DR: It doesn’t say “The Declaration of Independence” in the document. Why did they call it that?
DA: Independence was voted on July 2, 1776, and the text of the Declaration on July 4, 1776. But somebody was already in the business of sneaking out copies. They had leaks in the Continental Congress. The result of that was an early newspaper printing and also the first book publication of the Declaration in July 1776. In that book publication, the header along the top of the page says “Declaration of Independence.”
DR: So it wasn’t Thomas Jefferson?
DA: Just a printer.
DR: When the colonies were set up, the British didn’t tax them at first. When did the British say, “We’re going to impose taxes on you,” and why was that such a shock?
DA: By the middle of the 1760s, the British government had gotten itself embroiled in the French and Indian War on this continent and the Seven Years’ War in Europe. They were in debt. What do you do when you’re in debt? You extract taxes. And so in 1764 the British introduced the Sugar Act, and it goes from there.
DR: The Americans said, “Wait a second. We haven’t had taxes before, and what about the principle of no taxation without representation?” What did the British say about that?
DA: James Otis, another neglected name, in 1764 wrote a pamphlet defending the rights of the British citizens of the colonies. He is the one who gets the credit for the “no taxation without representation” line. The issue wasn’t just taxation. That was certainly a key issue, but it was also that Britain was changing how they were handling judicial cases. There was a general sense of an incipient breakdown of the rule of law.
DR: When did the first British troops come over to enforce the taxation?
DA: British troops were consistently in the colonies. They had been there for the French and Indian War. The Stamp Act of 1765 was the act where Britain required that you had to pay for every piece of paper, whether it was used for a legal document or a newspaper or whatever else. This is the first point of real uprising. There’s even some skirmishing with the British troops.
It’s also important to say that this is a period when King George is a new king. He’s a baby. He’s twenty-one or twenty-two when he comes to the throne in 1760. And the simple fact of the matter is he just did not know what he was doing. England was actually as unstable in its politics as the colonies were.
DR: Who sent the troops over to Concord and Lexington? It was a massacre, and people were killed. That was in 1775?
DA: Exactly. But we skipped the Boston Tea Party of 1773. The Americans refused to unload the British tea because of the way the tax structure was working. They didn’t want to pay. They were limited in their use of tea and other things that were coming through Britain. They couldn’t just directly get tea from India and so forth. To protest this, the plan was to dump all the tea into the harbor.
DR: After the Boston Tea Party, the British were really upset. That’s when they said, “We’re going to send more troops over”?
DA: They’re really worried about the amount of ammunition that has spread through the countryside and the colonial militias. They send troops to Lexington and Concord to try to secure these munitions, and there’s an accidental shot that triggers other shooting.
DR: The thirteen colonies had never actually had a congress because they felt they were, in effect, arms of British territory. When did they decide to have a Continental Congress?
DA: In 1774. The Tea Party’s in ’73, then Britain closes the Boston port and imposes other kinds of onerous restrictions on the colonies. That’s what motivates the Continental Congress.
DR: The delegates get to Philadelphia. They don’t want to be independent. They say, “How can we save these colonies?”
DA: They work hard on reconciliation. They work hard on submitting petitions to the king. The entire case of the Declaration rests on the fact that they’ve been working really hard for years to make their case to England and to assert their rights as English citizens.
DR: The Continental Congress sent a petition to the king saying, “Your Parliament is treating us poorly, but we know you’re going to treat us well.” What did the king say about that?
DA: On multiple occasions they got insufficient responses from the king, but the most important one was in the Second Continental Congress. They send a petition in July 1775. They’re getting to the end of their tether. Massachusetts is raring to go, ready for independence, but Virginia’s dragging its feet. They decide to make one last effort to reconcile, and they hear nothing—nothing at all.
At the time, it takes something like six weeks for a letter to get across the ocean anyway, so they don’t expect to hear immediately. They send the petition at the end of July. They get to September and they’ve heard nothing. They get to October, they’ve heard nothing.
The king completely disregards the petition. In October they start hearing news of skirmishes where British troops are attacking along the coast, so they take those actions on the part of the British military as their answer. They read the king’s intentions from what they see in the actions of his military. At that point, John Adams is like, “Let’s do it.”
DR: John Adams says, in this Second Continental Congress, “What we need to do is be independent.” Was that the majority opinion in the country?
DA: Things are tipping by the time we get to 1776, but it’s that fall of 1775 that is the really critical point. The politics are complicated. You have John Adams driving politics in the North. You have Richard Henry Lee driving politics in the South. The two of them are early adopters for revolution, for independence, and they’re trying to bring everybody else along.
