The Declaration of independence : a study in the history of political ideas |
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| II. |
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 | IV. |
THE ROUGH DRAFT |
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 | CHAPTER IV The Declaration of independence : |  |
THE ROUGH DRAFT
as it probably read when Jefferson
made the `fair copy' which was presented
to Congress as the report of
the Committee of Five.
A Declaration by the Representatives of the
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General
Congress assembled.
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary
for a one people to dissolve the political hands which have connected
them with another, and to advance from that subordination in
which they have hitherto remained, & to assume among
the powers of the earth the separate and equal equal & independent station
to which the laws of nature & 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
the
change.
We hold these truths to be self-evident; sacred & undeniable; that
all men are created equal & independent; that they are endowed by their
creator with equal rights, some of which are from that
equal creation they derive in rights inherent & inalienable rights; that
among which these are the preservation of life, & liberty, &
the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights ends,
governments are instituted among men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed; that
whenever any form of government shall becomes destructive
of these ends, it is the right of the people to
alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government,
laying it's foundation on such principles & organizing
it's powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely
to effect their safety & happiness. prudence indeed will
dictate that governments long established should not be
changed for light & 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 & usurpations, begun
at a distinguished period, & pursuing invariably the
same object, evinces a design to subject reduce them
[28]
under absolute Despotism to arbitrary power, it is their right, it is their duty, to
for their future security. such has been the patient
sufferance of these colonies; & such is now the necessity
which constrains them to expunge their former systems
of government. the history of his [29] the present king of Great Britain majesty is a
history of unremitting injuries and usurpations, among
which appears no solitary fact no one fact stands single or solitary to contradict
the uniform tenor of the rest, all of which but all have in
direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny
over these states. to prove this, let facts be submitted
to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge
a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.
he has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and
necessary for the public good:
he has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate
& pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation
till his assent should be obtained; and when so
suspended, he has neglected utterly[30]
to attend to them.
he has refused to pass other laws for the accomodation
relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable
to them & formidable to tyrants only:
he has called together legislative bodies at places unusual,
uncomfortable & distant from the depository of their
public records for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into
compliance with his measures:
he has dissolved, Representative houses repeatedly & continually,
for opposing with manly firmness his invasions
on the rights of the people:
he has dissolved he has refused for a long space of time [31]
time after such dissolutions
to cause others to be elected, whereby the legislative
powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the
people at large for their exercise, the state remaining in
the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion
from without, & convulsions within:
he has endeavored to prevent the population of these
states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization
of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage
their migrations hither; & raising the conditions
of new appropriations of lands:
he has suffered the administration of justice totally to
laws for establishing judiciary powers:
he has made our judges dependent on his will alone,
for the tenure of their offices, and [32]
the amount and payment of their
salaries:
he has erected a multitude of new offices by a self-assumed
power, & sent hither swarms of officers to
harrass our people & eat out their substance:
he has kept among us in times of peace without our consent standing armies &
ships of war without the our consent. of our legislatures:
he has effected to render the military, independent of &
superior to the civil power:
he has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction
foreign to our constitutions and unacknoleged by our
laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended acts of legislation,
for quartering large bodies of armed troops among
us;
for protecting them by a mock-trial from punishment
for any murders which they should commit on
the inhabitants of these states;
for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;
for imposing taxes on us without our consent;
for depriving us of the benefits of trial by jury;
for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for
pretended offenses;
for abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring
province, establishing therein an arbitrary government,
and enlarging it's boundaries so as to render
it at once an example & fit instrument for introducing
the same absolute rule into these colonies states;
for taking away our charters,[33]
abolishing our most important valuable laws & altering fundamentally
the forms of our governments;
for suspending our own legislatures & declaring
themselves invested with power to legislate for
us in all cases whatsoever:
he has abdicated government here, withdrawing his governors,
& declaring us out of his allegiance & protection:
he has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our
towns & destroyed the lives of our people:
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
he has endeavored 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:
he has incited[34]
treasonable insurrections of our fellow-citizens,
with the allurements of forfeiture & confiscation
of our property:
he has constrained others[35]
taken captives falling into his hands, on the
high seas to bear arms against their country & to destroy
& be destroyed by the brethren whom they love, to become
the executioners of their friends & brethren, or to fall
themselves by their hands.
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
transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the
opprobrium 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 determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold 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
against 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[36]
only by repeated injury.[37]
a prince whose
character is thus marked by every act which may define
a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to
be free. future ages will scarce believe that the hardiness
twelve years only, to lay build a foundation[38] so broad & undisguised for tyranny on so many acts of tyranny without
a mask, over a people fostered & fixed in principles of
liberty. freedom.
Nor have we been wanting in attentions 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 expence 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 & connection. they too have been
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
re-established 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 & [39] destroy us deluge us in blood. these facts
have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly
spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren.
we must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and
to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in
war, in peace friends. we might have been a free & a
great people together; but a communication of grandeur
& of freedom it seems is below their dignity. be it so,
since they will have it: the road to glory & happiness & to glory
is open to us too; we will climb it apart from them in a separately state,[40]
everlasting adieu! eternal separation!
