society, or “sovereignty,” as those writers were apt to call it, was
to be built up and regulated. Civil government did not destroy natural
rights and the pursuit of happiness. On the contrary, it was intended to
give those rights greater security and a fresh force and efficiency. That
was the purpose men had in coming together to form a civil society for
the benefit of all; that was the reason, as Burlamaqui put it, that “the
sovereign became the depositary, as it were, of the will and strength of
each individual.”
This seemed very satisfactory to some of the colonists. You choose
your sovereign, your government, for yourself, and make it your mere
depositary or agent. Then as to the nature of the government, the right
to govern, they were very much pleased to find that the only right there
was of this sort was the right of each community to govern itself.
Government by outside power was absolutely indefensible, because the
notion that there was a divine right in one set of people to rule over
others was exploded nonsense, and the assertion that mere might or
superior power necessarily gave such right was equally indefensible.
There remained only one plausible reason, and that was that superior
excellence, wisdom, or ability might possibly give such right.
As to this “superior excellence” theory, if you admitted it you denied
man’s inherent right to liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness;
you denied his moral accountability and responsibility; you crippled his
independent development, his self-development, his individual action; in
a word, you destroyed the whole natural system.
Because a man is inferior to another is no reason why he should surrender
his liberty, his accountability, his chance for self-development, to
the superior. We do not surrender our property to the next man who is
richer or an abler business manager. Our inferiority does not give him a
right over us. On the contrary, the inferiority of the inferior man is
an additional reason why he should cling to all those rights of nature
which have been given to him, that he may have wherewithal to raise
himself, and be alone accountable for himself. Or, as Burlamaqui briefly
summarized it:
“The knowledge I have of the excellency of a superior does not alone
afford me a motive sufficient to subject myself to him, and to induce me
to abandon my own will in order to take his for my rule; ... and without
any reproach of conscience I may sincerely judge that the intelligent
principle within me is sufficient to direct my conduct.”
Only the people, Burlamaqui explained, have inherent inalienable rights;
and they alone can confer the privilege of commanding. It had been
supposed that the sovereign alone had rights, and the people only
privileges. But here were Burlamaqui, Puffendorf, Montesquieu, Locke, and
fully half the American colonists, undertaking to reverse this order and
announcing that the people alone had rights, and the sovereign merely
privileges.
These principles the Americans afterwards translated in their documents
by the phrase, “a just government exists only by consent of the
governed.” All men being born politically equal, the colonies, as
Dickinson and Hamilton explained, are equally with Great Britain entitled
to happiness, equally entitled to govern themselves, equally entitled to
freedom and independence.
It is curious to see the cautious way in which some of the colonists
applied these doctrines by mixing them up with loyalty arguments. This is
very noticeable in the pamphlets written by Alexander Hamilton. He gives
the stock arguments for redress of grievances, freedom from internal
taxation, government by the king alone, and will not admit that he is
anything but a loyal subject. At the same time there runs through all
he says an undercurrent of strong rebellion which leads to his ultimate
object. “The power,” he says, “which one society bestows upon any man or
body of men can never extend beyond its own limits.” This he lays down as
a universal truth, independently of charters and the wonderful British
Constitution. It applied to the whole world. Parliament was elected by
the people of England, therefore it had no authority outside of the
British isle. That British isle and America were separate societies.
“Nature,” said Hamilton, “has distributed an equality of rights to every
man.” How then, he asked, can the English people have any rights over
life, liberty, or property in America? They can have authority only among
themselves in England. We are separated from Great Britain, Hamilton
argued, not only by the ocean, by geography, but because we have no part
or share in governing her. Therefore, as we have no share in governing
her, she, by the law of nature, can have no share in governing us; she is
a separate society.
The British, he said, were attempting to involve in the idea of a colony
the idea of political slavery, and against that a man must fight with
his life. To be controlled by the superior wisdom of another nation was
ridiculous, unworthy of the consideration of manhood; and at this point
he used that sentence which has so often been quoted—“Deplorable is
the condition of that people who have nothing else than the wisdom and
justice of another to depend upon.”
Charters and documents, he declared, must yield to natural laws and our
rights as men.
“The sacred rights of man are not to be rummaged for among old parchments
or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume
of human nature by the hand of divinity itself and can never be erased by
mortal power.”
