Ultimately, Jefferson canceled “sacred and undeniable” in favor of “self-evident.” The change may have been suggested by Benjamin Franklin, who found the word “sacred” inappropriate.18 Franklin did recognize the secular connotation of the word. He had used it with this meaning himself. Reading a British pamphleteer’s suggestion that colonial charters did not matter very much, Franklin wrote, “The Charters are sacred. Violate them, and then the present Bond of Union (the Kingly Power over us) will be broken.”19 If the revision was Franklin’s, then perhaps he disliked Jefferson’s deliberate ambiguity. Regardless, “sacred and undeniable” was out and “self-evident” was in.
In the document submitted to Congress, “inherent and inalienable” remained the only conjoined word pair left in this phrase, yet Congress would not allow it to remain. It changed the phrase “inherent and unalienable rights” to “certain inalienable rights.” Jefferson disliked the change. The two words he used had long been linked together in the political discourse as a way of characterizing the most basic natural rights. During the previous decade, for example, the phrase “inherent and unalienable” frequently recurred in the protests against the Stamp Act to reassert the rights of the colonists. A popular belletristic work may have given these words their greatest currency: Lord Lyttelton’s Dialogues of the Dead.
In one of Lyttleton’s series of imaginative conversations between important historical figures, Marcus Aurelius explains to Servius Tullius that Augustus had no legal authority to change the government the way he had, but once it was changed, the government had succeeded to Marcus Aurelius “by a lawful and established Rule of Succession.”
“Can a Length of Establishment make Despotism lawful?” asks Servius Tullius. “Is not Liberty an inherent, inalienable Right of Mankind?”
“They have an inherent Right to be governed by Laws, not by arbitrary Will,” Marcus Aurelius responds. “But Forms of Government may, and must, be occasionally changed, with the consent of the People.”20
Lord Lyttleton’s Dialogues of the Dead not only helped popularize the “inherent/inalienable” word pair, but also stressed the validity of overthrowing arbitrary governments in favor of democracy.
Beyond its resonance in both the political and literary discourse, Jefferson’s use of this pair of words propels his ideas forward. Situating the phrase precisely where he does, Jefferson gave his sentence additional force. It builds strength as it continues and, in so doing, verbally reinforces the fundamental nature of the truths it delineates. As Jefferson revised the sentence, the concepts articulated seem as sure as one, two, three: “equal,” “inherent and unalienable,” “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
His original text may be stylistically more effective than the one that appears in the final version of the Declaration of Independence. Either way, the sentence offers a moving encapsulation of the idea of natural rights. As adopted by Congress, the passage reads:
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.
All of the hundreds of pages and countless hours Jefferson spent reading about natural law and natural rights came down to this one statement. Its simplicity belies the extraordinary amount of intellectual work it took to achieve, but in terms of its straightforwardness and verbal economy, the statement is absolutely appropriate to the ideas it conveys.
This sentence also establishes a grammatical pattern for the remainder of the Declaration of Independence. Each beginning with the word “that,” the three clauses elaborating the self-evident truths are similarly constructed and anticipate a pattern of repetition that recurs with variation throughout the document. Consider the following set of clauses:
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 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.
As a rhetorical technique, such patterns of repetition are indebted to a number of sources from Cicero’s orations to Ossian’s prose poems to Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount.” As an aesthetic device, repetition helps unify the work and offers a way of building intensity.
Political bands between colony and nation, Jefferson explained, should not be broken without just cause, but with just cause they must be broken. Given their treatment at the hands of the British government, the American colonists had sufficient reason to declare themselves independent: “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.”
Though Jefferson hinted that he would recount the history to which he alludes, what follows is not a history at all but rather a series of statements using the subject pronoun “he” to refer to King George III and written in the present perfect, a verb tense suggesting that the injuries of the past are continuing into the present. The king himself becomes the primary target of Jefferson’s verbal attack in this part of the Declaration, which Samuel Adams called the “Catalogue of Crimes.”21 Directing his argument toward King George III, Jefferson established a pattern that would recur in the history of American conflict: he personalized the enemy and directed his vituperation toward an individual leader rather than an entire nation.
Many of these charges contain distinct rhetorical strategies designed to accomplish a variety of effects. The fifth, for example, reads: “He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.” Emphasizing the manliness of the colonial legislators and opposing their actions to the British crown, Jefferson figuratively emasculates the King, implying that his behavior had left Americans “exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsions within.”
