During this 250th anniversary of independence, Americans are presented with a familiar narrative—one grounded more in national myth than historical reality. It goes something like this: the Declaration of Independence cast aside the British origins and institutions of the colonies and created a propositional nation based on equality and individual liberty. To secure these principles, the document birthed a unitary nation-state superior in prerogatives and powers to its constituent parts. Ever dynamic, the Declaration is not limited to the historical context of the American Revolution, but is a liberal and individualistic instrument of human progress applicable to everything from social justice to sexual self-determination.
That’s a heavy burden for one document to bear. Actually, for one paragraph to support—the oft-quoted second paragraph (“We hold these truths to be self-evident”).
But what was the original intent of the Continental Congress that edited and adopted the Declaration? Where can we look for clues, given that Congress did not keep an official record of why it made changes to the original draft (crafted by Thomas Jefferson and a small committee), or an explanation of how it interpreted the language retained?
The Summary View
A logical starting point is the predominant theory of British and colonial constitutional relations at the time of the Revolution. For this we have Jefferson’s Summary View of the Rights of British America, which was originally drafted as instructions to Virginia’s delegates to the First Continental Congress but was converted into a pamphlet published on both sides of the Atlantic. It dealt with the constitutional authority of the British Parliament over the colonies and set forth a theory of imperial federalism.
The crux of Jefferson’s argument was that the colonies were the monarch’s dominions and that Parliament had no authority to legislate for them. The thirteen colonial assemblies, in Jefferson’s view, possessed the full power to enact their own laws. The king served as the chief executive of the empire—the glue holding it together—and Jefferson asked him to intercede on behalf of the colonies by prohibiting Parliament from taxing or regulating them. The king refused to accept the colonial invitation and ultimately declared them to be outside his protection. The colonies’ assertion of the right of self-government combined with Great Britain’s stand on centralized parliamentary authority form the proximate cause of the colonies’ secession from the mother country.