United States Declaration of Independence

It appearing in the course of these debates that the colonies of N. York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina were not yet matured for falling from the parent stem ... it was thought most prudent to wait a while for them ... but that this might occasion as little delay as possible a committee was appointed to prepare a declaration of independence. The commee were J. Adams, Dr. Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston & myself ... The committee ... desired me to do it. It was accordingly done, and being approved by them, I reported it to the house on Friday the 28th of June ...

On June 21, 1776, Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston (New York), and Roger Sherman (Connecticut) were appointed to a committee for producing a declaration which would announce American independence. The committee asked Jefferson to draft it ... Handwritten revisions suggest it was Franklin's idea to change Jefferson's description of "sacred and undeniable truths" to "self-evident." ... Franklin changed Jefferson's phrase "deluge us in blood" to "destroy us." And he had a number of other changes that tightened up Jefferson's magnificent draft.

All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, me and you is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain't got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time whichever way he likes, so long as he don't interfere with nobody else. That any government that don't give a man them rights ain't worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of government they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter.

It was in 1776, ... with the publication of the Declaration of Independence, that the historical concept of sovereignty got turned upside down ... The Declaration emphasizes that men have been endowed with certain fundamental and inherent rights that preexist government ... It also emphasizes that the reason people call government into existence is to protect the exercise of these rights ... The Declaration tells us that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish that government and to implement a new government that is designed to protect, not destroy, the exercise of man's natural or God-given rights.

The 56 men who signed the Declaration suffered greatly for their courageous act:

• 5 were captured by the British and tortured to death;
• 12 had their homes destroyed;
• 9 of them died in combat, and
• 3 of them lost their sons in the army.

All told, more than half of the signers endured terrible hardships. But their patriotism and devotion to liberty were not in vain. For 137 years, or until 1913, the country enjoyed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness under a small, constitutional, benign government. Then things went awry. The ideals ... were to be betrayed repeatedly.

Even the Declaration of Independence, whose adoption is celebrated on July Fourth, features unfortunate examples of hypocrisy. Consider the condemnation of the British for turning the "savage" American Indians against the colonists. There was some validity to the complaint, but coming from a political leadership that had allied with at least some "savages" not so long before in the war with France, and who soon enough instituted a nearly genocidal policy of expansionist displacement of the Indians, this is no minor defect in the Declaration's language.

In 1775–1776, Jefferson was a Virginia delegate to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, where in June 1776 he drafted the Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Congress on July 4. As he later described his purpose, he sought 'to place before mankind the common sense of the subject'—justification of American independence—'in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent.' In doing so, he also defined the American philosophy of government, which was premised on the fact that each person, by virtue of his or her humanity alone, possessed inherent natural rights, among them the rights of 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'

On June 7 the declaration of independence was moved by Richard Henry Lee, of Virginia, and seconded by John Adams. The motion was allowed to lie on the table for three weeks, in order to hear from the colonies of Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and New York, which had not yet declared their position with regard to independence. ... On July 1 Mr. Lee's motion was taken up by congress sitting as a committee of the whole; and, as Mr. Lee was absent, the task of defending it devolved upon Mr. Adams ... Adams's speech on that occasion was probably the finest he ever delivered.

The Declaration of Independence was Leonard’s favorite. Permit me to quote from Read's interpretation of a portion of one sentence. "... in the fraction of one sentence written into the Declaration of Independence," Read declared, "was stated the real American Revolution, the new idea, and it was this: '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 was it. This is the essence of Americanism. This is the rock upon which the whole 'American miracle' was founded ..."

For as noble, as exciting, as profoundly libertarian as the Declaration was, it was still the necessary but not sufficient first step in the victory of what we have correctly identified as the First Libertarian Revolution. The Declaration was the rhetoric, the ideology, that set the stage; but the American revolutionaries ... were not only interested in setting forth a glorious set of principles; ... they were also interested ... in putting these principles into practice ... It is only because of their dedicated actions that we, their descendants, can celebrate the 4th of July and the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration of Independence is more than a mere declaration of intention to sever political ties with Britain. It is a carefully crafted argument justifying that intention. It ranks as one of the greatest and most influential political documents of all time. ... The Founders offered a careful set of arguments for armed revolution, a course that was not undertaken lightly, with full awareness of the consequences. When he signed a document that concluded, 'We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,' each signatory knew that he was signing his own death warrant in the event of failure.