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 hereafter claim by,
through, or under them; we utterly dissolve & break off
all political connection which may have heretofore have subsisted
between us & the people or parliament of Great
Britain; and finally we do assert and declare[41]
these
colonies to be free and independent states, and that as
free & independent states they shall hereafter have full
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, & our sacred honour.
The report of the Committee of Five, presented
to Congress on June 28, was taken up four days
later, debated on three successive days, and
finally adopted with a number of amendments
on the 4 of July. Since Congress sat, for
these debates, in committee of the whole, the
Journals give no account of either the debates
or the amendments. Jefferson recorded, in his
"Notes" taken at the time, a few details. In
the "Notes" he says:
The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England
worth keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of
many. For this reason those passages which conveyed
censures on the people of England were struck out, lest
they should give them offense. The clause too, reprobating
the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck
out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia,
who had never attempted to restrain the importation of
slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it.
Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender
few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable
carriers of them to others.[42]
In a letter to Robert Walsh, December 4, 1818,
Jefferson wrote as follows:
The words `Scotch and other foreign auxillaries' excited
the ire of a gentleman or two of that country. Severe
strictures on the British king, in negativing our repeated
repeals of the law which permitted the importation of
slaves, were disapproved by some Southern gentlemen,
whose reflections were not yet matured to the full abhorrence
of that traffic. Although the offensive expressions
were immediately yielded, these gentlemen continued their
depredations on other parts of the instrument.[43]
The Journal of Congress gives only the form of
the Declaration as finally adopted. In what is
called the `rough Journal' the entry for July 4
is as follows:
Mr. Harrison reported that the Committee of the Whole
Congress have agreed to a Declaration which he delivered
in. The Declaration being read was agreed to as follows.[44]
What follows in the `rough Journal' is a printed
copy of the Declaration — a copy printed by
Dunlap by order of Congress and under the
supervision of the Committee of Five. In what
is known as the `corrected Journal' the Declaration
is written in.[45]
The copy in the corrected
Journal should, one would suppose, be the more
authoritative text. Such seems, however, not to
be the case. Apart from differences in punctuation
and capitalization, in which the corrected
Journal follows more closely the practice of Jefferson,
the only differences in the two texts
are the following: where the rough Journal
reads, "for quartering large bodies of armed
troops among us," the corrected Journal reads,
"for quartering large bodies of troops among
us"; and where the rough Journal reads, "they
too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of
consanguinity," the corrected Journal reads,
"they too have been deaf to the voice of justice
& consanguinity." The reading of the rough
Journal in these two cases is the same as that
of every other text we have, including the
engrossed parchment copy. It seems clear,
therefore, that these changes in the corrected
Journal were not `corrections' but simply inadvertent
omissions. The copy in the rough
Journal should thus be taken as the most authoritative
the copy which Jefferson sent to Richard H.
Lee is the nearest we can come to the `fair
copy' which was the report of the Committee
of Five, a comparison of the Lee copy with the
copy in the rough Journal will give us the
changes made by Congress as accurately as it
is possible to determine them. The text given
below is the Lee copy, except for one reading
in the last paragraph where Jefferson probably
made an error in copying, with the parts
omitted by Congress crossed out and the
parts added interlined in italics.
The Rough Draft reads, "he has utterly neglected atterly." The copy
in the "Notes" reads "utterly neglected." My belief is that this was
one of the corrections made by Congress which Jefferson neglected to
indicate as he commonly did such corrections, by bracketing the
omitted word.
The copy in the "Notes" reads "our fellow citizens" in place of
"others." This is the reading of the text as adopted by Congress;
but as the change does not appear on the Rough Draft, I have assumed
that this was a change made by Congress. The paragraph is written
in the Rough Draft as here shown, following the paragraph beginning,
"he has incited." Congress changed the order, placing the paragraph
beginning "he has constrained" immediately following the one beginning
"he is at this time transporting." The copy in the "Notes" follows
the order adopted by Congress.
The Rough Draft reads,
"we will climb it must tread apart from them in a separately state"
The text as adopted by Congress reads "we will climb it apart from
them." The copy in the "Notes" is the only one which gives the reading
"we will tread it apart from them." If the change from "climb"
to "tread" was made before the Committee of Five submitted its
report, we must suppose that Jefferson made an error in the Lee copy
and that Congress changed the "tread" back to "climb." This seems
improbable. See below, pp. 199-201.
Here I have followed the Rough Draft instead of the Lee copy.
The Lee copy reads, "parliament or people . . we do assert these
colonies." There is no indication on the Rough Draft that `people or
parliament' was at any time changed to `parliament or people,' nor is
there any indication that `and declare' was at any time omitted.
Furthermore, the text adopted by Congress reads "publish and declare,"
which seems to indicate that the words `and declare' were in the report
of the Committee of Five. I assume therefore that the different
reading of the Lee copy is the result of an error in copying. The copy
which Jefferson incorporated in his "Notes" follows the reading of the
Rough Draft; on the other hand, two other copies made by Jefferson,
probably at the same time he made the Lee copy, follow the reading
of the Lee copy. Cf. Hazelton, op. cit., 177, 340.
| CHAPTER IV The Declaration of independence : | |