Shall this, their lofty scene, be acted o’er
In states unborn, and accents yet unknown?”
It will be acted o’er, but it never can be repeated. It stands, and
must forever stand, alone; a beacon on the summit of the mountain, to
which all the inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes for a genial
and saving light, till time shall be lost in eternity, and this globe
itself dissolves, nor leave a wreck behind. It stands forever, a light of
admonition to the rulers of men, a light of salvation and redemption to
the oppressed. So long as this planet shall be inhabited by human beings,
so long as man shall be of social nature, so long as government shall be
necessary to the great moral purposes of society, so long as it shall
be abused to the purposes of oppression—so long shall this Declaration
hold out to the sovereign and to the subject the extent and boundaries of
their respective rights and duties, founded in the laws of nature and of
nature’s God.
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE[7]
BY TUDOR JENKS
“What is the most dramatic incident in American history and why?”
The emphatic and determining word in this question is the adverb “most.”
To answer conclusively, the method must be comparative; it is not enough
to stir the emotions of patriotism, to excite the imagination of the
poetic soul, to depict with skill bygone scenes so that they live again.
The intellectual faculties must be satisfied that the chosen incident is
truly an incident, that it is dramatic, and that it is more dramatic than
all others in our history.
Definition seems but a poor prelude to the drama, but as the defender
of the Constitution began his reply to Hayne by asking for the reading
of the resolution before the Senate, it may be permissible to refer to
the dictionary for guidance, as the storm-tossed mariner of Webster’s
metaphor glanced at the sun to rectify his course.
“Incident,” as used in the given question, can mean only “something which
takes place in connection with an event or series of events of greater
importance” (Century Dictionary), since any broader meaning of the word
would be too inclusive, and might permit the naming of a whole epoch.
“Dramatic” (by the same author) is “characterized by the force and
animation in act or expression appropriate to the drama.” Force and
animation may of course be psychical or physical; but if psychical they
must find expression in some form appreciable by the senses, else they
are not dramatic.
Bearing these guiding principles in mind, let us see in what moment of
American history we shall find that incident so connected with greater
events, and so expressed as to be “The most dramatic”—that incident
toward which all preceding events led, and from which subsequent events
have sprung. Let us then select as expressing that incident the most
forceful and animated action that would be appropriate to dramatic
representation.
The periods of American history are the traditionary, that of discovery
and exploration, that of colonization. These three are preparatory,
and “American” only in a geographical sense. Then come the period
of revolution, that of nationality and rebellion and finally the
present—which may be called the period of expansion, since it marks for
good or for evil the birth of the nation as a world power.
These periods group naturally into two great classes: I. America as an
appanage of Europe. II. America as independent. The transition from one
existence to the other took place in an instant of time. Before the
Declaration of Independence our nation did not exist; once that document
was ratified, the United States was created a nation.
Here, then, is the dividing of the ways; here the act of divine creation
of which our forefathers were but the human instruments. This is the one
universally celebrated and commemorated moment in our history—the birth
of “a new nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal.”
The great Civil war was but the test whether that nation could endure;
so said Lincoln, whom we are learning to know as our greatest statesman.
All our subsequent history is but the voyage of the ship of state by the
chart then drafted.
Toward the Declaration converge all previous lines of historical
development; from the Declaration diverge all the lines along which
patriotic statesmanship must hereafter guide the national future.
Deviations from these converging and diverging paths have been but blind
trails to be painfully retraced.
Here, then, let us repeat, is the focus of our national life.
In what act, in what incident shall we find this moment of time expressed
most dramatically?
The streets of Philadelphia were thronged with citizens awaiting news of
the action of Congress. Within the old State House were the councilors
of the colonies—the group of contemporaries whom Gladstone declared
unequaled in the history of the world. One by one the names of the
representatives were signed to that document which was to commit them to
death as rebels or to immortality as patriots.
As the last name was affixed, a little boy ran from the doorway out into
the street, and, tossing his arms above his head, gave forth the tidings
of a nation’s birth in the words:
“Ring! _Ring!_ RING!”
and then the Liberty Bell echoed the gospel, as foreordained in its
inscription: “Proclaim liberty to the land: to all the inhabitants
thereof.”
That is the most dramatic incident in American history.
Whether we view its inception or its outcome, it stands unrivaled. We
shall forever “celebrate it with thanksgiving” so long as the nation
endures.
This incident responds to every test. It is the action of a single
person actuated by intense emotion; he, a child, was a type of the fact
he expressed; through his puny action began the independent life of a
nation to whose future none dares prescribe limits.
Discovery and colonization were inevitable, and are common to all lands.
