The Declaration of Independence contains multitudes. It joins assertions of eternal and “unalienable” individual natural rights to a laundry list of particular complaints against the king and Parliament of Great Britain. While altering and abolishing one form of government, it lays a foundation for instituting another.
Abraham Lincoln distinguished the ideals of the Declaration as “an apple of gold” from the organizational particulars of the Constitution’s “frame of silver.” But this distinction may be overdrawn, if not by Lincoln then more recently, in separating American purposes from practice. The Declaration was a declaration of war, and meant to provide a solution to the two principal strategic problems that faced leaders in Britain’s North American colonies in the late 18th century.
The Problem of Empire
For George III and his ministers to have made revolutionaries out of American elites was an astonishing feat. In 1763, at the close of the worldwide conflict known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War and in America as the French and Indian War, the celebration of British victory in the colonies was as great as or greater than in London. For the colonists, the end of the war—in particular the defeat of French Canada and the opening of the Ohio River system to westward expansion—was a new beginning. The rapturous preaching of Reverend Jonathan Mayhew caught the mood:
Mayhew’s vision was no more than an especially enthusiastic and apocalyptic expression of consensus opinion. The population of English colonies had hit one million in 1750 and would double by 1770, as Benjamin Franklin had predicted in his essay Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind. The implications for British power were plain:
In the American mind, their British empire stood, in 1763, on the precipice of greatness; the gate manned by the French, Spanish, and hostile Indians had been battered down and all that was left was to let nature take its course. What might happen when “the greatest Number of Englishmen” lived on the American side of the Atlantic was left undefined, but for the foreseeable future, men like Franklin and George Washington wished nothing more than to take a respectable place in the common imperial project.
By contrast, George III, who had come to the throne only in the last two years of war, and his governments were gripped by quite different feelings. These blended the hubris of the global conqueror with the trepidations of a poor and weak island nation off the northwest coast of Europe. Secretary of State Henry Conway captured English hauteur in 1767: “One may indeed be surprised to find that any minister, in any part of the world, even the most remote, needs at this period, to be told of the importance, nay of the grandeur and glory of this nation.” Britain had been “set . . . in so high a point of light” that the “object of our ministers is . . . to abate the jealousy” of other states. Thus George III had negotiated an end to the war meant to ease European fears of British hegemony and to pull the plug of financial support from Prussia’s Frederick the Great.
It had been an expensive victory. Like the colonial population, the British debt had doubled, to more than 130 million pounds, and annual payments on the debt consumed a large portion of government revenues. Angry that the king would not continue the contest, William Pitt, the leading minister and architect of the victory—which Pitt regarded as incomplete and likely to lead to renewed conflict once France recovered and rearmed—resigned. This was much to George’s delight. He replaced Pitt with his former tutor, the Scottish Earl of Bute, and together the monarch and minister made peace and set about the tasks of organizing and reforming a massively expanded empire.
Principal among these tasks was sorting out the situation in North America. Balanced against the colonists’ desires was the necessity of governing a potentially restive French population in Canada and allied Indians along the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes; winning over powerful indigenous tribes and confederations, notably the Iroquois Six Nations, had tipped the balance in the continental interior. Thus, in 1763, George issued a proclamation preventing the land-hungry colonists from acquiring new territories west of the Appalachians. The king also kept a large-scale British army in North America to enforce the peace and proposed direct taxes to pay for the troops.
Taxation without representation and the submission to parliamentary supremacy was bad enough, but paying for their own containment was intolerable to the colonists. It was a violation of the basic imperial compact. “We have to expect,” said Franklin in 1773, “the protection [Britain] can afford us, and the advantage of a common umpire in our disputes, thereby preventing wars we might otherwise have with each other.” The purpose of such imperial direction was “so that we can without interruption go on with our improvements, and increase our numbers. We ask no more from her and she should not think of forcing more from us.”