What radicalizes the Virginians is that the governor decrees that any enslaved person who escapes from a plantation and fights for the British will earn their freedom. That is what commits the Virginians to wanting to declare independence. Their view is that the king is interfering with their rights of property, and they start to use that vocabulary, talking about the revolution.
So Adams and Richard Henry Lee are both driving toward independence, for different reasons. It’s important to say out loud that Adams didn’t own slaves. He thought enslavement was a bad thing. This country has always had multiple traditions operating at the same time. So John Adams writes this to-do list in February 1776, and on that to-do list he has both “Write constitutions for the colonies” and “Declare independence.”
“Constitutions for the colonies” comes first. That’s the important point in this story.
By this point, New Hampshire has no government. Their royal governor just ran away. They write to Congress and say, “What are we supposed to do?” And Congress says, “Write a constitution!”
So New Hampshire writes one, and by the time we actually get to June and July 1776, there’s a lot of constitution-writing already happening. It’s showing people what comes after the revolution that makes it possible for them to embrace it.
In June, Lee stands up and proposes independence. Not all of the delegations there in Philadelphia had the authority to vote. Because they wanted unanimity on the vote, they withheld voting until July so that people could go back and secure authority.
DR: They also decided to be prepared for a vote of independence. To do that, they wanted to have a document that would explain why. Who was put on the committee to draft that?
DA: Adams was super busy. He was on every committee, and Jefferson was a kid.
DR: He was thirty-three.
DA: Exactly. He lived on the outskirts of town, and he didn’t like to socialize, and he didn’t seem to have a lot of friends. Adams thought, “This guy knows how to write, and he’s not very busy, so let’s get him elected to chair of this committee.”
DR: There were five people on the committee. The others were—?
DA: Adams, because he worked the politics behind the scenes on the vote and got Jefferson elected chair by one vote. Adams came in second, then Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherm
an of Connecticut, and Robert Livingston of New York. They worked together, and Adams and Franklin really made meaningful contributions to the text.
DR: Adams later said that he didn’t think he should write it because he wasn’t that popular and Jefferson was a better writer. What do you think really happened?
DA: I’m sure that was part of the conversation. Listen to who I named on that committee: Jefferson/Virginia, Adams/Massachusetts, Franklin/Pennsylvania, Sherman/Connecticut, Livingston/New York. One southerner, four northerners. The northerners were hotter on revolution than the South. They needed the Virginian to be at the head of making the case for independence as a part of uniting the entirety.
DR: Jefferson is given seventeen days to write. Does he spend every part of those seventeen days doing that?
DA: He goes out shopping, it seems, for ladies’ gloves. He does mostly spend his time writing, but he isn’t alone. He works with Adams and Franklin, and he’s got materials to draw on. He has George Mason’s work for the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which has a lot of related language and concepts. He almost certainly has a text [the Proclamation for the General Court] that John Adams wrote for Massachusetts in January 1776, which reads like a rough draft of the Declaration.
DR: Jefferson drafts this document, and then he shows it to the other members of the committee. They say, “We’re going to edit this a lot, because we know you like being edited”?
DA: They do edit it in meaningful ways. Let me just give you a couple of the most important changes. Creator is a word that comes in from Adams and Franklin. There wasn’t religious language in the version Jefferson wrote. That mostly comes in from Congress in its edits after the committee. Self-evident is another word that emerges from Franklin and Adams in their conversations.
The other really important thing that happens is in the phrase life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries delivered to the rights conversation was the phrase life, liberty, and property.
So what happened to property? Why did it turn into pursuit of happiness? Because of the royal governor’s interference and promise of emancipation to enslaved African Americans who would join the British, Virginians had begun to argue for independence using a language of defense of property rights. So by the spring of 1776, the defense of property was connected to the defense of slavery.
Adams has been arguing that happiness is the concept to use. He puts out a pamphlet in April 1776 where he says that the objective for governments is the same as the objective for individual man, and that final objective is happiness. Adams was somebody who was against slavery. That phrase in the Declaration is an antislavery moment.
It’s part of a compromise, because there was other language in the draft that was also antislavery, which Congress cut out. That cutting was the proslavery moment in the Declaration. It’s important to recognize that the compromises and structure of the Constitution were already in play at the moment of the Declaration.
DR: So they submit this document at the end of June 1776 to the Continental Congress. The members come back and vote on July 1 and 2 to be independent. On the night of July 2, John Adams writes to his wife. What does he say to Abigail in his famous letter?
DA: He says, “No question as important as this has ever been debated in America or ever will be.” He does think July 2 will be the day that everybody celebrates rather than July 4.
DR: When they take up the actual document that has been drafted by the committee, do they say, “This is wonderful, and we don’t need to edit it”?
DA: No. The most substantial edits are two different compromises.