Civil wars are expressions rather than causes of great crises. Civil and
commercial progress are inevitable. But the Declaration of Independence
was an act of conscious choice.
No other incident in our history was so momentous, none so dramatic and
comprehensive of past and future.
Columbus was an unconscious instrument in opening a new world; the
Spanish, French, Dutch, and English explorers were all working toward a
consummation none foresaw; the founders of colonies had their ideals, but
all have been swallowed up in our national development. The Revolution
alone looked both backward and forward, and the fathers of the republic
gave us the law of our national being.
The birth-cry of the nation came from the lips of the child who cried
aloud in the streets:
“Ring! _Ring!_ RING!”
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN CRITICISM[8]
BY MOSES COIT TYLER
(Professor of History in Cornell University.)
I
It can hardly be doubted that some hindrance to a right estimate of the
Declaration of Independence is occasioned by either of two opposite
conditions of mind, both of which are often to be met with among us;
on the one hand, a condition of hereditary, uncritical awe and worship
of the American Revolution, and of that state paper as its absolutely
perfect and glorious expression; on the other hand, a later condition
of cultivated distrust of the Declaration, as a piece of writing lifted
up into inordinate renown by the passionate and heroic circumstances
of its origin, and ever since then extolled beyond reason by the blind
energy of patriotic enthusiasm. Turning from the former state of mind,
which obviously calls for no further comment, we may note, as a partial
illustration of the latter, that American confidence in the supreme
intellectual merit of this all-famous document received a serious wound
some forty years ago from the hand of Rufus Choate, when, with a courage
greater than would now be required for such an act, he characterized
it as made up of “glittering and sounding generalities of natural
right.” What the great advocate then so unhesitatingly suggested, many
a thoughtful American since then has at least suspected—that our great
proclamation, as a piece of political literature, cannot stand the test
of modern analysis; that it belongs to the immense class of over-praised
productions; that it is, in fact, a stately patchwork of sweeping
propositions of somewhat doubtful validity; that it has long imposed upon
mankind by the well-known effectiveness of verbal glitter and sound;
that, at the best, it is an example of florid political declamation
belonging to the sophomoric period of our national life, a period which,
as we flatter ourselves, we have now outgrown.
Nevertheless, it is to be noted that whatever authority the Declaration
of Independence has acquired in the world, has been due to no lack of
criticism, either at the time of its first appearance, or since then; a
fact which seems to tell in favor of its essential worth and strength.
From the date of its original publication down to the present moment, it
has been attacked again and again, either in anger, or in contempt, by
friends as well as by enemies of the American Revolution, by liberals
in politics as well as by conservatives. It has been censured for its
substance, it has been censured for its form, for its misstatements of
fact, for its fallacies in reasoning, for its audacious novelties and
paradoxes, for its total lack of all novelty, for its repetition of old
and threadbare statements, even for its downright plagiarisms; finally,
for its grandiose and vaporing style.
II
One of the earliest and ablest of its assailants was Thomas Hutchinson,
the last civil governor of the colony of Massachusetts, who, being
stranded in London by the political storm which had blown him
thither, published there, in the autumn of 1776, his “Strictures upon
the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia,” wherein, with an
unsurpassed knowledge of the origin of the controversy, and with an
unsurpassed acumen in the discussion of it, he traverses the entire
document, paragraph by paragraph, for the purpose of showing that its
allegations in support of American Independence are “false and frivolous.”
A better written, and, upon the whole, a more plausible and a more
powerful arraignment of the great Declaration was the celebrated pamphlet
by Sir John Dalrymple, “The Rights of Great Britain Asserted against the
Claims of America: Being an Answer to the Declaration of the General
Congress,”—a pamphlet scattered broadcast over the world at such a
rate that at least eight editions of it were published during the last
three or four months of the year, 1776. Here, again, the manifesto of
Congress is subjected to a searching examination, in order to prove that
“the facts are either willfully or ignorantly misrepresented, and the
arguments deduced from premises that have no foundation in truth.” It is
doubtful if any disinterested student of history, any competent judge of
reasoning, will now deny to this pamphlet the praise of making out a very
strong case against the historical accuracy and the logical soundness of
many parts of the Declaration of Independence.