The Declaration of Independence was an epitome of these doctrines of
natural law applied to the colonies. The Declaration of Independence
originated in these doctrines, and not in the mind of Jefferson, as so
many people have absurdly supposed. In order to see how directly the
Declaration was an outcome of these teachings we have only to read its
opening paragraphs:
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one
people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with
another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and
equal station to which the laws of nature and 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.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That,
to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any
form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of
the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government,
laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers
in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety
and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long
established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and,
accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed
to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by
abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
By understanding the writings of Burlamaqui, Locke, and Beccaria, which
the colonists were studying so intently, we know the origin of the
Declaration, and need not flounder in the dark, as so many have done,
wondering where it came from, or how it was that Jefferson could have
invented it. Being unwilling to take the trouble of examining carefully
the influences which preceded the Declaration, historical students are
sometimes surprised to find a document like the Virginia Bill of Rights
or the supposed Mecklenburg resolutions, issued before the Declaration
and yet containing the same principles. They instantly jump to the
conclusion that here is the real origin and author of the Declaration,
and from this Jefferson stole his ideas.
Jefferson merely drafted the Declaration. Neither he, Adams, Franklin,
Sherman, nor Livingston, who composed the committee which was responsible
for it, ever claimed any originality for its principles. They were merely
stating principles which were already familiar to the people, which had
been debated over and over again in Congress; which were so familiar
in fact, that they stated them rather carelessly and took too much for
granted. It would have been better, instead of saying, “all men are
created equal,” to have said that all men are created politically equal,
which was what they meant, and what every one at that time understood.
By leaving out the word “politically” they gave an opportunity to a
generation unfamiliar with the doctrines of natural law to suppose
that they meant that all men are created, or should be made, equal in
conditions, opportunities or talents.
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
BY JOHN D. LONG
Recall the quaint and homely city of Philadelphia, the gloom that hung
over it from the terrible responsibility of the step there taken, the
modest hall still standing and baptized as the Cradle of Liberty. On
its tower swung the bell which yet survives with its legend,—“Proclaim
liberty throughout all the world to all the inhabitants thereof.” That
day it rang out a proclamation of liberty that will indeed echo round the
world and in the ears of all the inhabitants thereof long after the bell
itself shall have crumbled into dust.
Hancock is in the president’s chair; before him sit the half-hundred
delegates who at that time represent America. Among the names it is
remarkable how many there are that have since been famous in our annals.
The committee appointed to draft the declarations are Jefferson, youngest
and tallest; John Adams; Sherman, shoemaker; Franklin, printer; and
Robert R. Livingston. If the patriot, Samuel Adams, at the sunrise of
Lexington could say,—“Oh, what a glorious morning!” how well might he
have renewed in the more brilliant noontime of July 4, 1776, the same
prophetic words!
There is nothing in the prophecies of old more striking and impressive
than the words of John Adams, who declared the event would be
celebrated by succeeding generations as a great anniversary festival
and commemorated as a day of deliverance, from one end of the continent
to the other; that through all the gloom he could see the light; that
the end was worth all the means and that posterity would triumph in the
transaction. I am not of those who overrate the past. I know that the men
of 1776 had the common weaknesses and shortcomings of humanity. I read
the Declaration of Independence with no feeling of awe; and yet if I were
called upon to select from the history of the world any crisis grander,
loftier, purer, more heroic, I should not know where to turn.
It seems simple enough to-day, but it was something else in that day. The
men who signed the Declaration knew not but they were signing warrants
for their own ignominious execution on the gibbet. The bloody victims of
the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 were still a warning to rebels;
and the gory holocaust of Culloden was fresh in the memory. But it was
not only the personal risk; it was risking the homes, the commerce, the
lives, the property, the honor, the future destiny of three million
innocent people,—men, women, and children. It was defying on behalf of a
straggling chain of colonies clinging to the sea-board, the most imperial
power of the world. It was, more than all, like Columbus sailing into
awful uncertainty of untried space, casting off from an established
and familiar form of government and politics, drifting away to unknown
methods, and upon the dangerous and yawning chaos of democratic
institutions, flying from ills they had to those they knew not of, and
perhaps laying the way for a miserable and bloody catastrophe in anarchy
and riot.
There are times when ordinary men are borne by the tide of an occasion to
crests of grandeur in conduct and action. Such a time, such an occasion,
was that of the Declaration. While the signers were picked men, none the
less true is it that their extraordinary fame is due not more to their
merits than to the crisis at which they were at the helm and to the
great popular instinct which they obeyed and expressed. And why do we
commemorate with such veneration and display this special epoch and event
in our history? Why do we repeat the words our fathers spoke or wrote?
Why cherish their names, when our civilization is better than theirs and
when we have reached in science, art, education, religion, politics, in
every phase of human development, even in morals, a higher level?
It is because we recognize that in their beginnings the eternal elements
of truth and right and justice were conspicuous. To those eternal
verities we pay our tribute, and not to their surroundings, except so far
as we let the form stand for the spirit, the man for the idea, the event
for the purpose. And it is also because we can do no better work than to
perpetuate virtue in the citizen by keeping always fresh in the popular
mind the great heroic deeds and times of our history. The valuable thing
in the past is not the man or the events,—which are both always ordinary
and which under the enchantment of distance and the pride of descent, we
love to surround with exaggerated glory,—it is rather in the sentiment
for which the man and the event stand. The ideal is alone substantial and
alone survives.
