and perhaps never does he rise before us with more dignity, with more
truth, than when, late in his lifetime, hurt by the captious and jangling
words of disparagement then recently put into writing by his old
comrade, to the effect that the Declaration of Independence “contained no
new ideas, that it is a commonplace compilation, its sentences hackneyed
in Congress for two years before, and its essence contained in Otis’s
pamphlet,” Jefferson quietly remarked that perhaps these statements might
“all be true: of that I am not to be the judge.... Whether I had gathered
my ideas from reading or reflection, I do not know. I know only that I
turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider
it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer
no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.”
Before passing from this phase of the subject, however, it should be
added that, while the Declaration of Independence lacks originality in
the sense just indicated, in another and perhaps in a higher sense, it
possesses originality—it is individualized by the character and by the
genius of its author. Jefferson gathered up the thoughts and emotions
and even the characteristic phrases of the people for whom he wrote,
and these he perfectly incorporated with what was already in his mind,
and then to the music of his own keen, rich, passionate, and enkindling
style, he mustered them into that stately and triumphant procession
wherein, as some of us still think, they will go marching on to the
world’s end.
There were then in Congress several other men who could have written the
Declaration of Independence, and written it well—notably Franklin, either
of the two Adamses, Richard Henry Lee, William Livingston, and, best of
all, but for his own opposition to the measure, John Dickinson; but had
any one of these other men written the Declaration of Independence,
while it would have contained, doubtless, nearly the same topics and
nearly the same great formulas of political statement, it would yet have
been a wholly different composition from this of Jefferson’s. No one at
all familiar with his other writings, as well as with the writings of his
chief contemporaries, could ever have a moment’s doubt, even if the fact
were not already notorious, that this document was by Jefferson. He put
into it something that was his own, and that no one else could have put
there. He put himself into it—his own genius, his own moral force, his
faith in God, his faith in ideas, his love of innovation, his passion for
progress, his invincible enthusiasm, his intolerance of prescription, of
injustice, of cruelty; his sympathy, his clarity of vision, his affluence
of diction, his power to fling out great phrases which will long fire and
cheer the souls of men struggling against political unrighteousness.
And herein lies its essential originality, perhaps the most precious,
and, indeed, almost the only originality ever attaching to any great
literary product that is representative of its time. He made for himself
no improper claim, therefore, when he directed that upon the granite
obelisk at his grave should be carved the words: “Here was buried Thomas
Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence.”
V
If the Declaration of Independence is now to be fairly judged by us, it
must be judged with reference to what it was intended to be, namely,
an impassioned manifesto of one party, and that the weaker party, in a
violent race-quarrel; of a party resolved, at last, upon the extremity
of revolution, and already menaced by the inconceivable disaster of
being defeated in the very act of armed rebellion against the mightiest
military power on earth. This manifesto, then, is not to be censured
because, being avowedly a statement of his own side of the quarrel,
it does not also contain a moderate and judicial statement of the
opposite side; or because, being necessarily partisan in method, it is
likewise both partisan and vehement in tone; or because it bristles
with accusations against the enemy so fierce and so unqualified as now
to seem in some respects overdrawn; or because it resounds with certain
great aphorisms about the natural rights of man, at which, indeed,
political science cannot now smile, except to its own discomfiture
and shame—aphorisms which are likely to abide in this world as the
chief source and inspiration of heroic enterprises among men for
self-deliverance from oppression.
Taking into account, therefore, as we are bound to do, the circumstances
of its origin, and especially its purpose as a solemn and piercing appeal
to mankind on behalf of a small and weak nation against the alleged
injustice and cruelty of a great and powerful one, it still remains our
duty to inquire whether, as has been asserted in our time, history must
set aside either of the two central charges embodied in the Declaration
of Independence.
The first of these charges affirms that the several acts complained of by
the colonists evinced “a design to reduce them under absolute despotism,”
and had as their “direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny”
over the American people. Was this, indeed, a groundless charge, in the
sense intended by the words “despotism” and “tyranny”—that is, in the
sense commonly given to those words in the usage of the English-speaking
race? According to that usage, it was not an Oriental despotism that
was meant, nor a Greek tyranny, nor a Roman, nor a Spanish. The sort of
despot, the sort of tyrant, whom the English people, ever since the time
of King John and especially during the period of the Stuarts, had been
accustomed to look for and to guard against, was the sort of tyrant or
despot that could be evolved out of the conditions of English political
life. Furthermore, he was not by them expected to appear among them at
the outset in the fully developed shape of a Philip or an Alva in the
Netherlands. They were able to recognize him, they were prepared to
resist him, in the earliest and most incipient stage of his being—at the
moment, in fact, when he should make his first attempt to gain all power
over his people, by assuming the single power to take their property
without their consent. Hence it was, as Edmund Burke pointed out in the
House of Commons only a few weeks before the American Revolution entered
upon its military phase, that:
“The great contests for freedom ... were from the earliest times chiefly
upon the question of taxing. Most of the contests in the ancient
commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates,
or on the balance among the several orders of the state. The question of
money was not with them so immediate. But in England it was otherwise.
