is death. Read charitably, this passage is decrying that fact.
Even so, we cannot let charitable reading get the better of reality. The preference for order over the liberty of the enslaved may be, and was, pressed so far as to justify slavery. And while history is a storehouse of native practices that should stay locked away, it also proves that not all tribes acted in these ways, that native cruelty was matched and often exceeded by that of the colonists, and that almost total destruction awaited both the “civilized” as well as “uncivilized” tribes. Present readers can be forgiven for wondering whether the actions of the “merciless Indian Savages” were justified, even if the actions of the king were not.
I have no interest in eliminating discomforts. These questions should stand, and we should allow ourselves to feel disturbed by our imperfect beginning. If the committee had let Jefferson’s condemnation of the slave trade survive the cutting room floor, then the Declaration would have been a more perfect work. But they didn’t, so it isn’t. I choose instead to let this section of grievance remain a kind of open wound.
Perhaps we are coming closer to the day when this passage will be a scar and not a wound. This shows that the Declaration lets history finish the work of ideas. It took some four score and nine years to end slavery. Many more scores of years have passed, and we still have not resolved the question of the Native Americans. We have not resolved it, because we as a people have not yet become native Americans. But as Wendell Berry has often counseled, that is just what we must do—to render justice to those America has oppressed, and to become the just country that the Declaration envisions.
But how can we become native Americans? The Declaration itself shows the way to become united as native Americans. It is the Declaration’s own principles—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—which lead readers to feel outraged by the denial of these rights to the enslaved and the indigenous. The rectification will come, not by rejecting the Declaration, but by remembering it. It is this remembrance—this re-membering—that will unite all Americans into one people.
First and foremost, I believe, this remembering demands a more intense respect for life, and the right to life, than any of us has known in this country until now. The Declaration demands it, radically so, more radically than any political document I have ever read. Such respect is for life in all its forms, for all the creatures of this vast place, and not only the human ones.
Such respect is what inspired the protests of the American people, which then led to their Declaration of themselves as a people. Such respect is also, admittedly, what led the Americans to deplore the insurrection of the enslaved and the brutal attacks from Native tribes, though this was a one-sided respect, attending only to the lives of the colonists. And yet, the respect for life eventually required that the American people extend to the enslaved and the indigenous what they had only granted to themselves. This radical respect for life is as corrective as it is expansive. It is enough to bring outrage to a people, to call a king a tyrant, to spark a revolution—but also to constitute a nation. It is, I believe, a key to making native Americans of us all.
VII. “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.”
The right to life is the ultimate basis of a people. If it is violated by a government, that government may no longer rule. “In every stage” the Americans had “Petitioned for Redress in the most humble Terms.” In response, “our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury.” This final act of negligence proves that the government has become arbitrary, ruling into by will alone, over, above, and against the “Laws of Nature” and the “unalienable Rights” granted to each person. There is only one figure above these laws and rights acknowledged by the Declaration. It is “Nature’s God,” the “Creator.” Any ruler who pretends to occupy that station warrants only one judgment from the American people:
“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.”
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