We can distinguish between good compromises and bad compromises. Compromise is a good thing. We’ve gotten really stuck in this country on this issue, because the compromise we know most about is the slavery compromise. Because it was such a bad compromise and did so much damage to so many people, it’s very hard for us to see what a good compromise could be.
So how do we tell the difference? The good compromise in the Declaration is the compromise around religion. Congress added religious language. The document is very carefully constructed so that no particular doctrinal position is visible.
It has belt-and-suspenders language—in the beginning, the phrase laws of nature, and of nature’s God. You could be a Deist or you could be an atheist and think there’s a natural account about rights that is sufficient to justify the arguments of the Declaration.
That was a good compromise, because it incorporated all the different views about religion then in the colonies. To make a good compromise, you need the inclusion of all perspectives and voices.
Bad compromise—slavery. That left a lot of people out in terms of thinking about whether this was a workable compromise. My ancestors did not think it was a workable compromise.
DR: The words slavery and slave are never mentioned in the Declaration. In the debate on July 3 and July 4, I think in your book you say they made sixty-eight changes in the text given to them.
DA: They made a lot.
DR: What did Jefferson do while the debate was occurring?
DA: He suffered silently. He just listened and noted every change down as it went. The general accounting of it is that it was like watching your child being mutilated.
DR: Did he later send copies of his version and Congress’s version to his friends, saying, “Don’t you think my version was better?”
DA: He absolutely did. Jefferson was not known for a small ego.
DR: The night of the fourth of July, they agreed on the text. What did they do to get people to know what they’d agreed to?
DA: Congress had its official printer, a man named John Dunlap, and he had two jobs as of July 4. The first was to produce a broadside—a poster. He produced about two hundred of those for distribution to the troops. It was also for distribution to foreign governments, as they were now in the process of trying to develop treaties with France and Spain, seeking resources and alliances. They also gave Dunlap the job of printing it in his newspaper.
DR: They printed up two hundred copies, of which I think there are only twenty-seven left. King George gets a copy. Does he say, “Hey, you convinced me, and now I’m going to change my position”?
DA: No. The British government doubles down. They’re intent on maintaining control of the colonies. It’s important again to recognize how much uncertainty and instability they had anyway.
We forget that King George was also the elector of Hanover. He was a German monarch as well as being a British monarch. So when he engages Hessian troops, German troops, to come fight here, it’s not exactly calling in foreign mercenaries. He’s using all the forces of both his regimes to try to control the colonies.
DR: When do the delegates actually sign the document?
DA: The signing doesn’t start until August, and it takes some time to finish. Most of them do sign in August 1776.
DR: Why is John Hancock’s signature so big?
DA: He was the president of the Continental Congress, so that was his job.
DR: Signing that document was treason?
DA: Any aid to the Americans had been designated as treason a couple years earlier. It wasn’t just signing the document. Coming back to the difficulty of our original sin and the problematic nature of the compromise, even at that point, in 1776, they compromise over slavery out of fear. The fear is that they’ve now committed themselves to a treasonous battle that they cannot win if they split up. And so in the Continental Congress in July 1776, they basically decide to try to sweep the question of slavery under the rug out of fear.
DR: How could Thomas Jefferson write “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”? Jefferson had two slaves with him when he was writing this. Did he think all white men were created equal? What was he thinking?
DA: That is super important, and there are a couple of different ways to get to the core of this. Again, if you go back an
d look at that rough draft, the passage that Congress cut out about slavery is one in which Jefferson was condemning the slave trade. He uses the same vocabulary for people from Africa as for the colonists. He refers to their sacred rights of life and liberty. And in that passage, he also condemns slave markets as places where men—and he puts the word MEN in all caps. So we know that he used the word “men” in a universal way to mean all human beings, because it’s not just the case that in slave markets only males were sold. Women were sold too.
How do you explain the discrepancy in how power was organized? To answer that question, let’s go back to the end of the second sentence:
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 power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Again, it’s the last clause, the distinction between laying the foundation on principle and organizing the powers of government. What hangs on that distinction?
Abigail Adams wrote to John Adams. She was very excited about revolution, and she said, “What about the ladies? Where do the women fit in this account”?
Adams wrote back, and he said, in paraphrase, “The principles of life, liberty, and happiness, that’s for everybody.” As to how to organize the powers of government, he says, “We men are not going to give up our masculine system.” That was his phrase, “masculine system.” That was the distinction they relied on, but they actually did think of the principles as universal, pertaining to everybody.
Abigail writes back and she says, and again I’m paraphrasing, “Great that those principles apply, but you guys don’t have a good track record, you husbands, at exercising power on behalf of wives effectively.” She says, “If you can’t do it, we women will,” in her words, “foment rebellion for voice and representation.”
The American Experiment Page 5
