Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor

by Richard R. Beeman

  It is of course the second paragraph of the preamble, and, in particular the first sentence of that paragraph, that, in their final form, have become a vital part of American memory and American ideals:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable 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 those ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute 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.

  Although the opening words of that second paragraph of the preamble are significantly indebted to the writings of John Locke, the more immediate influence on Jefferson’s composition of that passage, occurring virtually simultaneously with his duties as chair of the Continental Congress’s Committee of Five, was his intense intellectual and emotional involvement in the crafting of the Virginia Constitution and Declaration of Rights. However frustrated he may have been that he was not in Williamsburg to take the lead in that effort, his involvement from afar had a direct impact on his drafting of the preamble of America’s Declaration of Independence.

  On June 12, the Pennsylvania Gazette printed the Virginia Convention committee’s first draft of the Declaration of Rights, a draft most likely crafted by Jefferson’s senior Virginia colleague, George Mason. It is likely that Jefferson read the draft just as he was beginning his composition of the Declaration of Independence. The draft of the Virginia Declaration printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette began: “That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Although Jefferson could not have known it at the time, the Virginia Convention, when it eventually adopted the draft of the Declaration of Rights, made one small, but highly significant change, adding, between the phrases “of which” and “they cannot” another phrase—another qualifying phrase: “when they enter into a state of society.” Thus with italics added: “That all men are by their nature free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity; namely the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” That seemingly innocuous (and perhaps purposely ambiguous) phrase was in fact of momentous importance, for when members of the Virginia Convention read the original phraseology, many of them protested that such an open-ended assertion of mankind’s inherent rights of life and liberty might be “misinterpreted” to apply to the colony’s slave population, and thus the Convention added the phrase “when they enter into a state of society” to avoid any such misconception.20

  Jefferson’s initial articulation of the fundamental natural rights of man did not include that qualification and was somewhat more elegant than the version in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, but it was nevertheless inferior to the language of the final draft. In his initial composition, he wrote:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal & independent; that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.

  The final draft was not only more concise, but more elegant than either the Virginia Convention’s version or that in Jefferson’s initial draft. And it did not include the qualification of “when they enter into a state of society,” which excluded forty percent of Virginia’s population from the guarantee of the blessings of liberty. There is little doubt that Jefferson’s own conception of the promises of equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was, at least implicitly, far more limited than ours today, but the fact that the language of the preamble did not include that qualification has proven enormously important over the course of America’s history.

  The famous opening lines of the preamble’s second paragraph were in fact intended as just a preface to the paragraph’s real punch line—the assertion of Americans’ right to rebel against the government of England. Jefferson, like Tom Paine, reminded his readers that the very purpose of government is to protect the natural rights of mankind. Since governments, at the time of their creation, base their authority on the consent of the people over whom they are to govern, then it is also the right of the people to “alter or abolish” their government if its actions threaten the very liberties that the government was created to protect. And, though Jefferson may have been seen as a “radical” by some within the elite body of the Continental Congress, he was certainly no anarchist. Like Paine, he recognized the dangers of living in a society without government and was quick to assert that once the people had severed their ties to an old, corrupt government, they must move on to form new governments committed to promoting the people’s “Safety and Happiness.”

  The preamble, in its final form as approved by Congress, ended with an emotional, if somewhat self-righteous, invocation of the patience with which Americans had endured the “sufferances” imposed upon them by Great Britain:

  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.21

  The Declaration of Independence as a whole was intended for multiple audiences, both at home and abroad, but this particular passage was perhaps aimed most directly at those in and out of Congress who were still hoping that some solution short of independence might be found. As we have seen, the decision for independence was reached slowly and, indeed for many, painfully. So it was important to signal to the world that the decision had not been arrived at rashly—that the delegates to the Congress had done everything within their power to find some alternative and that only a “long train of abuses” had driven them to this final, decisive action.