The Declaration of Independence was a statement of these principles. Far from being an extravagant rallying cry for a difficult cause, it was a simple statement of the general political and legal consensus of the colonists. When the infuriated colonists denounced the Stamp Tax and demanded the rights of Englishmen, they were not demanding those rights which Parliament had from time to time granted its subjects but rather those immemorial rights of Englishmen granted by God and manifest in nature which no parliament however representative may take away or alter.

Two hundred years ago our ancestors signed a document which forever changed the course of history: the Declaration of Independence. That document ... established for the first time a society based on the principle of the rule of law and limited government ... But, bit by bit, the principles which made this country great have been forgotten–to the point where the uncontrolled growth of government now threatens to totally destroy our liberty and our prosperity. Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and the other signers of the original Declaration of Independence were well aware of that danger.

The libertarian vision is in the Declaration of Independence: we are all created equal; no one ought to have any special rights and privileges in his social relations with other people. We have certain rights—to our life, to our freedom, to do what we please in order to find happiness. Government has just one purpose: to help us protect those rights. And if it doesn't, then we get to "alter or abolish it." It's hard to imagine a more libertarian document, but there it is: a sacred founding document of the United States of America.

For democratic government to endure, therefore, it must be based on a universal conception of human rights. This was the spirit of the American Declaration of Independence, as Lincoln observed in his response to the Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case, in which the Court decided that slaves could not be considered equal to other human beings. Lincoln replied that the words of the Declaration could not be confined to the white inhabitants of the United States, but had a universal application.

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee urged the Continental Congress to adopt his resolution for independence. Debate was scheduled for July 1, while Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston were assigned to prepare a statement announcing and justifying independence. Thirty-three-year-old Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence on the second floor of a Philadelphia home belonging to bricklayer Jacob Graff, where he rented several rooms ... By habit, he did most of his writing between about 6:00 PM and midnight. The Declaration took him 17 days.

Thomas Jefferson made one of the most famous moral appeals in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence ... The Declaration resonated with people around the world. The first of dozens of German translations appeared on July 9, 1776. French translations ... circulated throughout Europe, from Paris to Berlin and St. Petersburg. During the 19th century, it was translated into Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish and other languages. Well into the 20th century, new nations issued declarations that adopted phrases from the American Declaration of Independence.

We could answer that question by pointing to the Declaration of Independence, which embraces the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But does that really get us out of the woods? Someone who believes the Preamble authorizes the welfare state will similarly believe the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness entail the welfare state. But even if the Declaration resists that interpretation, we must note, as Jensen did, that the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution of 1787 were quite a different set of men from those who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The immortal opening lines of the Declaration affirm that individuals have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness because they're human beings, regardless what a law might say. This, the philosophy of natural rights, is crucial because throughout history laws have suppressed liberty. ... In August 1963, at the March on Washington, King appealed to the principles of the Declaration of Independence when he said: 'I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed —we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'

It was the Declaration of Independence that firmly established the right of a people to resist and secede from state control. "So important is the right and duty of the people to dispense with despotism," [LeFevre] wrote, "this great Declaration contains the sentence not once, but twice. In its final utterance, the choice of words ... calls for 'new guards' which may or may not entail such a unit as an artificial agency." He further said that "the bill of grievances contained in the immortal Declaration of Independence could be extended by our own citizens in modern times, had they the stomach for it."

HESS: ... [T]he Internal Revenue Service took a dim view of [not paying taxes] and ... apparently decided that I'm a one-man movement to overthrow the government.
PLOWBOY: Are you?
HESS: As far as I'm concerned, the federal government is overthrown because the Declaration of Independence clearly states that when a government gets to be intolerable, concerned citizens should abolish it. So I wrote a letter to the government saying that it was abolished. Interestingly enough, however, the Declaration of Independence has no current legal standing. The Constitution superseded it unfortunately.