Undoubtedly, the force of such censures is for us much broken by the
fact that they proceeded from men who were themselves partisans in the
Revolutionary controversy, and bitterly hostile to the whole movement
which the Declaration was intended to justify. Such is not the case,
however, with the leading modern English critics of the same document,
who while blaming in severe terms the policy of the British Government
toward the Thirteen Colonies, have also found much to abate from the
confidence due to this official announcement of the reasons for our
secession from the empire. For example, Earl Russell, after frankly
saying that the great disruption proclaimed by the Declaration of
Independence was a result which Great Britain had “used every means
most fitted to bring about,” such as “vacillation in council, harshness
in language, feebleness in execution, disregard of American sympathies
and affections,” also pointed out that “the truth of this memorable
Declaration” was “warped” by “one singular defect,” namely, its
exclusive and excessive arraignment of George the Third, “as a single
and despotic tyrant,” much like Philip the Second to the people of the
Netherlands.
This temperate criticism from an able and a liberal English statesman of
the present century may be said to touch the very core of the problem
as to the historic justice of our great indictment of the last King of
America; and there is deep significance in the fact that this is the very
criticism upon the document, which, as John Adams tells us, he himself
had in mind when it was first submitted to him in committee, and even,
when, shortly afterward, he advocated its adoption by Congress. After
mentioning certain things in it with which he was delighted, he adds:
“There were other expressions which I would not have inserted if I 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; but, as Franklin and
Sherman were to inspect it afterwards I thought it would not become me to
strike it out. I consented to report it.”
A more minute and a more poignant criticism of the Declaration of
Independence has been made in recent years by still another English
writer of liberal tendencies, who, however, in his capacity as critic,
seems here to labor under the disadvantage of having transferred to the
document which he undertakes to judge much of the extreme dislike which
he has for the man who wrote it, whom, indeed, he regards as a sophist,
as a demagogue, as quite capable of inveracity in speech, and as bearing
some resemblance to Robespierre “in his feline nature, his malignant
egotism, and his intense suspiciousness, as well as in his bloody-minded,
yet possibly sincere, philanthropy.” In the opinion of Prof. Goldwin
Smith, our great national manifesto is written “in a highly rhetorical
strain; it opens with sweeping aphorisms about the natural rights of man,
at which political science now smiles, and which ... might seem strange
when framed for slave-holding communities by a publicist who himself
held slaves”; while, in his specifications of fact, it “is not more
scrupulously truthful than are the general utterances” of the statesman
who was its scribe. Its charges that the several offensive acts of the
king, besides “evincing a design to reduce the colonists under absolute
despotism,” “all had as their direct object the establishment of an
absolute tyranny,” are simply “propositions which history cannot accept.”
Moreover, the Declaration “blinks the fact that many of the acts, styled
steps of usurpation, were measures of repression, which, however unwise
or excessive, had been provoked by popular outrage. No government could
allow its officers to be assaulted and their houses sacked, its loyal
lieges to be tarred and feathered, or the property of merchants sailing
under its flag to be thrown by lawless hands into the sea.” Even “the
preposterous violence and the manifest insincerity of the suppressed
clause” against slavery and the slave-trade “are enough to create
suspicion as to the spirit in which the whole document was framed.”
III
Finally, as has been already intimated, not even among Americans
themselves has the Declaration of Independence been permitted to pass
on into the enjoyment of its superb renown, without much critical
disparagement at the hands of statesmen and historians. No doubt Calhoun
had its preamble in mind when he declared that “nothing can be more
unfounded and false” than “the prevalent opinion that all men are born
free and equal”; for “it rests upon the assumption of a fact which is
contrary to universal observation.” Of course, all Americans who have
shared to any extent in Calhoun’s doctrines respecting human society
could hardly fail to agree with him in regarding as fallacious and
worthless those general propositions in the Declaration which seem to
constitute its logical starting point, as well as its ultimate defense.
Perhaps, however, the most frequent form of disparagement to which
Jefferson’s great state paper has been subjected among us is that
which would minimize his merit in composing it, by denying to it the
merit of originality. For example, Richard Henry Lee sneered at it as
a thing “copied from Locke’s _Treatise on Government_.” The author of
a life of Jefferson, published in the year of Jefferson’s retirement
from the presidency, suggests that the credit of having composed the
Declaration of Independence “has been perhaps more generally, than
truly, given by the public” to that great man. Charles Campbell, the
historian of Virginia, intimates that some expressions in the document
were taken without acknowledgment from Aphra Behn’s tragi-comedy,
“The Widow-Ranter, or the History of Bacon in Virginia.” John Stockton
Littell describes the Declaration of Independence as “that enduring
monument at once of patriotism, and of genius and skill in the art
of appropriation”—asserting that “for the sentiments and much of the
language” of it, Jefferson was indebted to Chief Justice Brayton’s
charge to the grand jury of Charleston, delivered in April, 1776, as
well as to the Declaration of Independence said to have been adopted by
some citizens of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in May, 1775. Even
the latest and most critical editor of the writings of Jefferson calls
attention to the fact that a glance at the Declaration of Rights, as
adopted by Virginia on the 12th of June, 1776, “would seem to indicate
the source from which Jefferson derived a most important and popular
part” of his famous production. By no one, however, has the charge of a
lack of originality been pressed with so much decisiveness as by John
Adams, who took evident pleasure in speaking of it as a document in
which were merely “recapitulated” previous and well-known statements
of American rights and wrongs, and who, as late as in the year 1822,
deliberately wrote:
“There is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for
two years before. The substance of it is contained in the declaration of
rights and the violation of those rights, in the Journals of Congress,
in 1774. Indeed, the essence of it is contained in a pamphlet, voted and
printed by the town of Boston, before the first Congress met, composed by
James Otis, as I suppose, in one of his lucid intervals, and pruned and
polished by Samuel Adams.”