On this point of taxes the ablest pens and most eloquent tongues have
been exercised, the greatest spirits have acted and suffered.... They
took infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that
in all monarchies the people must in effect, themselves, mediately or
immediately, possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow
of liberty could subsist. The colonies draw from you, as with their
life-blood, these ideas and principles. Their love of liberty, as with
you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing. Liberty might
be safe or might be endangered in twenty other particulars without their
being much pleased or alarmed. Here they felt its pulse, and as they
found that beat, they thought themselves sick or sound.”
Accordingly, the meaning which the English race on both sides of
the Atlantic were accustomed to attach to the words “tyranny” and
“despotism,” was a meaning to some degree ideal; it was a meaning drawn
from the extraordinary political sagacity with which the race is endowed,
from their extraordinary sensitiveness as to the use of the taxing-power
in government, from their instinctive perception of the commanding place
of the taxing-power among all the other forms of power in the state,
from their perfect assurance that he who holds the purse with the power
to fill it and to empty it, holds the key of the situation—can maintain
an army of his own, can rule without consulting Parliament, can silence
criticism, can crush opposition, can strip his subjects of every vestige
of political life; in other words, he can make slaves of them, he can
make a despot and a tyrant of himself. Therefore, the system which in
the end might develop into results so palpably tyrannic and despotic,
they bluntly called a tyranny and a despotism in the beginning. To say,
therefore, that the Declaration of Independence did the same, is to say
that it spoke good English. Of course, history will be ready to set aside
the charge thus made in language not all liable to be misunderstood, just
so soon as history is ready to set aside the common opinion that the
several acts of the British government, from 1764 to 1776, for laying
and enforcing taxation in America, did evince a somewhat particular
and systematic design to take away some portion of the property of the
American people without their consent.
The second of the two great charges contained in the Declaration of
Independence, while intimating that some share in the blame is due to the
British Parliament and to the British people, yet fastens upon the king
himself as the one person chiefly responsible for the scheme of American
tyranny therein set forth, and culminates in the frank description of
him as “a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may
define a tyrant.” Is this accusation of George the Third now to be set
aside as unhistoric? Was that king, or was he not, chiefly responsible
for the American policy of the British government between the years 1764
and 1776? If he was so, then the historic soundness of the most important
portion of the Declaration of Independence is vindicated.
Fortunately, this question can be answered without hesitation, and in
a few words; and for these few words, an American writer of to-day,
conscious of his own bias of nationality, will rightly prefer to
cite such words as have been uttered upon the subject by the ablest
English historians of our time. Upon their statements alone it must
be concluded that George the Third ascended his throne with the fixed
purpose of resuming to the crown many of those powers which, by the
constitution of England, did not then belong to it, and that in this
purpose, at least during the first twenty-five years of his reign, he
substantially succeeded—himself determining what should be the policy
of each administration, what opinions his ministers should advocate in
Parliament, and what measures Parliament itself should adopt. Says Sir
Erskine May:
“The king desired to undertake personally the chief administration of
public affairs, to direct the policy of his ministers, and himself to
distribute the patronage of the crown. He was ambitious not only to
reign, but to govern. Strong as were the ministers, the king was resolved
to wrest all power from their hands, and to exercise it himself. But
what was this in effect but to assert that the king should be his own
minister?... The king’s tactics were fraught with danger, as well to the
crown itself as to the constitutional liberties of the people.”
Already prior to the year 1778, according to Lecky, the king had
“laboriously built up” in England a “system of personal government”; and
it was because he was unwilling to have this system disturbed that he
then refused, “in defiance of the most earnest representations of his
own minister and of the most eminent politicians of every party ... to
send for the greatest of living statesmen at the moment when the empire
appeared to be in the very agonies of dissolution.... Either Chatham
or Rockingham should have insisted that the policy of the country
should be directed by its responsible ministers and not dictated by an
irresponsible sovereign.”