  The phrasing of that section of the preamble was again shaped by multiple sources. In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, John Locke had written that the people could “rouze themselves” and deny the legitimacy of their government only after “a long train of Abuses, Prevarications, an Artifices, all tending the same way,” had justified such a drastic step. And Jefferson himself, in his 1774 Summary View of the Rights of British America, referred to the “rapid and bold succession of injuries” to which the colonies had been subjected, concluding that “single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably thro’ every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”22

  Many people at the time regarded the words of the preamble as having little substantive importance. John Lind, a Loyalist critic of the Declaration of Independence, claimed that “Of the preamble I have taken little or no notice,” and the embittered f
ormer Massachusetts royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, gave it only cursory attention in his critical dissection of the Declaration. But it was not Loyalists alone who ignored the preamble. For most American patriots, the heart and soul of the Declaration was the list of specific grievances, which, making up more than two-thirds of the document, were aimed at proving to the world that the king was indeed guilty of “repeated injuries and usurpations” that justified independence.23

  It is in the list of grievances that we see Jefferson the lawyer, rather than Jefferson the philosopher, display his argumentative skills. The list is in no way a fair-minded or evenhanded assessment of the conflict, but, rather, a one-sided bill of indictment aimed not only at persuading those Americans who remained undecided on the question of independence, but, equally important, at signaling to potential European allies that Americans were utterly serious about their intent to break with England.

  The fact that Jefferson was nearly simultaneously engaged in drafting a version of the Virginia Constitution made this part of his job in drafting the Declaration significantly easier. He prefaced his draft of the Virginia document with twenty itemized grievances against the king that differed only slightly from the list of twenty-eight complaints that he included in his draft of the Declaration.24

  There is a monotony to the recitation of the injustices, but, as the grievances accumulate, Jefferson’s tone, much like that of a prosecuting attorney delivering his summation to a jury, grows steadily more belligerent, more fiery in its sense of outrage. Nor was it merely the British actions that elicited Jefferson’s contempt. Even worse was the British intent. Jefferson portrayed King George III as not merely guilty of bad policies, but of proceeding with malevolent motives. The grievances laid out in Jefferson’s list are not merely constitutional in nature, but intensely personal.

  Buried in the list of grievances—number sixteen in the “fair copy” that he and the Committee of Five sent to Congress—was the complaint that had started it all, the denunciation of the king and Parliament for “imposing taxes on us without our Consent.” Several other grievances were direct consequences of the decision to tax the colonies—one accusing the king of “sending swarms of Officers to harass our people,” an accusation that referred to the customs officials sent to America to collect the taxes; and another condemning the king for sending “Standing Armies” to America in “times of peace,” a direct outgrowth of the inability of the customs officers alone to carry out their duties. Adding insult to injury, the decision to send troops to America was accompanied by another parliamentary act requiring the colonists to provide lodging for those troops—the subject of another of his specific grievances. The thirteenth grievance on Jefferson’s original list was one of the most convoluted, charging the king with combining “with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution”; the “others” referred to in that grievance were the Parliament, which in the Declaratory Act had declared its right to legislate for the colonies in “all cases whatsoever,” and the Board of Trade, which was charged with enforcing the new taxes imposed on the Americans.

  A significant number of the grievances in the draft that Jefferson and the committee sent to Congress—nine in all—dealt with encroachments on the prerogatives of the colonial legislatures. Jefferson blamed the king for refusing to approve laws passed by those legislatures; for instructing his governors to prevent laws already passed from going into effect; for not allowing laws to go into effect unless the people gave up their right to representation in the legislature; for calling the legislatures into session in places and times “unusual, uncomfortable, and distant,” all with an aim of “fatiguing” the people into “compliance with his measures; for dissolving the legislatures whenever they displayed “manly firmness” in opposing his measures; for refusing to call for new elections of representatives, thus making it impossible for the legislatures to meet; for refusing to agree to laws passed by the legislatures establishing provincial courts; for revoking colonial charters—a grievance aimed particularly at his actions toward the Massachusetts government; and, finally, for suspending many of the legislatures, thus depriving the colonies of their right to govern themselves.

  It is not surprising that Jefferson devoted so much space in his list of specific grievances concerning violations of the rights of provincial legislatures. Nearly all of the members of the Congress who would be asked to endorse his draft of the Declaration of Independence had been members of those legislatures. They felt great pride not only in the independence and autonomy of their representative assemblies but also in the prestige they had earned and the power they exercised while members of those legislatures. The encroachments upon the rights and prerogatives of their legislatures were therefore not only constitutional violations, but also intensely personal assaults on their prestige and dignity.