IV
Perhaps nowhere in our literature would it be possible to find a
criticism brought forward by a really able man against any piece of
writing less applicable to the case, and of less force and value, than
is this particular criticism by John Adams and others, as to the lack
of originality in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, for such a
paper as Jefferson was commissioned to write, the one quality which
it could not properly have had, the one quality which would have been
fatal to its acceptance either by the American Congress or by the
American people—is originality. They were then at the culmination of
a tremendous controversy over alleged grievances of the most serious
kind—a controversy that had been steadily raging for at least twelve
years. In the course of that long dispute, every phase of it, whether
as to abstract right or constitutional privilege or personal procedure,
had been presented in almost every conceivable form of speech. At last,
they had resolved, in view of all this experience, no longer to prosecute
the controversy as members of the empire; they had resolved to revolt,
and, casting off forever their ancient fealty to the British crown, to
separate from the empire, and to establish themselves as a new nation
among the nations of the earth. In this emergency as it happened,
Jefferson was called upon to put into form a suitable statement of the
chief considerations which prompted them to this great act of revolution,
and which, as they believed, justified it. What, then, was Jefferson
to do? Was he to regard himself as a mere literary essayist, set to
produce before the world a sort of prize-dissertation—a calm, analytic,
judicial treatise on history and politics with a particular application
to Anglo-American affairs—one essential merit of which would be its
originality as a contribution to historical and political literature?
Was he not, rather, to regard himself, as, for the time being, the very
mouthpiece and prophet of the people whom he represented, and as such
required to bring together and to set in order, in their name, not what
was new, but what was old; to gather up into his own soul, as much as
possible, whatever was then also in their souls, their very thoughts and
passions, their ideas of constitutional law, their interpretations of
fact, their opinions as to men and as to events in all that ugly quarrel,
their notions of justice, of civic dignity, of human rights; finally,
their memories of wrongs which seemed to them intolerable, especially
of wrongs inflicted upon them during those twelve years by the hands of
insolent and brutal men, in the name of the king, and by his apparent
command?
Moreover, as the nature of the task laid upon him made it necessary
that he should thus state, as the reasons for their intended act,
those very considerations both as to fact and as to opinion which had
actually operated upon their minds, so did it require him to do so,
to some extent, in the very language which the people themselves, in
their more formal and deliberate utterances, had all along been using.
In the development of political life in England and America, there had
already been created a vast literature of constitutional progress—a
literature common to both portions of the English race, pervaded by its
own stately traditions, and reverberating certain great phrases which
formed, as one may say, almost the vernacular of English justice, and of
English aspiration for a free, manly and orderly political life. In this
vernacular the Declaration of Independence was written. The phraseology
thus characteristic of it is the very phraseology of the champions of
constitutional expansion, of civic dignity and progress, within the
English race ever since Magna Charta; of the great state papers of
English freedom in the seventeenth century, particularly the Petition
of Right in 1629, and the Bill of Rights in 1789; of the great English
Charters for colonization in America; of the great English exponents
of legal and political progress—Sir Edward Coke, John Milton, Sir
Philip Sidney, John Locke; finally, of the great American exponents of
political liberty, and of the chief representative bodies, whether local
or general, which had convened in America from the time of Stamp Act
Congress until that of the Congress which resolved upon our independence.
To say, therefore, that the official declaration of that resolve is
a paper made up of the very opinions, beliefs, unbeliefs, the very
sentiments, prejudices, passions, even the errors in judgment and the
personal misconstructions—if they were such—which then actually impelled
the American people to that mighty act, and that all these are expressed
in the very phrases which they had been accustomed to use, is to pay to
that state-paper the highest tribute as to its fitness for the purpose
for which it was framed.