Ch. 2.1. Jefferson’s Charges Against the King, Introduction
This and the subsequent sections of this chapter are organized based on Maier’s analysis of the different parts of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration consists of a preamble or introduction (two long paragraphs), a conclusion (two long paragraphs), and a body section containing many specific accusations. Maier discusses the Declaration’s more rhetorical opening and closing paragraphs later, and this discussion will be part of the reading for Module 6.
Maier instead begins, as we too will do here in Module 5, with the Declaration’s central material, which, though often overlooked, consists of a long list of accusations against the king (ch. 2.1 through 2.5). In this sub-chapter, she introduces these charges and discusses some reactions to them at the time.
When Jefferson took up his responsibility as draftsman of the Declaration of Independence, he turned to the preamble of his constitution for Virginia, numbering and then rearranging its charges against the King. Items in that list were meant to show how George III had endeavored to “pervert” the government of Virginia “into a detestable & insupportable tyranny.”
In the Declaration of Independence, the various charges had essentially the same purpose: to demonstrate that the King had inflicted on the colonists “unremitting injuries and usurpations,” all of which had as a “direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny.” Independence was justified only if the charges against the King were convincing and of sufficient gravity to warrant the dissolution of his authority over the American people. They were therefore essential to the Declaration’s central purpose.
At the time, no one doubted the importance of the sections containing the charges against the King. British and Loyalist critics of the Declaration, like good defense lawyers, turned immediately to that part of the document, and had a field day ripping it apart. But first they had to figure out exactly what events lay behind the charges. Today most Americans, including professional historians, would be hard put to identify exactly what prompted many of the accusations Jefferson hurled against the King, which is not surprising since even some well-informed persons of the eighteenth century were perplexed.
Thomas Hutchinson, a Loyalist historian and ex-governor of Massachusetts, began a pamphlet criticizing the Declaration by quoting Philip Yorke, the second Earl of Hardwicke, who said that he was “utterly at a loss as to what facts many parts of the Declaration of Independence published by the Philadelphia Congress referred.” Hutchinson proceeded to explain the more ambiguous of Jefferson’s charges, many of which, he argued were “false and frivolous.” Many “facts … alleged to be the evidence of injuries and usurpation” were purposely stated in an obscure manner, he said, because if they were clear they would reveal the criminality of the American revolt rather than justify it.
A writer in the Scots Magazine similarly remarked that the Americans’ effort to cite “some justifiable reasons of their separating themselves from Great Britain” suffered for lack of “truth and sense” and so reflected “no honour” on their “erudition or their honesty.” John Lind‘s An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress (1776) again focused almost exclusively on the charges against the King, and came to much the same conclusion.
Hutchinson and Lind were closely connected with the British ministry, which helps explain why they wrote the two most sustained criticisms of the Declaration of Independence. That they opposed American Independence and the arguments advanced to justify it was therefore predictable, but not the way they criticized the Declaration. The charges of frivolousness and obscurity could hardly have been brought against most state and local declarations on Independence, which for the most part cited a few prominent events of undoubted seriousness – the King’s failure to respond to the colonists’ petitions, his consent to the Prohibitory Act, his use of slaves, Indians, and, finally, German ‘mercenaries’ against them.
Jefferson chose instead to construct a much longer and less selective list of accusations. His preamble to the Virginia constitution included sixteen charges against the King, one of which cited his consent to six different “pretended acts of legislation.” And in revising that document for the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson made an already long list even longer: the draft submitted to Congress included twenty-one charges against the King, and increased to nine the “pretended acts of legislation” in what became the thirteenth of those charges.