Declaration of Independence
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Description
When the Continental Congress established a committee to draft the Declaration of Independence on June 11, 1776, the thirteen colonies had already been coordinating armed resistance against the British military for more than a year. Royal government had been under siege for almost two years. The Declaration, therefore, did not initiate the American Revolution. Instead, it marked a transformation in the revolutionaries’ collective self-conception of their armed enterprise. What began as resistance had quickly transformed into rebellion and then became a civil war. By the summer of 1776, the revolutionaries viewed their enterprise as a war for national independence. They wanted others, at home and abroad, to see it as they did, too. The Revolution, they claimed, was no longer a domestic rebellion between king and colonies. There could be no honorable reconciliation of the provinces back into the British Empire. It was now an international war. The drafters stated their international ambitions clearly in the Declaration's first sentence. “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” they began, “and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), the principal drafter of the Declaration, emphasized in this opening sentence that the conflict was existential, involving the fundamental question of political allegiance and collective independence as international states. No longer a haphazard sequence of intraimperial conflicts, the Revolution was now imagined as an epochal series of “human events” that justified the American people's claim to assume their “equal station” as one of “the powers of the earth.” The thirteen colonies proclaimed themselves to be independent states—international states in what they saw as a preexisting European system of states.
Source Publication
America in the World, 1776 to the Present: A Supplement to the Dictionary of American History
Source Editors/Authors
Edward J. Blum
Publication Date
2016
Volume Number
1: A-L
Recommended Citation
Hulsebosch, Daniel J., "Declaration of Independence" (2016). Faculty Chapters. 904.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/904
