The American Declaration of Independence

This research will examine the American Declaration of Independence and the extent to which it accomplished the purposes that it articulated. The research will set forth the historical context in which the Declaration emerged and then discuss how the consequences that flowed from it correlated with what the document represented and with its function as an artifact of nation-state institutionalization.

It is both a commonplace and a definitive statement of origins in American history that the Declaration of Independence, written in 1776 as the justification for the revolution that resulted, in 1783, in dissolution of royal authority over the British colonies, was meant, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, "to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent." The Declaration is acknowledged as the provenance of the American republic, but the seriousness of purpose informing it is perhaps less well known. Part of this may be attributed to the fact that the Revolution itself was not shaped by men of extreme youth and idealism but rather by educated, professional men of property and generally high social position. The Continental Congress representatives who convened in Philadelphia in 1776 were steeped in Enlightenment thought, the political strands of which could be traced to such commentators as Rousseau and Voltaire in France, and Locke and Hume in England. It is not too much to say, indeed, that the intellectual groun

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ill not save from some degree of dishonor those, who voluntarily engaged to conduct it." The Declaration itself emerged in the context of rapidly unfolding events. It is dated some six months after publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, the well-known pamphlet of revolutionary propaganda that itself had appeared eight months after the armed conflict between British troops and American farmers at Concord and Lexington. The war that eventually guaranteed the new nation unchallenged territorial sovereignty emerged in no small measure from a rhetorical politics that rationalized, or more exactly realized in the sense of intending to make real, philosophical abstractions expressed as discontent with specific provisions of colonial law--the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and so on. Decisively isolated from European politics geographically, America had developed its own economic, social, and political character as well. One effect of Common Sense and of the Declaration that followed it, then, was to decode that character on one hand and encode, or create specific symbolic referents of the American approach to public and private life on the other. This approach was shaped by persons whose intellectual equipment was not sufficiently

Category: History - T