The Annotated Declaration of Independence

In Congress, July 4, 1776: On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously approved the Declaration of Independence. Both the document and the day would come to mark America’s founding. 

Meeting in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, the Second Continental Congress united delegates from all thirteen colonies to coordinate the war against Great Britain. It had first convened in May 1775, just weeks after Lexington and Concord, and soon placed George Washington at the helm of a Continental Army. The Congress built on earlier intercolonial assemblies—the Albany Congress of 1754, the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, and the First Continental Congress of 1774—that paved the way for collective action.

On June 11, 1776, the Congress appointed five delegates— Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston—to prepare a declaration on independence. With Jefferson having taken the lead, the committee one June 28 presented its draft to the full Congress. (John Trumbull’s monumental painting The Declaration of Independence, which has hung in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda since 1826, depicts this scene.) Congress revised the text before adopting it on July 4. 

Two days earlier, on July 2, the Congress had approved the Lee Resolution, which announced the colonies “free and independent” from Britain. John Adams predicted that July 2 would be “celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival” of American independence. Instead, Americans came to commemorate July 4, the day independence was declared and justified. 

Primary Sources:
Second Continental Congress, Lee Resolution (1776)
John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams (July 3, 1776)
John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence (1818)

America: The Declaration of Independence was a “collective act,” in the words of Pauline Maier, a distinguished historian. More than Thomas Jefferson, or the five-man drafting committee, or the Second Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence was authored by America as a whole through a yearslong, continent-wide constitutional conversation. 

As Maier powerfully documented, the Declaration borrowed from and built upon dozens of earlier American writings, big and small: political essays and pamphlets; intercolonial declarations; state constitutions and instructions; county, city, and town resolutions; and even judicial grand-jury charges. Jefferson himself later recalled that the Declaration was “intended to be an expression of the [A]merican mind,” one that distilled “the harmonising sentiments of the day” rather than discovered any “new principles, or new arguments.”

(This Annotated Declaration, in turn, borrows from and builds upon Maier’s seminal book American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, along with Akhil Reed Amar’s The Words That Made Us, Born Equal, and America’s Constitution, and Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness.)

Primary Source:
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Henry Lee (May 8, 1825)

one people: The thirteen colonies overcame significant political, cultural, legal, economic, and religious differences to unite against Great Britain. 

Military necessity required unity. Only by joining forces could the colonies stand a chance against Britain, a truth memorably illustrated by Benjamin Franklin’s “Join or Die” cartoon. First sketched in 1754 to urge unity against the French and Indians, Franklin’s cartoon became a symbol of resistance to Great Britain as it was reprinted and remixed in the 1760s and 1770s. 

Constitutional conversation also fostered unity, as delegates from different colonies mixed and mingled in intercolonial assembles, colonial legislatures conversed with each other via circular letters, and Americans read in newspapers and pamphlets about developments in other colonies.

Primary Source:
Benjamin Franklin, Join or Die (1754)

the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God: According to natural-law theory, certain universal moral principles, rooted in God’s authority, govern all human conduct. This law is “natural” because it applies even in the “state of nature”—that is, even before human form governments and establish  “positive” law like statutes, judicial decisions, and custom. As William Blackstone explained in Commentaries on the Laws of England, natural law constitutes the “eternal, immutable laws of good and evil” that are “dictated by God himself” and are “binding over all the globe in all countries, and at all times.” Among the most influential natural-law philosophers at the founding were John Locke and Algernon Sidney. 

Primary Sources:
John Locke, Second Treatise on Governmen (1690)
Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (1698)
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69)

a decent respect to the opinions of mankind: The Declaration addressed both domestic and foreign audiences. Abroad, its drafters hoped to persuade European powers—especially France—to support the American cause with money, supplies, and troops. At home, more importantly, the Declaration aimed to rally ordinary Americans, whose hearts and minds would need to be won for America to win on the battlefield. 

Immediately after approving the Declaration, the Second Continental Congress ordered that it be sent to state assemblies and military commanders and that it be “proclaimed”—read aloud—“in each of the United States, and at the head of the army.” That night, Philadelphia printer John Dunlap produced some 200 copies, now known as the Dunlap broadsides.

In the days that followed, John Hancock, as president of the Congress, sent copies to the states, urging that the Declaration be proclaimed “in such a Manner, that the People may be universally informed of it.” He also sent a copy to General Washington, who ordered it read “with an audible voice” on July 9, hoping that such a reading would “serve as a fresh incentive to every officer, and soldier, to act with Fidelity and Courage.”

Public readings took place in Philadelphia on July 8 and in cities and towns across the colonies through July and into August. Newspapers and broadsides ensured that the Declaration’s words reached eyes and ears up and down the continent.