  Several of the grievances in Jefferson’s draft dealt with imperial threats to American judicial processes: making colonial judges dependent on the British government for their continuation in office and for their salaries; depriving the colonists of their right to trial by jury; attempting to transport colonists accused of crimes back to Great Britain to be tried there rather than by a jury of their peers at home; and protecting British troops, “by a mock-trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states,” a likely reference to the 1774 Administration of Justice Act.

  If the American grievances began with acts of taxation and then spread to more general threats to American legislative and judicial processes, still other grievances came to the fore in the years immediately preceding independence. The twelfth and twentieth points of argument in Jefferson’s draft, which accused the king of rendering the military superior to civilian power and of “altering fundamentally the forms of our governments,” were clearly aimed at those parts of the Coercive Acts suspending Massachusetts government and installing General Gage as a military governor of the colony. The fifteenth item on his list, which complained of British edicts that cut off American trade “with all parts of the world,” was aimed at both the Boston Port Act and the Prohibitory Act of December 1775. The nineteenth, condemning the king for “abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province,” amounted to a broad-brushed, and unfair, attack on the Quebec Act, which, as we have seen, was aimed at protecting the liberties of the French Catholic residents of that province, not at destroying American liberties.

  The final grievances in Jefferson’s draft list built to a crescendo of outrage over British actions occurring after military hostilities broke out at Lexington and Concord. The twenty-third, with the charge that the king had “plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people,” while technically true, was certainly a one-sided depiction of the tragic outcomes of any state of war. The twenty-fourth grievance condemned the king for sending foreign mercenaries to “compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty & perfidy unworthy the head of a civilized nation.” Another grievance, the twenty-seventh on Jefferson’s original list and the twenty-sixth on the list eventually approved by Congress, blamed the king for forcing “our fellow citizens taken captive on the high Seas to bear arms against their Country.” This grievance was aimed at the effects of the Prohibitory Act, which not only declared war on American commerce but also called for the impressment of American sailors into the British navy.

  When Thomas Jefferson was working on his drafts for the Virginia Constitution, he included, midway through his list of grievances, two items in the preamble that leap out at the reader in their intensity and passion. One denounced the king for “prompting our negroes to rise in arms among us,” a reference to Lord Dunmore’s proclamation offering freedom to Virginia slaves who fled their masters and fought on the side of the British. The irony of that particular juxtaposition of slavery and liberty has already been noted, but it was not the arming of slaves alone that incit
ed Jefferson’s fury. Jefferson also included in the Virginia Constitution drafts another grievance blaming the king for bringing “on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions of existence.”25

  In the draft of the Declaration presented to Congress, Jefferson changed both the order and content of grievances appearing at the end of his list. He eliminated, as a separate grievance, the charge that the king had incited “our negroes to rise in arms against us.” He substituted another grievance, which had also appeared in the Virginia drafts, a condemnation of the king for inciting “treasonable insurrections of our fellow citizens, with the allurements of forfeiture & confiscation of our property.” The charge referred not to Lord Dunmore’s proclamation but rather to attempts to rally white American loyalists to the British side. He retained, however, in number twenty-five in the draft submitted to Congress, the wording of the grievance blaming the king for inciting warfare among the “merciless Indian savages.” The placing of blame on the king and Parliament for inciting Indian violence on the American frontier was simply unfair, for it was the American colonists themselves, by their relentless move westward onto Indian lands, who did most of the inciting. But Jefferson’s description of the “known rule of warfare” of the “merciless Indian savages” went beyond unfairness; it is the most shockingly ethnocentric piece of writing in a document dedicated to the principles of liberty and equality. When he penned those words, Jefferson was no doubt correct in thinking that they would be useful in strengthening his fellow colonists’ commitment to band together to fight their English foe. Most eighteenth-century Euro-Americans no doubt shared that highly negative view of their Native American neighbors. But that phrase, “merciless Indian savages,” has proven to be the Declaration’s one piece of language that, over time, has brought no credit upon the author.