By the spring of 1776 the colonies had been at war with Britain for a year without saying what they were fighting for. Many delegates still hoped for reconciliation. Common Sense, the king's refusal to receive their petitions, and news that Britain was hiring German soldiers wore those hopes down. Independence also had a practical use: a sovereign nation could make alliances, and France would not openly help rebels who might still make peace with their king.
From resolution to document
On 7 June 1776 Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved that the colonies "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States." Congress delayed the vote and named a committee to draft a declaration explaining it: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston. The committee chose Jefferson, then thirty three, to write the draft. He borrowed freely from earlier writing, especially George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights, which shaped the Declaration's opening with its claim that all men are by nature equally free and independent.
Congress voted for independence itself on 2 July 1776, with New York abstaining. John Adams expected that day to be celebrated forever. Congress then spent two days editing Jefferson's text, cutting about a quarter of it, and approved the final wording on 4 July. Most delegates signed a handwritten copy on 2 August.
What the Declaration says
The opening paragraph explains why the document exists at all: "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." The Declaration was written partly to persuade foreign powers and the wider world, not only Americans. Then comes the most famous passage in American writing:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
The passage packs Locke's theory into a few lines: rights come before government, government exists to protect them, and when it destroys them "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." But the Declaration cautions that governments "long established should not be changed for light and transient causes." Most of the document is a list of grievances against the king, twenty seven charges ranging from dissolving assemblies to keeping armies in peacetime and waging war on the colonists. One charge accuses the king of stirring up "merciless Indian Savages," a phrase that shows how the founders' idea of "all men" had limits.
Why the king, not Parliament?
Readers often notice that Parliament is never named. This was deliberate. By 1776 Patriots denied that Parliament had any authority over them at all; their only tie to Britain, they argued, had been the king. Blaming the king alone cut the last link. It was also unfair to George III, who mostly supported his ministers' policies rather than directing them, but the Declaration was a brief for one side, not a neutral history.
What Congress cut
The largest deletion was a long passage in which Jefferson blamed the king for the transatlantic slave trade and for offering freedom to enslaved people who would fight for Britain. Congress removed Jefferson's attack on the king over the slave trade, partly, Jefferson later said, to satisfy South Carolina and Georgia, and partly because some northern delegates whose towns had profited from the trade felt uneasy. The passage was itself evasive, since the colonists had bought the enslaved people the king was accused of sending.
Critics in 1776
The Declaration drew sharp replies. In London, John Lind wrote an answer, with a section by the young philosopher Jeremy Bentham mocking the idea of self-evident natural rights. Thomas Hutchinson, the exiled governor of Massachusetts, asked how slaveholders could claim all men are equal, a charge Samuel Johnson had already made in 1775: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" The critics had a point the founders could not answer, and some founders knew it.
Worked example: Douglass reads the Declaration
On 5 July 1852, in Rochester, New York, the formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass was invited to give an Independence Day speech. He praised the signers as brave men and called the Declaration's principles saving truths. Then he turned to his audience: "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?" To the enslaved, he said, the celebration was a sham, because the nation shouted liberty while holding millions in chains. Notice how Douglass argued. He did not reject the Declaration as a fraud. He held the country to its own words and demanded it live up to them. That move, using a founding text against the people who betray it, would be repeated by suffragists, by civil rights leaders and by movements around the world. The contradiction the critics of 1776 exposed became, in time, a lever for change.