Ch. 2.5. Jefferson’s Charges Against the King, Group 3
(Continued from Maier, pp. 119-23.)
IN THE THIRD and concluding group of charges against the King, Jefferson finally arrived at those recent events that were repeatedly and often exclusively cited in state and local resolutions on Independence. His first draft of the Virginia constitution charged that the King had attempted to erect a tyranny
[10] by plundering our seas, ravaging our coasts, burning our towns, & destroying the lives of our people:
[11] by inciting insurrections of our fellow subjects with the allurements of forfeiture & confiscation
[12] by prompting our negroes to rise in arms among us; those very negroes whom by an inhuman use of his negative he hath refused us permission to exclude by law:
[13] by endeavoring to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions of existence.
[14] by transporting at this time a large army of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, & tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty & perfidy so unworthy the head of a civilized nation
[15] by answering our repeated petitions for redress with a repetition of injuries
[16] and finally by abandoning the helm of government & declaring us out of his allegiance & protection.
Jefferson rearranged these provisions in preparing the Declaration of Independence, numbering the charges in his draft Virginia constitution, then inserting numbers between clauses to indicate that the sixteenth charge would open rather than close this sequence, and that the fourteenth and thirteenth charges would come after the tenth. He also added a new charge, after the eleventh, and radically expanded what was originally the twelfth:
[14] he has indicated government here, withdrawing his governors, & declaring us out of his allegiance & protection:
[15] he has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns & destroyed the lives of our people
[16] he is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, & tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty & perfidy unworthy the head of a civilized nation:
[17] he has endeavored to bring,on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian-savage, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all-ages, sexes, & conditions of existence:
[18] he has incited treasonable insurrections of our fellow citizens, with the allurements of forfeiture & confiscation of property:
[19] he has constrained others taken captives on the high seas to bear arms against their country to become the executioners of their friends & brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.
[20] he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither, this piratical warfare, the opportunity of infidel powers is the warfare of the Christian, king of Great Britain, determined, to keep open a market, where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed again the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another, in every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered on by repeated injury.
These changes gave Jefferson’s draft Declaration of Independence a character or feeling different from that of his preamble to the Virginia constitution or, for that matter, the body of state and local resolutions on Independence that had emphasized so many of the same events. There was much to be said for concluding with the King’s formally putting the Americans out of his protection by approving the Prohibitory Act, as Jefferson had done in the Virginia preamble. Like Parliament’s assertion of power to bind the colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” with which Jefferson concluded his list of “pretended acts of legislation,” that act seemed to encapsulate the tendency of all the charges that preceded it.
For John Adams and others, the Prohibitory Act provided a wholly sufficient justification for Independence since the Americans had no obligation of allegiance to a King who publicly promised to treat them like enemy aliens. Here, however, the King’s abdication of government and declaring the colonists out of his protection seems to introduce the charges that follow, which list positive acts of an increasingly heinous character–the burning of colonial towns, turning slaves, Indians, and German mercenaries against them, making American seamen fight against their countrymen.
Some dispassionate observers might object that royal governors were sometimes forced from office, not withdrawn by the King, as the fourteenth charge said, or ask whether any Americans had actually been forced “to become the executioners of their friends & brethren,” which the Prohibitory Act made theoretically possible.
Still more profound questions were raised by the elaborate charge at the end of the list, which not only denounced George III for turning slaves against their masters and blocking provincial efforts to tax the importation of slaves (which Jefferson had, of course, already condemned in the very first charge), but imposed upon him entire responsibility for the slave trade, an accusation that one seeks in vain elsewhere in the literature on behalf of Independence.
Jefferson obviously invested considerable effort in the passage and meant it to be the emotional climax of his case against the King. But his effort failed. The problem is not, I think, that Jefferson lacked passion. In his long passage on the slave trade, he described a form of “piratical warfare” that he had personally witnessed, and attempted to convey its iniquity and that of the King by enlisting strong words such as “prostituted,” “murdering,” ”execrable,” “assemblage of horrors.”
The attempt foundered in part because the image of King George personally “captivating and carrying” innocent Africans into slavery was patently unbelievable. This complex passage, with its “twisted language and logic,” also invites misinterpretation. It does not call for the abolition of slavery, but, in its closing lines, actually condemns the King for opening the prospect of manumission to slaves if they supported his cause.
And yet, curiously, John Adams liked what he called the “high tone” and “flights of oratory” in Jefferson’s draft, and particularly in the passage “concerning negro slavery,” which, however, he said in his 1822 letter to Pickering, “I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress’.”
Adams then volunteered that “there were other expressions which I would not have inserted if l had drawn it up, particularly that which called the king tyrant. I thought this too personal; for I never believed George to be a tyrant in disposition and in nature; I always believed him to be deceived by his courtiers on both sides of the Atlantic, and in his official capacity only, cruel. I thought the expression too passionate, and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document.”
However, since the manuscript was still to be submitted to other committee members, Adams “thought it would not become me to strike it out,” and he “consented to report it, and do not now remember that I made or suggested a single alteration.” (In fact, Adams probably inserted two changes and Franklin five, all of which were essentially verbal.) Nor did he recall that the committee made any changes in Jefferson’s draft. It was then that he noted, ‘We were all in haste. Congress was impatient,” … For all those reasons…, the draft Declaration presented to Congress was for the most part Jefferson’s work.
Adams’s criticism of the document remains striking. That Thomas Hutchinson, the Loyalist ex-governor of Massachusetts, or John Lind, a ministerial hack, was unconvinced by the Declaration of Independence was to be expected. John Adams, on the other hand, was the foremost advocate of Independence in the Continental Congress, a man who would defend Jefferson’s text through the difficult debates of early July with the determination of a prizefighter. If even he remained unconvinced that George III was a tyrant, then Jefferson’s draft declaration had failed to prove a point central to its very purpose.
From a comparative perspective, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the states and localities had offered a more effective case for Independence by concentrating on a handful of specific events of 1775 and 1776 and arguing that they left Americans with no good alternative to separate nationhood. Jefferson agreed with that description of the Americans’ position. But in the Declaration of Independence he tried to show that Independence had become necessary–which implies that there was no reasonable alternative–in a different way.
Groups of related documents, like the members of human families, can have different features and do similar things in different ways. The Declaration of Independence was distinguished from its American and English relatives in part by its effort to prove that George III was a tyrant, which led to other distinctions such as the extraordinarily large number of grievances it listed. The key to the document’s approach lies in the paragraphs that preceded and introduced the charges against the King and which were, in fact, themselves part of the document’s distinctiveness.