Jefferson’s phrase “manly firmness” is a literary allusion and, as such, functions as a kind of shorthand for the ideas expressed in the work he was alluding to. The phrase echoes the well-respected eighteenth-century British poet James Thomson, whose verse had garnered a huge popular following in Great Britain and America, especially his long contemplative poem The Seasons. Upon first reading this poem, Benjamin Franklin, for one, was moved to tears. Describing the effect Thomson’s great poem had upon him, Franklin wrote, “I had read no Poetry for several years, and almost lost the Relish for it, till I met with his Seasons. That charming Poet has brought more Tears of Pleasure into my Eyes than all I ever read before. I wish it were in my Power to return him any Part of the Joy he has given me.”22 Jefferson, too, was taken by The Seasons. While a young man, he commonplaced several lines from the poem. In fact, his extracts from Thomson include the single lengthiest verse quotation in his entire commonplace book.23
As he matured, Jefferson came to prefer Thomson’s tragedies, which he ranked above The Seasons. In his great library at Monticello, he had the four-volume Works of James Thomson. Though this edition begins with The Seasons and ends with the poet’s dramatic works, Jefferson shelved it among other tragedies, not among the poetry. Specifically, the phrase “manly firmness” derives from Thomson’s most successful tragedy, Tancred and Sigismunda. Jefferson encountered an excerpt from this play in The Beauties of the English Stage, a work from which he excerpted many other passages in his commonplace book. Like the other quotations from The Beauties of the English Stage, the passage from Tancred and Sigismunda appears under a specific subject heading: it is used to illustrate prudence.
Tancred and Sigismunda tells the story of the young king of Sicily who is thwarted in his love for Sigismunda by her father, Siffredi. Acting in the intere
sts of peace, Siffredi wishes his daughter to marry Osmond, the lord high constable, instead of Tancred. The phrase “manly firmness” occurs in a speech Siffredi makes to Osmond, a speech that emphasizes the importance of avoiding war as long as liberty can be maintained:
Let us be stedfast in the Right; but let us
Act with cool Prudence, and with manly Temper,
As well as manly Firmness. True, I own,
Th’ Indignities you suffer are so high,
As might even justify what now you threaten.
But if, my Lord, we can prevent the Woes
The cruel Horrors of intestine War,
Yet hold untouch’d our Liberties and Laws;
O let us, rais’d above the turbid Sphere
Of little selfish Passions, nobly do it!
Nor to our hot intemperate Pride pour out
A dire Libation of Sicilian Blood.
‘Tis Godlike Magnanimity, to keep,
When most provok’d, our Reason calm and clear,
And execute her Will, from a strong Sense
Of what is right, without the vulgar Aid
Of Heat and Passion, which, tho’ honest, bear us
Often too far.
Applying the phrase “manly firmness” to describe the behavior and attitude of the American colonists in the face of the king’s injustice, Jefferson implies all of the positive qualities Thomson associated with it: prudence, good judgment, a belief in the importance of liberty, resistance to war unless absolutely necessary, the value of controlling the passions and maintaining reason, and the importance of upholding what is right.
Jefferson was not the only one to recognize the relevance of Thomson’s words to the colonial cause. The phrase had already entered the Revolutionary discourse. One of Jefferson’s Virginia supporters had used it two years earlier in the preface he wrote to A Summary View of the Rights of British America in order to characterize the rhetorical stance Jefferson took in this work. Furthermore, John Trumbull, one of a group of Revolutionary poets known as the Connecticut Wits, used the phrase in An Elegy for the Times, a poem chronicling the plight of Boston in the face of the Port Bill. Abandoning any hope of remedying the injustice through official recourse, the colonists, Trumbull stressed, had to rely on their own strength:
Ours be the manly firmness of the sage,
From shameless foes ungrateful wrongs to bear;
Alike removed from baseness and from rage,
The flames of faction and the chills of fear.
Trumbull emphasized the rational and philosophical aspects of manly firmness, the ability to maintain a sense of reason in the face of injustice. Jefferson’s use of the phrase in the Declaration of Independence embodies similar concepts.
With the thirteenth and lengthiest indictment of the king, Jefferson varied his structure. He introduced a list of Acts approved by Parliament that contradicted laws passed by the colonial legislators. Again, he used repetition as a rhetorical strategy. Each of the nine Acts is structured as a prepositional phrase beginning with the word “for.” The emphasis Jefferson placed on these tends to disappear in modern editions of the Declaration, but in the first printing, which Jefferson supervised, each instance of the word appears with an initial capital letter. The remaining two letters of the word appear in small capitals. Furthermore, each “For” begins a new line of the printed document and thus leaves considerable white space to the right of the page, further emphasizing and distinguishing each Act named. Take the third and fourth Acts, for example. They appear as follows:
FOR cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
FOR imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.
