Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution: A Fully Annotated Declaration of Independence (2 page)

The opening paragraphs of the Declaration display the talents of Thomas Jefferson as a literary stylist and a political philosopher. In the list of specific grievances, we see Jefferson the lawyer at work. It is an exhaustive—and wholly one-sided—bill of indictment of British rule in America. On the one hand, there is a monotony to the recitation of each of the twenty-seven grievances, but on the other hand, as the list of grievances accumulates, Jefferson’s tone, much like that of a prosecuting attorney delivering his summation to a jury, grows steadily more belligerent, more heated in its sense of outrage at British depredations. Nor is it merely the British actions that elicit contempt; even worse is the British
intent.
The British government and the British king in particular are portrayed as guilty, not merely of bad policies, but also of proceeding with malevolent
motives.
The grievances laid out in the Declaration are not merely
constitutional;
they are also intensel
y personal.

In the years leading up to independence, the colonists directed most of their petitions and complaints at the British parliament. They often prefaced those petitions to Parliament with expressions of their pride and loyalty as British subjects and their affection, even reverence, for both the institution of the monarchy and the person of the monarch himself, King George III. But by 1776, the Americans had reached the point where they were denying that Parliament had any authority over them whatsoever. If Parliament had no authority, then why even waste time addressing that body? Consistent with its denial of parliamentary authority, the Declaration studiously avoids any mention of Americans as British subjects. It speaks of the Americans’ fundamental rights as a “people,” and it lays the blame for the people’s travail squarely on King George III—the “He” to whom most of the grievances refer. This decision to direct their ire at the king rather than Parliament signaled the Americans’ intention to affect a fundamental shift in their allegiance, to sever altogether their relationship with their mother country, as represented by the king.

Buried in the long list of grievances—seventeenth of the twenty-seven—is the complaint with which the conflict with England ultimately began, and from which nearly all the other grievances flowed: the denunciation of the king “for imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.” The American insistence that the British parliament had no right to tax them without their consent provoked the first sustained colonial protests, beginning with the Sugar and Stamp Acts of 1764 and 1765, respectively, and continuing with the Townshend duties in 1768 and the Tea Act in 1773. That this particular grievance appears in the middle of the list suggests how far the Americans had come in their opposition to British control over their affairs. The British attempts to tax the colonies were an important catalyst for what would ultimately become a revolution, but they were only that; the real causes of the American Revolution went much deeper, to the very idea that only Americans themselves could be responsible for their own governance.

There were several grievances that emerged as a direct consequence of the British decision to tax the colonies. The tenth grievance accuses the king of sending “swarms of Officers to harrass our people,” an accusation that no doubt refers to the British government’s decision to send additional customs officers to America to attempt to collect the new taxes imposed on the Americans. The eleventh grievance condemns the king for sending “Standing Armies” to America “in times of peace.” From the British point of view, the troops were sent to aid the customs officers in carrying out their duties and to keep the peace in a situation that, from Parliament’s perspective, was growing increasingly disorderly. From the American point of view, however, the decision to send the troops was one of the most ominous, for it raised the specter of military despotism and made an already volatile situation even more so. Adding insult to injury, the decision to send troops to America was accompanied by another parliamentary act that ordered Americans to provide lodging for those troops—the subject of the fourteenth grievance. The thirteenth grievance, one of the most convoluted in the list, charges the king with combining “with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution.” Those “others” were apparently the British parliament, which in the Declaratory Act of 1766 had asserted its right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” and the Board of Trade, which was charged with implementing and enforcing the new taxes imposed on the Americans.

A significant number of the grievances—nine in all—deal with encroachments on the rights of the provincial legislatures of the colonies. The king is blamed for refusing to approve laws passed by those legislatures (number 1); for instructing his governors to prevent laws already passed from going into effect (number 2); for not allowing laws to go into effect unless the people give up their right to representation in the legislature (number 3); for calling the legislatures into session at times and in places that make it difficult for them to do their business (number 4); for forcing colonial legislatures to adjourn and then preventing them from doing their business, against their wishes (number 5); for refusing to call for new elections of representatives, making it impossible for new sessions of the legislatures to begin their business and leaving the colonies without functioning governments (number 6); for refusing to agree to laws establishing provincial courts, thus threatening the colonists’ control over their own judicial powers (number 8); for revoking the charters of government under which the colonies operate and, in the process, abolishing their laws (number 21); and, finally, for suspending—and in effect abolishing—some of the colonies’ legislatures, thereby depriving the colonies of their right to govern themselves (number 22).