This refusal of the king to pursue the course which was called for by
the constitution, and which would have taken the control of the policy
of the government out of his hands, was, according to the same great
historian, an act “the most criminal in the whole reign of George the
Third; ... as criminal as any of those acts which led Charles the First
to the scaffold.”
Even so early as the year 1768, according to John Richard Green,
“George the Third had at last reached his aim.... In the early days of
the ministry” (which began in that year) “his influence was felt to be
predominant. In its later and more disastrous days it was supreme; for
Lord North, who became the head of the ministry on Grafton’s retirement
in 1770, was the mere mouthpiece of the king. ‘Not only did he direct
the minister,’ a careful observer tells us, ‘in all important matters of
foreign and domestic policy, but he instructed him as to the management
of debates in Parliament, suggested what motions should be made or
opposed, and how measures should be carried. He reserved for himself all
the patronage, he arranged the whole cast of the administration, settled
the relative place and pretentions of ministers of state, law officers,
and members of the household, nominated and promoted the English and
Scotch judges, appointed and translated bishops and deans, and dispensed
other preferments in the church. He disposed of military governments,
regiments, and commissions, and himself ordered the marching of troops.
He gave and refused titles, honors, and pensions.’ All this immense
patronage was steadily used for the creation of a party in both houses of
Parliament attached to the king himself.... George, was, in fact, sole
minister during the fifteen years which followed; and the shame of the
darkest hour of English history lies wholly at his door.”
Surely, until these tremendous verdicts of English history shall
be set aside, there need be no anxiety in any quarter as to the
historic soundness of the two great accusations which together make
up the principal portion of the Declaration of Independence. In the
presence of these verdicts also, even the passion, the intensity of
language, in which those accusations are uttered, seem to find a
perfect justification. Indeed, in the light of the most recent and most
unprejudiced expert testimony, the whole document, both in its substance
and in its form, seems to have been the logical response of a nation of
brave men to the great words of the greatest of English statesmen, as
spoken in the House of Commons precisely ten years before:
“This kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the colonies. Sir, I rejoice
that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the
feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have
been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.”
VI
Thus, ever since its first announcement to the world, and down almost to
the present moment, has the Declaration of Independence been tested by
criticism of every possible kind—by criticism intended and expected to
be destructive. Apparently, however, all this criticism has failed to
accomplish its object.
It is proper for us to remember, also, that what we call criticism is not
the only valid test of the genuineness and worth of any piece of writing
of great practical interest to mankind; there is, in addition, the test
of actual use and service, in direct contact with the common sense and
the moral sense of large masses of men, under various conditions, and for
a long period. Probably no writing which is not essentially sound and
true has ever survived this test.
Neither from this test has the great Declaration any need to shrink. As
to the immediate use for which it was sent forth—that of rallying and
uniting the friends of the Revolution, and bracing them for their great
task—its effectiveness was so great and so obvious that it has never
been denied. During the century and a quarter since the Revolution, its
influence on the political character and the political conduct of the
American people has been great beyond calculation. For example, after we
had achieved our own national deliverance, and had advanced into that
enormous and somewhat corrupting material prosperity which followed the
adoption of the constitution and the development of the cotton-interest
and the expansion of the Republic into a transcontinental power, we fell
under an appalling temptation—the temptation to forget, or to repudiate,
or to refuse to apply to the case of our human brethren in bondage, the
principles which we had once proclaimed as the basis of every rightful
government. The prodigious service rendered to us in this awful moral
emergency by the Declaration of Independence, was, that its public
repetition, at least once every year, in the hearing of vast throngs of
the American people in every portion of the Republic, kept constantly
before our minds, in a form of almost religious sanctity, those few
great ideas as to the dignity of human nature, and the sacredness of
personality, and the indestructible rights of man as mere man, with
which it had so gloriously identified the beginnings of our national
existence. It did at last become very hard for us to listen each year
to the preamble of the Declaration and still remain the owners and
users and catchers of slaves; still harder, to accept the doctrine that
the righteousness and prosperity of slavery was to be accepted as the
dominant policy of the nation. The logic of Calhoun was as flawless
as usual, when he concluded that the chief obstruction in the way of
his system was the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. Had it
not been for the inviolable sacredness given by it to those sweeping
aphorisms about the natural rights of man, it may be doubted whether
Calhoun might not have won over an immense majority of the American
people to the support of his compact and plausible scheme for making
slavery the basis of the Republic. It was the preamble of the Declaration
of Independence which elected Lincoln, which sent forth the Emancipation
Proclamation, which gave victory to Grant, which ratified the Thirteenth
Amendment.
We shall not here attempt to delineate the influence of this state
paper upon mankind in general. Of course, the emergence of the American
Republic as an imposing world-power is a phenomenon which has now for
many years attracted the attention of the human race. Surely, no slight
effect must have resulted from the fact that, among all civilized
peoples, the one American document best known is the Declaration of
Independence, and that thus the spectacle of so vast and beneficent a
political success has been everywhere associated with the assertion of
the natural rights of man. “The doctrines it contained,” says Buckle,
“were not merely welcomed by a majority of the French nation, but even
the government itself was unable to withstand the general feeling. Its
effect in hastening the approach of the French Revolution ... was indeed
most remarkable.” Elsewhere, also, in many lands, among many peoples, it
has been cited again and again as an inspiration to political courage, as
a model for political conduct; and if, as the brilliant historian just
alluded to has affirmed, “that noble Declaration ... ought to be hung up
in the nursery of every king, and blazoned on the porch of every royal
palace,” it is because it has become the classic statement of political
truths which must at last abolish kings altogether, or else teach them to
identify their existence with the dignity and happiness of human nature.
V
THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE
THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION
BY JOSIAH QUINCY
When we speak of the glory of our fathers, we mean not that vulgar renown
to be attained by physical strength; nor yet that higher fame, to be
acquired by intellectual power. Both often exist without lofty thought,
pure intent, or generous purpose. The glory which we celebrate was
strictly of a moral and religious character: righteous as to its ends;
just as to its means.
The American Revolution had its origin neither in ambition, nor avarice,
nor envy, nor in any gross passion; but in the nature and relation of
things, and in the thence-resulting necessity of separation from the
parent state. Its progress was limited by that necessity. Our fathers
displayed great strength and great moderation of purpose. In difficult
times they conducted it with wisdom; in doubtful times, with firmness;
in perilous times, with courage; under oppressive trials, erect; amidst
temptations, unseduced; in the dark hour of danger, fearless; in the
bright hour of prosperity, faithful.
It was not the instant feeling and pressure of despotism that roused
them to resist, but the principle on which that arm was extended. They
could have paid the impositions of the British government, had they
been increased a thousandfold; but payment acknowledged right, and
they spurned the consequences of that acknowledgment. But, above all,
they realized that those burdens, though light in themselves, would to
coming ages—to us, their posterity—be heavy, and probably insupportable.
They preferred to meet the trial in their own times, and to make the
sacrifices in their own persons, that we and our descendants, their
posterity, might reap the harvest and enjoy the increase.
Generous men, exalted patriots, immortal statesmen! For this deep moral
and social affection, for this elevated self-devotion, this bold daring,
the multiplying millions of your posterity, as they spread backward to
the lakes, and from the lakes to the mountains, and from the mountains
to the western waters, shall annually, in all future time, come up to
the temples of the Most High, with song and anthem, and thanksgiving;
with cheerful symphonies and hallelujahs, to repeat your names; to look
steadfastly on the brightness of your glory; to trace its spreading rays
to the points from which they emanate; and to seek in your character and
conduct a practical illustration of public duty in every occurring social
exigency.
THE SONG OF THE CANNON
BY SAM WALTER FOSS
When the diplomats cease from their capers,
Their red-tape requests and replies,
Their shuttlecock battle of papers,
Their saccharine parley of lies;
When the plenipotentiary wrangle
Is tied in a chaos of knots,
And becomes an unwindable tangle
Of verbals unmarried to thoughts;
When they’ve anguished and argued profoundly,
Asserted, assumed, and averred,
Then I end up the dialogue roundly
With my monosyllabical word.
Not mine in a speech academic,
No lexicon lingo is mine,
And in politic parley, polemic,
I was never created to shine.
But I speak with some show of decision,
And I never attempt to be bland,
I hurl my one word with precision,
My hearers—they all understand.
It requires no labored translation,
Its pith and its import to glean;
They gather its signification;
They know at the first what I mean.
The codes of the learned legations,
Of form, and of rule, and decree,
The etiquette books of the nations,—
They were never intended for me.
When your case is talked into confusion,
Then hush you, my diplomat friend,
Give me just a word in conclusion,
Let me bring the dispute to an end.
Ye diplomats, cease to aspire,
A case that’s appealed to debate,
It has gone to a court that is higher,
And I’m the Attorney for Fate.
PAUL REVERE’S RIDE[9]
(April 18, 1775.)
BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal-light,
One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”