The main objectives of the Declaration of Independence were to announce a cause of action and formally justify the Continental Congress’s July 2, 1776, decision to separate from Great Britain. The Declaration explained the decision for independence by clarifying the causes that drove the “united States” to separate and form itself into a new political entity. Jefferson and the drafting committee did not start with a blank slate in fulfilling the charge given to them by Congress. A significant number of documents, including the Magna Carta of 1215, the Petition of Right of 1628, and the Declaration of Rights of 1689, had listed Crown abuses against the rights of subjects and had successfully sought reform.
Jefferson found the Declaration of Rights significant because it listed the charges against King James II and secured the rights the next king was bound to protect. This led to the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which Jefferson relied upon in writing his Summary View of the Rights of British America, which he used to shape his initial draft of the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson’s Summary View was similar to the English Bill of Rights with one crucial difference. While the English document relied on legal history and grievances alone to make its argument, Jefferson united the grievances that the colonies had suffered with an invocation of natural rights and natural law. Jefferson rejected any claims of authority by Parliament over the colonies based on history and natural rights. The Americans, like their Saxon ancestors who left various parts of continental Europe to come to England, did not owe loyalty to their previous masters. According to Jefferson, this basic right, “which nature has given to all men,” permitted the Americans to depart “from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness.”
The Declarations and Resolves passed by the First Continental Congress in 1775 drew heavily on Jefferson’s grievances in the Summary View. It announced that the colonies held rights of life, liberty, and property “by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts….” The Crown rejected the document, and violence soon erupted in Lexington and Concord when American arsenals came under British attack. That prompted the Second Continental Congress to issue the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms detailing why the colonists had reached this state. The document states that “[b]y one statute it is declared, that parliament can ‘of right make laws to bind us in all cases whatsoever’ [a reference to the Declaratory Act, passed by Parliament in 1766]” and asks, “What is to defend us against so enormous, so unlimited, a power?”
The conflict continued, and on June 11, 1776, Congress resolved to form a committee to draft a declaration of independence. Members of the drafting committee included Jefferson, John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert Livingston of New York. Adams later said Jefferson initially wanted him to draft the document but that he declined for various reasons, the most important being that “I had great Opinion of the Elegance of his pen and none at all of my own.”13
Jefferson would draw from his Summary View, his preamble to the draft constitution for Virginia (which was placed into the ratified state constitution on June 22, 1776), and the Virginia Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which had been drafted by George Mason and adopted 10 days before Jefferson’s preamble. The resemblance between certain passages of these documents, particularly Jefferson’s preamble to the Virginia Constitution, and the Declaration is undeniable. Mason’s Virginia Bill of Rights is also strikingly similar:
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, pursuing and Obtaining Happiness and Safety.
Jefferson said the “similitude” of the Declaration to Mason’s Bill of Rights lies in the object of both documents: “justifying our separation from Great Britain.”
John Adams recorded that Jefferson’s initial draft went to the committee, which made various changes before forwarding the document to Congress, where more substantial alterations were made. The committee mostly slimmed down the prose, but Congress’s modifications were more substantial.14 Congress deleted Jefferson’s reference to the slave trade, in which he blamed the King for compelling the importation of Africans. Also added were references to a personal God intervening in the affairs of men (“the Supreme Judge of the World”) and their “firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence.”
Primary Documents that Influenced the Declaration
EARLY STATE CONSTITUTIONS OF
- New Hampshire
- South Carolina
- Virginia
VIRGINIA CONSTITUTION’S PREAMBLE, written by Jefferson, and the Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason, June 1776
SUMMARY VIEW OF THE RIGHTS OF BRITISH AMERICA, written by Thomas Jefferson, 1774
SECOND TREATISE OF GOVERNMENT, written anonymously by John Locke, 1689
ENDNOTES:
13. Julian P. Boyd, The Declaration of Independence: The Evolution of the Text as Shown in Facsimiles of Various Drafts by its Author, Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945), p. 10.
14. Eicholz, Harmonizing Sentiments, p. 48.