It is not at all surprising that the Declaration of Independence would devote so much space in its list of specific grievances to encroachments on the provincial legislatures. Nearly all the members of the Continental Congress who signed the Declaration were members of those legislatures. They had taken pride in the independence and autonomy of their legislatures—they considered them to be American versions of the House of Commons. But as the conflict with England escalated, royal governors and other agents of the king not only threatened the independence and autonomy of the colonial legislatures but also the prestige and power of the provincial legislators themselves. The Americans viewed these encroachments on their legislatures therefore not merely as
constitutional
threats but also as intensely
personal
assaults on their prestige and dignity.

Several of the grievances deal with the imperial government’s interference with American judicial processes: making colonial judges dependent on the British government for their continuation in office and for their salaries (number 9); depriving the colonists of the right of trial by jury (number 18); attempting to transport some colonists accused of crimes back to Great Britain, to be tried there, rather than in colonial courts (number 19); and protecting British troops, “by mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States” (number 15). This last grievance, which most likely refers to the trial of the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre in 1770, was not wholly fair. Although the British soldiers accused of killing five Bostonians in a scuffle were acquitted, they did receive a fair trial; indeed the American patriot leader John Adams stepped forward to defend them.

If the American grievances began with taxation and gradually extended to perceived threats to colonial legislative and judicial processes, still other grievances came to the fore in the years immediately preceding independence; it was these grievances that provided much of the emotional dynamic in the American opposition to British rule. When, in response to the Boston Tea Party, Parliament passed the package of acts that came to be known as the Coercive Acts, Americans faced new, and increasingly ominous, threats to their liberties. The Massachusetts Government Act had the practical effect of replacing Massachusetts’s royal government and charter with a military government headed by General Thomas Gage, actions reported in the twelfth and twenty-first grievances, which accuse the king of rendering the military superior to civilian power and of “altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” The sixteenth grievance, which complains of British edicts that cut off American trade “with all parts of the world,” was a response to the Boston Port Act, which closed Boston’s port to all trade until the town’s citizens paid for the tea they had thrown into the harbor. The twentieth grievance amounts to a broad-brushed, and somewhat unfair, attack on the Quebec Act. The intention of that act was to take the first steps in organizing the vast territories in Canada that England had acquired after its victory over France in the Seven Years’ War. The act made no provision for representative assemblies in that territory—a step the Americans interpreted, or perhaps misrepresented, as a prelude to an attack on all representative government in the thirteen main-land English colonies.

The final five grievances on the list build to a crescendo of outrage over British actions occurring after the outbreak of actual warfare in April of 1775. The twenty-third grievance acknowledges the reality of the state of war but places blame for that state entirely on the king. The twenty-fourth grievance, with its charge that the king has “plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people,” may have been technically true, for that is the nature of warfare, but it was certainly a one-sided depiction of the growing military conflict between the two sides. The twenty-fifth grievance, which condemns the king for sending foreign mercenaries—German Hessian soldiers—to help the British army fight its war to subdue the colonies, escalates the war of words still further with its charge that the whole aim of those foreign troops was to “compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny,” all carried out in a manner that was “scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages.” In December 1775, after reading and rejecting the so-called Olive Branch Petition from the Continental Congress, King George III declared the colonies in a state of rebellion, and in support of that declaration, Parliament passed the Prohibitory Act, effectively declaring war on American commerce on the high seas and making any sailor on an American merchant ship liable to seizure and subsequent impressment into service in the British navy. The twenty-sixth grievance, with its lament that the victimized Americans were being forced to “become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their own Hands,” once again lays the blame not at the doorstep of Parliament, but at that of the king.

The final grievance in the Declaration’s list, the twenty-seventh, is extraordinary in several ways. The immediate source of the grievance was the proclamation of Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, who promised freedom to any of Virginia’s slaves who deserted their masters to fight on the side of the British. There is considerable irony, as well as tragedy, in the fact that it was Lord Dunmore’s offer of
freedom
to slaves who joined the British cause that convinced Virginia’s slave-owning class that the British were intent on robbing them of their liberties—indeed intent on enslaving
them
. Nor was it the inciting of “domestic insurrections” alone that alarmed Americans. That final grievance goes on to denounce the king for inciting the “merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions” to make war against white English colonists. While the king and Parliament were hardly blameless in the matter of inciting Indian violence on the American frontier, the American colonists themselves, by their relentless move westward onto Indian lands, did most of the inciting. And the description of the “known rule of warfare” of the “merciless Indian Savages” is the most shockingly ethnocentric piece of language to appear in any of America’s founding documents. Thomas Jefferson, when he penned those words, may have thought that they would strengthen his fellow colonists’ commitment to band together to fight the English foe, but the words would bring no credit upon the author.

In his initial draft of the Declaration, Jefferson included one other item in the bill of indictment against the king. It is extraordinary both in its length relative to the other specific grievances in the Declaration and in the passion with which it is articulated. It read: