As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of American Independence, our founding charter remains central to our national life. The Declaration ties us together, linking us to our past and pushing us forward at the same time.
Few would have imagined, on July 4, 1776, that this would be the fate of a statement hastily drafted and haggled over. Once Congress had edited Thomas Jefferson’s draft, cutting out a quarter of his words, including his passionate condemnation of the slave trade, the thirteen colonies adopted the Declaration as sovereign States. No central government held them together.
So important to the States was their individual sovereignty that an “errant a”, which had accidentally been added before “government” in the proof copy of the broadside hurriedly printed up by John Dunlap that night, was quickly removed. The dangerous a in the eighth line, made the sentence read “…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends [of securing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government…” To suggest that the people could institute “a new government” implied the possible creation of a unitary, centralized entity, which in July 1776 was anathema to the representatives of the thirteen colonies assembled “in Congress” in Philadelphia.
And yet, as hastily as the errant “a” was removed, unity was implied in the document all the same. After an edit most likely made by Benjamin Franklin, the first line of the Declaration asserted that one people was dissolving their political bands with England. The Signers pledged to each other their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, and adopted the document as “Representatives of the united States of America.”
The next thirteen years would see Congress and the States struggle to balance national unity and state sovereignty. On the same day in June 1776 that Congress named Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, and two others to a committee to draft a declaration of independence, it also formed a committee to draft a plan of confederation, tasked with establishing a loose governing structure over the former colonies. The Articles of Confederation, when they finally came into effect in 1781, were purposely weak. They did their job only too well: the young nation was unable to raise taxes, pay off debt, raise forces to respond to Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786, and do most of the work of central governments. The result, of course, was the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the creation of the federal government.