The amount of information these charges provide is remarkably spare given the amount of ink Jefferson and other American political writers had already used to elaborate these complaints. No more justification was necessary. Speaking for the new nation, Jefferson was no longer making an argument but stating facts, the facts that had led to a momentous decision.
The next set of paragraphs shows how British actions had escalated from hurtful legislation to actual violence:
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the Lives of our people.
Parallels within parallels: Jefferson incorporates within the second sentence of this passage a series of four phrases that emphasize and reinforce the violence of the British. Besides trepanning colonial American sailors and impressing them into the Royal Navy, the King was also attempting to turn sympathetic souls against the American colonists: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Read out of context, Jefferson’s depiction of the Native Americans makes them out to be ruthless and bloody savages. Read in light of how he elevated Chief Logan to the level of noble savage in the blank leaves of his Virginia Almanack, Jefferson’s denigration of the Indian in the Declaration becomes an obvious rhetorical strategy. Depicting the Native American in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was well aware of his use of hyperbole and stereotype but found both useful rhetorical strategies nonetheless.
Retaining the present perfect tense, Jefferson switched from making the king his subject to making himself and his fellow colonists his subject: “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” British violence, in turn, has been answered with humble colonial perseverance.
In conclusion, Jefferson wrote:
We therefore the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled do, in the name and by authority of the good people of these states reject and renounce all allegiance and subjection to the kings of Great Britain and all others who may hereafter claim by, through, or under them; we utterly dissolve and break off all political connection which may have heretofore subsisted between us and the people or parliament of Great Britain; and finally we do assert and declare these colonies to be free and independant states, and that as free and independant states they shall hereafter have power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.24
After composing the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson submitted the document to the committee, which made several minor revisions, none affecting its overall impact. On Friday, June 28, the Committee of Five presented the draft to Congress. Debate on it was delayed until Monday, July 1, which many delegates anticipated as a great day. John Penn wrote, “The first day of July will be made remarkable; then the question relative to Independence will be ajitated and there is no doubt but a total separation from Britain will take place.”25
Benjamin Franklin was not the only Congressional delegate who was early to rise the morning of July 1. John Adams spent the first part of the day trying to catch up his correspondence, but he could scarcely contain his excitement. He wrote Archibald Bulloch: “This morning is assigned for the greatest Debate of all. A Declaration that these Colonies are free and independent states, has been reported by a Committee appointed some weeks ago for that Purpose, and this day or Tomorrow is to determine its Fate. May Heaven prosper the new born Republic—and make it more glorious than any former Republics have been!”
Jefferson, too, was out and about the morning of July 1: he had chosen this day to begin the daily weather log he would maintain the rest of his life. In none of his surviving notebooks does Jefferson say why he chose to start recording weather data when he did. Governor Fauquier had shown him the value and method of keeping accurate weather records more than a decade e
arlier, but so far Jefferson had refrained from regularly keeping his own. Seen in retrospect, Jefferson’s weather log expresses in a different way the same kind of enthusiasm Adams conveyed in his letter to Bulloch: it implicitly acknowledges the birth of a new republic by initiating a detailed written record of its existence literally from Day One. The United States of America would be a nation based on the principles of rational thought, and its history could and would be recorded scientifically.
As Jefferson observed, the temperature at nine o’clock in the morning was already 81 1/2 degrees Fahrenheit.26 July 1 promised to be a hot day. Congress endured the oppressive heat over its course as the debates continued nonstop for nine grueling hours. But the day ended before a final decision regarding independence was made.
The next day Congress debated Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence. New Hampshire delegate Josiah Bartlett wrote a correspondent that “the Declaration before Congress is, I think, a pretty good one. I hope it will not be spoiled by canvassing in Congress.”27 By no means did Congress spoil Jefferson’s original draft, but they did not accept it outright. Almost every sentence came under discussion. Jefferson found the process of listening to his finely crafted words being debated, revised, or deleted to be excruciating. Sitting next to him during these proceedings was Benjamin Franklin, who shrewdly recognized the younger man’s discomfort and offered a story to make him feel more at ease:
The Road to Monticello Page 25