THE SIGNING OF THE DECLARATION
BY GEORGE LIPPARD
It is a cloudless summer day; a clear blue sky arches and expands above a
quaint edifice rising among the giant trees in the center of a wide city.
That edifice is built of plain red brick, with heavy window frames, and a
massive hall door.
Such is the State House of Philadelphia in the year of our Lord 1776.
In yonder wooden steeple, which crowns the summit of that red brick
State House, stands an old man with snow-white hair and sunburnt face.
He is clad in humble attire, yet his eye gleams as it is fixed on the
ponderous outline of the bell suspended in the steeple there. By his
side, gazing into his sunburnt face in wonder, stands a flaxen-haired
boy, with laughing eyes of summer blue. The old man ponders for a moment
upon the strange words written upon the bell, then, gathering the boy in
his arms, he speaks: “Look here, my child; will you do this old man a
kindness? Then hasten down the stairs, and wait in the hall below till a
man gives you a message for me; when he gives you that word, run out into
the street and shout it up to me. Do you mind?” The boy sprang from the
old man’s arms and threaded his way down the dark stairs.
Many minutes passed. The old bell-keeper was alone. “Ah!” groaned the
old man, “he has forgotten me.” As the word was upon his lips a merry,
ringing laugh broke on his ear. And there, among the crowd on the
pavement, stood the blue-eyed boy, clapping his tiny hands while the
breeze blew his flaxen hair all about his face, and, swelling his little
chest, he raised himself on tiptoe, and shouted the single word, “Ring!”
Do you see that old man’s eye fire? Do you see that arm so suddenly bared
to the shoulder? Do you see that withered hand grasping the iron tongue
of the bell? That old man is young again. His veins are filling with
a new life. Backward and forward, with sturdy strokes, he swings the
tongue. The bell peals out; the crowds in the street hear it, and burst
forth in one long shout. Old Delaware hears it, and gives it back on the
cheers of her thousand sailors. The city hears it, and starts up from
desk and workshop, as if an earthquake had spoken.
Under that very bell, pealing out at noonday, in an old hall, fifty-six
traders, farmers and mechanics had assembled to break the shackles of the
world. The committee, who had been out all night, are about to appear. At
last the door opens, and they advance to the front. The parchment is laid
on the table. Shall it be signed or not? Then ensues a high and stormy
debate. Then the faint-hearted cringe in corners. Then Thomas Jefferson
speaks his few bold words, and John Adams pours out his whole soul.
Still there is a doubt; and that pale-faced man, rising in one corner,
speaks out something about “axes, scaffolds, and a gibbet.” A tall,
slender man rises, and his dark eye burns, while his words ring through
the halls: “Gibbets! They may stretch our necks on every scaffold in
the land. They may turn every rock into a gibbet, every tree into a
gallows; and yet the words written on that parchment can never die. They
may pour out our blood on a thousand altars, and yet, from every drop
that dyes the axe, or drips on the sawdust of the block, a new martyr to
freedom will spring into existence. What! are there shrinking hearts and
faltering voices here, when the very dead upon our battle-fields arise
and call upon us to sign that parchment, or be accursed forever?
“Sign! if the next moment the gibbet’s rope is around your neck. Sign! if
the next moment this hall rings with the echo of the falling axe. Sign!
by all your hopes in life or death, as husbands, as fathers, as men! Sign
your names to that parchment.
“Yes! were my soul trembling on the verge of eternity; were this voice
choking in the last struggle, I would still, with the last impulse of
that soul, with the last gasp of that voice, implore you to remember this
truth: God has given America to the free. Yes! as I sink down in the
gloomy shadow of the grave, with my last breath I would beg of you sign
that parchment.”
SUPPOSED SPEECH OF JOHN ADAMS
BY DANIEL WEBSTER
Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my
heart to this vote. It is true, indeed, that in the beginning we aimed
not at independence. But there is a Divinity which shapes our ends. The
injustice of England has driven us to arms; and, blinded to her own
interest and our good she has obstinately persisted, till independence
is now within our grasp. We have but to reach forth to it, and it is
ours. Why, then, should we defer the Declaration? Is any man so weak as
now to hope for a reconciliation with England, which shall leave neither
safety to the country and its liberties, nor safety to his life and
his own honor? Are you not, sir, who sit in that chair, is not he, our
venerable colleague near you, are you not both already the proscribed
and predestined objects of punishment and of vengeance? Cut off from all
hope of royal clemency, what are you, what can you be, while the power of
England remains, but outlaws?