By 1773 it may already have been too late to sustain the imperial bargain. Not only had the British army been posted to contain American expansion, it had been incompetent at patrolling the frontier, as the broad uprising known as Pontiac’s War had proven. After that, the troops were removed to Boston and other coastal garrisons. Containment had become direct oppression. Even before the Declaration, the Duke of Manchester had told the House of Lords:
The Problem of America
If British colonists no longer had faith in their empire, they also had doubts about their ability to create one of their own. In decades of war with France, the weakness of the colonies had been repeatedly and manifestly made plain; their enthusiasm for liberty and self-governance made even the growing whole less than the sum of its parts. As the population of the British colonies in North America surged into the millions, that of “New France”—which stretched west from the Gulf of St. Lawrence through the Great Lakes and south to the Mississippi Delta—was barely 70,000. The French, however, acted under the direction of Paris and sought only to trade with inland Indians. The French were few, but they had their strategic act together.
As early as 1643, in the aftermath of their war with the Pequots, the Puritans of New England—who were as close to a homogenous polity as there was—attempted to confederate for self-defense. “We all came into these parts of America,” they declared in the agreement,
Nonetheless, the “United Colonies of New England” were anything but united. When, in the 1670s, they strove to “encompass” more Indian territory, a diverse group of tribes gathered under the gifted indigenous leader Metacomet—known to history as “King Philip”—to drive the New Englanders back into the sea. The tribes were united. Only the intervention of the Mohawks on the side of the colonists turned the tide of the conflict.
Indeed, colonial success exacerbated this strategic conundrum. Daniel Coxe was a prominent colonial landowner and proprietor of a large grant, “Carolana,” which ran from Albemarle Sound in modern North Carolina to the St. Johns River in northern Florida. Although Coxe never left England, in 1722 he published an italic-laden complaint that the
No one felt the effects of colonial weakness more fully or directly than the revolutionary generation. In May 1754, George Washington had provoked the conflict that became the Seven Years’ War by an incompetently conducted encounter with a small party of Frenchmen while attempting to assert British claims—that is, both Virginia’s and those of the “Ohio Company,” a land-speculation venture in which Washington was heavily invested—in the Ohio River valley. Washington was unable to control his own forces, standing amazed as an allied Iroquois leader tomahawked a wounded 35-year-old French lieutenant, Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, and washed his hands in the dead man’s brains. The government in Whitehall was equally amazed, but colonial legislatures yawned. From June to July, Benjamin Franklin and representatives of almost all the other colonies met in Albany not only to hammer out a treaty with the Iroquois league but among themselves. The “Albany Plan of Union” was an utter failure. Most of the legislatures that considered it rejected it; the House of Burgesses in Virginia did not even take it up. Local autonomy trumped any larger strategic necessity.
The Declaration of War
This woeful experience of colonial weakness remained the strategic preamble to the Declaration of 1776. Those who pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor were taking a huge gamble, not merely in taking on a global empire but in hopes that, despite past failures, they could organize themselves for victory.
The enumeration of the “long train” of British “abuses and usurpations” of the imperial compact expresses, as a central theme, the colonists’ anger at George III’s efforts to constrain their westward expansion and what they believed was the fulfillment of their destiny. They professed their right to “alter or abolish” a form of government that was no longer working for them.
Yet even as they vowed to replace the British empire with one that “shall seem most likely to effect” the Americans’ “safety and happiness,” they were much less specific about the right form of what was to come than about the wrong form of what already was. They could do no more than lay the foundation of “principles” for the empire—and it was the language of empire that the colonists understood—that they would create.
The Declaration inspired renewed forms of what Thomas Jefferson described as an “empire for liberty,” the employment of the means of power for just ends. The Articles of Confederation—very much like the Albany Plan in deferring to local autonomy—gave way to the Constitution, a form of organization that itself contains mechanisms for modification in light of changing experience and perception, and became the vehicle for a “new birth of freedom” not only after the Civil War but after World War II. New structures were built on the original foundation.
Fully considered, the July 4 holiday is a time to reflect not only on the justice of the Declaration’s principles, but on how they have been made manifest. To make them real has meant introducing the irreducible element of human frailty and imperfection; the task, as Lincoln reminds us, forever remains before us.
In this time of many discontents, when our current government—sclerotic at best and perhaps something darker—is called to account, what is to be done to refurbish this empire of liberty? We have an “imperial problem” in that a hostile world is presenting new dangers. We have also an “American problem”; local autonomies threaten to supplant any larger national cause.
The Declaration of 1776 was a call to arms and to great enterprise that we might heed again. The “apple of gold” endures; the “frame of silver” must be polished.
