Editor’s Note: He had no polling numbers to guide his thoughts, nor any indication that the cause for which he put pen to paper would see another year, let alone two and a third centuries. In late June, there was open rebellion in the land. The British fleet and a sizeable land force were due at New York any minute. A long war lay ahead and there was no turning back. That was made clear by a best-selling pamphlet titled Common Sense, which hit the streets the previous January.
And so, when Thomas Jefferson sat down to write one of history’s pivotal documents, he had, in a sense, the wind at his back. He’d just been working on a draft constitution for Virginia and he drew heavily from that and other recent works.
The Declaration of Independence’s meaty, detailed indictment of the King — carefully written to isolate the crimes of the ruler and not the institution so many colonists still revered — mirrors in parts the earlier documents.
But it was no drab bill of complaint. Its opening passages stand as one of the most brilliant articulations of ideals in a political document. These words still ring true today.
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Nutty, but I never tire of reading those words…
Thanks for putting them front-n-center.