If we postpone independence, do we mean to carry on or give up the war?
Do we mean to submit to the measures of Parliament, Boston Port-Bill
and all? Do we mean to submit, and consent that we ourselves shall be
ground to powder, and our country and its rights, trodden down in the
dust? I know we do not mean to submit. We never shall submit. Do we mean
to violate that most solemn obligation ever entered into by men, that
plighting before God, of our sacred honor to Washington, when, putting
him forth to incur the dangers of war, as well as the political hazards
of the times, we promised to adhere to him, in every extremity, with our
fortunes and our lives? I know there is not a man here, who would not
rather see a general conflagration sweep over the land, or an earthquake
sink it, than one jot or tittle of that plighted faith fall to the
ground. For myself, having, twelve months ago, in this place, moved you,
that George Washington be appointed commander of the forces raised, or to
be raised, for defense of American liberty, may my right hand forget her
cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I hesitate or
waver in the support I give him.
The war, then, must go on. We must fight it through. And if the war
must go on, why put off longer the Declaration of Independence? That
measure will strengthen us. It will give us character abroad. The nations
will then treat with us, which they never can do while we acknowledge
ourselves subjects in arms against our sovereign. Nay, I maintain that
England herself will sooner treat for peace with us on the footing of
independence than consent, by repealing her Acts, to acknowledge that her
whole conduct toward us has been a course of injustice and oppression.
Her pride will be less wounded by submitting to that course of things
which now predestinates our independence than by yielding the points in
controversy to her rebellious subjects. The former she would regard
as the result of fortune; the latter she would feel as her own deep
disgrace. Why, then, why, then, sir, do we not as soon as possible change
this from a civil to a national war? And, since we must fight it through,
why not put ourselves in a state to enjoy all the benefits of victory, if
we gain the victory?
If we fail, it can be no worse for us. But we shall not fail. The cause
will raise up armies; the cause will create navies. The people, the
people, if we are true to them, will carry us, and will carry themselves,
gloriously through the struggle. I care not how fickle other people
have been found. I know the people of these Colonies, and I know that
resistance to British aggression is deep and settled in their hearts, and
cannot be eradicated. Every Colony, indeed, has expressed its willingness
to follow, if we but take the lead.
Sir, the Declaration will inspire the people with increased courage.
Instead of a long and bloody war for restoration of privileges, for
redress of grievances, for chartered immunities, held under a British
King, set before them the gloriousness of entire independence, and it
will breathe into them anew the breath of life. Read this Declaration at
the head of the army; every sword will be drawn from its scabbard, and
the solemn vow uttered to maintain it, or to perish on the bed of honor.
Publish it from the pulpit; religion will approve it, and the love of
religious liberty will cling round it, resolved to stand with it, or fall
with it. Send it to the public halls; proclaim it there; let them hear it
who heard the first roar of the enemy’s cannon; let them see it who saw
their brothers and their sons fall on the field of Bunker Hill, and in
the streets of Lexington and Concord, and the very walls will cry out in
its support.
Sir, I know the uncertainty of human affairs, but I see, I see clearly,
through this day’s business. You and I, indeed, may rue it. We may not
live to the time when this Declaration shall be made good. We may die;
die, colonists; die, slaves; die, it may be, ignominiously and on the
scaffold. Be it so; be it so! If it be the pleasure of heaven that my
country shall require the poor offering of my life, the victim shall
be ready at the appointed hour of sacrifice, come when that hour may.
But, while I do live, let me have a country, or at least, the hope of a
country, and that a free country.
But whatever may be our fate, be assured, be assured that this
Declaration will stand. It may cost treasure, and it may cost blood,
but it will stand, and it will richly compensate for both. Through the
thick gloom of the present, I see the brightness of the future, as the
sun in heaven. We shall make this a glorious, an immortal day. When we
are in our graves, our children will honor it. They will celebrate it
with thanksgiving, with festivity, with bonfires and illuminations. On
its annual return, they will shed tears, copious, gushing tears, not of
subjection and slavery, not of agony and distress, but of exultation,
of gratitude and of joy. Sir, before God, I believe the hour is come.
My judgment approves this measure, and my whole heart is in it. All
that I have, and all that I am, and all that I hope, in this life, I am
now ready here to stake upon it. And I leave off as I began, that, live
or die, survive or perish, I am for the Declaration. It is my living
sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment,
Independence _now_, and INDEPENDENCE FOREVER!
THE LIBERTY BELL
BY J. T. HEADLEY
On July fourth, 1776, the representatives of the American people gathered
at the State House in Philadelphia to take final action upon the
Declaration of Independence, which had been under discussion for three
days.