Tag Archives: Declaration of Independence

Why the Declaration Isn’t the Supreme Law of the Land

4 Jul 2022 By in Special days Tags: , , , , , 4 Comments

Assembly Hall, where the Constitution was signed.

On the 4th of July, 1776, the British subjects of thirteen colonies in North America declared through a makeshift congress that they were gunning for total independence from Britain.  They were already in a state of war against the British, but it was a defensive war against occupation, a war without aims.

Since the fighting had broken out a year earlier, representatives of the American colonies had applied themselves to the problem of how to win the war, a war against one of the world’s great military powers.  The Declaration successfully articulated the colonies’ grievances against the British Crown.  It presented a catalog of grievances against the monarchy, using the language of natural rights to justify throwing off a remote government that Americans feared would reduce them to “slaves.”  The Declaration legitimated war on the grounds that the British government did not represent the will of Americans.  Britain’s colonial system condemned Americans to live under an authority that was not of their own making, in which they had no voice.

The Declaration was a radical document, a glorious aspirational document that, beyond firing up the colonists, has inspired oppressed people to seek independence, equality, and self-determination down through the years.  With its ringing assertion of each person’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and its rejection of government without “the consent of the governed,” the Declaration gave the colonists a sound philosophical justification for rejecting British rule.  Their rebellion was justified because becoming a self-governing nation was their aim.

Inspiring in its idealism, the Declaration was never intended as a blueprint for national government.  The Continental Congress that approved it never approached the stature of the English system of King and Parliament that the colonists threw off.  The Declaration’s fiery phrases recalling past grievances couldn’t sustain the Revolution as it dragged on.  Having put the super-capably George Washington in charge of the war effort, Congress became diffident.  Enthusiasm waned.  Each state wanted what was best for itself, and no state wanted to give up much of its newly gained independence for the sake of a more powerful collectivity.

General Washington had to beg and cajole Congress for the basics to keep the Revolution going.  Valley Forge was the shameful nadir of the states’ indifference and irresponsibility. Continental troops, encamped there for the winter, perished not from battle but for want of human necessities such as clothing, shelter, and food.  Washington despised the Continental Congress for its weaknesses, blaming it for a war that was unduly costly and long.

Peace and independence came after eight tedious years.  Congress’s deficiencies became even more glaring once the colonists’ common enemy, Britain, had been expelled.  The fragile nationhood achieved through the Revolution began crumbling, as citizens and states grew tired of the extraordinary effort that acting in concert as a nation required.  Returning home, Washington confronted his own near-bankrupt condition. He faced the same uncertain prospects that all Americans faced, after shunning membership in an imperial economy that, for all its faults, had helped power American prosperity.

No wonder that Washington and other leading Revolutionaries put their weight behind the Constitution of the United States, which, in 1789, with the consent of the states then extant, became the supreme law of the land.  In subsequent decades, as the nation grew, western states sought admission to the United States, voluntarily placing their states under subjection to the Constitution.  States like Texas, briefly an independent nation, eagerly sought to become part of the US, its sovereignty pale beside the Constitutional Union’s advantages.

All this matters because aggrieved Americans now justify their anti-federalism by quoting phrases from the Declaration, as if they do not realize that all that they owe to the Constitution, all the benefits and protections that have accrued to them and their states, thanks to this transformative Founding document.  Oddly, people who don’t know the history or limitations of the Declaration misuse the fiery document that Thomas Jefferson wrote as a young revolutionary hungry the very self-government that Americans gained.

The glorious heights this nation and its people have attained since the War for Independence rest entirely on the Constitution.  The individualism and liberty that the Declaration makes so much of would have come to nothing had the United States not subsequently embraced a strong centralized vision–the Constitution, which spells out the federal system of self-government and individual rights we live by now.

It’s disturbing to hear anti-federalists railing against the federal government using phases from the Declaration.  These benighted citizens come across as yahoos.  The Constitution, not the Declaration, supplies the legal basis of government.  It ensures our freedoms, balances our interests, and gives us sufficient power to be self-governing.  The Constitution, not the Declaration, is the font of all present-day rights, court decisions, and laws.

The Declaration of Independence was never intended to pit Americans against one another or to attack the representative self-government that, thanks to the guarantees of the Constitution, is the birthright of all Americans.

The First Fourth of July

5 Jul 2020 By in History Tags: , , , , , , 6 Comments

The colonies had been warring against the English crown for more than a year. Their taking up arms on the periphery of the great British empire had at first been defensive and spontaneous, when, in April 1775, they exchanged fire with the redcoats in Massachusetts at Lexington and Concord. Behind Americans’ resort to arms was a conviction that, if they did not make a stand, the monarchy would strip them of their political autonomy, the ways of being and governing that the colonies had built up over the years. Some began associating loyalty to King George with political servitude.

So they backed up into a nasty situation: with their dander up and their more moderate tactics exhausted, thirteen weakly affiliated colonies had plunged willy-nilly into a war against a mighty power. No one of them could last against the British: they could only prevail by acting as one, by organizing. So the quest to organize the future states into something like a nation began.

It wasn’t the simplest proposition, because at that time the American colonies, though contiguous along the eastern seaboard, were largely strangers to one another. Each colony had its own character and peculiarities, its own governing traditions. They were as distinct and alien to one another, claimed John Adams in 1775, as Indian tribes.

What is most remarkable about the Revolution, yet often taken for granted, is that private citizens in the various colonies voluntarily took on these outlandishly weighty and amorphous duties. As the pace of political instability quickened, leading merchants, journalists, lawyers, intellectuals, printers, and farmers found a way to communicate, to protest, to proselytize, and to bring an entire (formerly tranquil) society together around ambitious and previously unthinkable propositions.

As the colonies became more radicalized, their leadership became shrewder, more obsessive and voluble, spewing forth oratory and addresses and declarations of such variety and power as to unite an entire population around a set of mortally dangerous yet self-respecting demands.

For more than a year, the Continental Army under George Washington had managed to hold together and to keep the British forces busy. But a rebellion that was merely negative–that merely pushed back against the British status quo–scarcely afforded the miserable and fractious colonials with a compelling reason to stay in the field. The moment they grew tired of rebelling against, the British would win.

The passage of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, marks the moment when the various grievances and injuries the colonies suffered under King George were transmuted into one simple positive, practical, political goal. The colonies (now states) declared they were and would be INDEPENDENT. But they also declared themselves to be “the United States of America.” Their first stride toward becoming a true nation came when their leadership, meeting as a “Grand Council of America,” unanimously approved of and proclaimed this as a fait accompli.

What would have happened to the colonists if they had failed to unite? They would probably have been treated as traitors and hung, their fate not too different from what is happening to political dissidents today in Hong Kong.

Today we look back on the leaders of the Revolution and marvel at their sins. We blame them for the political sins of generations of American leaders who came after them. How could they be so narrow-minded, so selfish and blind? Yet without their flawed vision, without their imperfect realization of a universal dream, without their amazing skills as political strategists and activists, where would you and I be today? What language would we be speaking? What narrow confines would shape our political dreams?

Image: “The Battle at Bunker’s Hill,”
from this source.