Ch. 1.3. Jefferson’s Draft: The Conclusion (paragraphs C and D)
(Continued from Maier, pp. 139-43.)
The penultimate section of the Declaration [= paragraph C] took up that subject. This long paragraph emerged directly from the colonists’ protracted efforts to coordinate opposition with the British people. Those fellow subjects “at home” could choose delegates to the House of Commons, but in 1774 they returned to power the same members of Parliament against whom the colonists had complained, and the British people seemed hopelessly passive thereafter as the Crown moved forcefully to suppress American opposition. The fact that no effective support for the colonists materialized in Britain served, as so many town, county, and state resolutions on Independence testified, to “alter” the deep feelings of affection Americans once felt for the British people, much as their “sentiments” toward the King had changed. In no part of the Declaration did Jefferson give expression to the minds and hearts of his countrymen more fully than in those that summarized the Americans’ efforts to join hands with the British people and the implications of their failure:
Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend a jurisdiction over these our states. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration & settlement here, no one of which could warrant so strange a pretension: that these were effected at the expense of our own blood & treasure, unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain: that in constituting indeed our several forms of government, we had adopted one common king, thereby laying a foundation for perpetual league & amity with them: but that submission to their parliament was no part of our constitution, nor ever in idea if history may be credited. And we appealed to their native justice & magnanimity as well as to the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations which were likely to interrupt our connection & correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice & of consanguinity, & when occasions have been given them, by the regular course of their laws, of removing from their councils the disturbers of our harmony, they have by their free election reestablished them in power. At this very time too they are permitting their chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch & foreign mercenaries to invade & destroy us. These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bid us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren.
There it was–Jefferson’s claim that America had been settled with no help from Britain, sandwiched between an innocuous reminder that the colonists had addressed their “British brethren” and a statement of the empire’s structure that had won wide acceptance among Americans. He slipped it in so inconspicuously that not every reader might catch its assertion that the colonists had settled America entirely at their own cost, “unassisted by the wealth or strength of Great Britain.” The point was extremely important to Jefferson. Against the “palpable untruth” that the colonies were established at British expense, Jefferson gathered an array of “facts,” then denounced a King who “can adopt falsehood, and solemnize it from the throne.” Such an act, he ominously suggested, “justifies the revolution of fortune which reduces him to a private station.”
But had the colonists “reminded” the British people of the “circumstances of our emigration & settlement” as Jefferson understood them? Not in Congress’s address to them of 1774, nor in that of 1775. And yet Jefferson heaped on the British people an anger like that he had invested in the King, an anger that took form in a flood of words. The passage above is coherent and complete: it recalled American appeals to the British and, in remarkable detail, how those “brethren” had taken another course, then drew a conclusion that tied ”these facts” to the document’s overall subject, American Independence. But Jefferson, it seems, couldn’t let it go at that. In lines full of passion he went on – it almost seems he couldn’t stop – overleaping natural pauses, heaping one denunciation on another.
we must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies of war, in peace friends.
There was another natural ending. But no:
“We might have been a free & a great people together; but a communication of grandeur & of freedom it seems is below their dignity.” Done? Not quite, although anger was beginning to dissolve into melodrama:
Be it so, since they will have it: the road to happiness & to glory is open to us too; we will climb it apart from them and acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our eternal separation!
Then, finally, on the basis of all that came before, the Declaration arrived at its main business:
We therefore the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled do, in the name & by authority of the good people of these states, reject and renounce all allegiance & subjection to the kings of Great Britain & all others who may thereafter claim by, through, or under them,
a passage that amounted to a rejection not only of George III but of his descendants and any other claimants to the throne, in effect, a rejection of monarchy, as well as of those public servants the King appointed. And more:
we utterly dissolve all political connection which may heretofore have subsisted between us & the parliament or people of Great Britain
a statement that strangely suggested there might once have been some political connection between Parliament and the “good people” of America;
and finally we do assert and declare these colonies to be free and independent states, and that as free & independent states they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, & to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
The final sentence was particularly wonderful in that it took a commonplace – one community after another in Massachusetts and elsewhere had movingly committed their “lives” and “fortunes” to the cause – and, by adding to it “our sacred honor,” gave the passage more power, since honor remained a force of considerable significance, as well as a dignity and a mellifluousness as pleasing to the mind as it is the ear.
The declaration Jefferson and the Committee of Five delivered to Congress on June 28 was a mixture of beautifully crafted passages, some of which had begun with previously written prose, and others that remained overstated or overlong and so gave evidence of both its draftsman’s feelings and the “haste” with which the draft had been written. No doubt it was a promising text, one that would have been easily improved if the author could have put it aside for two weeks, then looked at it afresh. Jefferson didn’t have two weeks. He had, however, the next best thing: an extraordinary editor.