Primary Sources:
Journals of the Continental Congress (July 4, 1776)
Dunlap Broadside (1776)
John Hancock, Letters to States and General Washington (July 1776)
George Washington, General Orders (July 9, 1776)

declare: In English law, a declaration was the statement of charges a plaintiff presented against a defendant. In English politics and history, declarations enacted policies and ended regimes. 

Eight declarations in English history had ended the reign of a living king. Most famous was the Declaration of Rights of 1689, which deposed King James II and listed thirteen grievances against him. 

Consistent with this tradition, American intercolonial assemblies had issued declarations even before the Declaration of Independence: a 1765 Declaration of Rights and Grievances, a 1774 Declaration and Resolves, and a 1775 Declaration on Taking Up Arms, the last of which Thomas Jefferson had co-drafted. 

Primary Sources:
Declaration of Rights (1689)
Stamp Act Congress, Declaration of Rights and Grievances (1765)
First Continental Congress, Declaration and Resolves (1774)
Second Continental Congress, Declaration on Taking Up Arms (1775)

We hold these truths to be self-evident: The Declaration’s second paragraph parallels the first three sections of George Mason’s May 1776 draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Mason declared that “all men are born equally free and independent”; that they possess “certain inherent natural rights” that cannot be “deprive[d]” or “divest[ed],” including “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety”; that “all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people;” that “government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the people, nation, or community”; and that whenever government proved “inadequate or contrary to these purposes,” a majority retained the “indubitable, unalienable, indefeasible right, to reform, alter, or abolish it.” Mason’s draft, in turn, paralleled John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government (1690), a widely read and deeply influential text at the founding. 

Primary Sources:
John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1690)
George Mason, Committee Draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (May 27, 1776)

all men are created equal: “Equal” in what respects? Were White men “equal” to Black men? Were “men” equal to women? This patch of text framed America’s constitutional conversation for more than a century and ultimately drove the adoption of four constitutional amendments.  

The words themselves had deep roots. Before the Declaration, John Locke’s Second Treatise had declared that “all [are] equal and independent,” and George Mason’s draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights that “all men are born equally free and independent.” John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters (1720–23) likewise proclaimed that “[a]ll men are born free.”

Yet Jefferson and Mason themselves slaveholders, despite their lofty words. Both condemned slavery as a moral crime. “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” Jefferson prophesied in 1782, and Mason at the Constitutional Convention warned that slavery “bring[s] the judgment of heaven on a Country.” But neither of them ever looked in the mirror, even as they both attributed slaveholding to the sin of “avarice,” or greed.

Others, however, seized on their words. Over a dozen antislavery state constitutions that postdated the Declaration echoed its most famous phrase (or that phrase’s Virginia precursor). Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution declared that “all men are born equally free and independent,” and Massachusetts’s 1780 constitution, drafted by John Adams, that “[a]ll men are born free and equal,” language which its supreme court later interpreted to have abolished slavery. In 1852, Frederick Douglass thundered that American slavery was “flagrantly inconsistent” with the Declaration’s “saving principles.” And in in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and other delegates to the the Seneca Falls Convention remixed the Declaration of Independence into their own Declaration of Sentiments, proclaiming that “all men and women are created equal.”

In the 1850s and 1860s, competing interpretations of the Declaration led to crisis. In 1854, Indiana’s Senator John Pettit said the Declaration’s equality clause a “self-evident lie,” and in 1861, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens boasted that the Confederacy’s “corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” Abraham Lincoln, by contrast, insisted in 1857 that the Declaration “did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them,” but “meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.” For Lincoln, the Declaration “set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.”

In the crucible of the Civil War, Lincoln’s vision prevailed. The interpertations championed by Lincoln, Douglass, Stanton, and Mott were constitutionalized in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments. 

Primary Sources:
John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1690)
John Trenchard & Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters (1720–23)
George Mason, Committee Draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (May 27, 1776)
Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776
Massachusetts Constitution of 1780
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1782)

unalienable: Inalienable (or “unalienable”) rights cannot be transferred or surrendered, even voluntarily. As Francis Hutcheson explained in Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), a right is alienable—meaning it can be transferred or surrendered to a government—only if its transfer is both within our power and would serve a valuable purpose. The right of conscience is a classic inalienable right, because “we cannot command ourselves to think what either we our selves, or any other Person pleases.” So, too, is the freedom of religion, because “it can never serve any valuable purpose, to make Men worship [God] in a way which seems to them displeasing to him.” The right to property, by contrast, is alienable, and so can be conveyed, regulated, and taxed. 

Primary Source:
Francis Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725)

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness: George Mason’s draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights listed the natural rights of “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Jefferson streamlined this to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” in part because the right to property, unlike the other three natural rights, is alienable. 

Steeped in classical and Enlightenment moral philosophy, the founders understood “the pursuit of Happiness” to mean the pursuit of virtue and self-government. Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics were classics texts on the good life, and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Joseph Addison’s Spectator, and David Hume’s Essays all used the specific phrase “the pursuit of happiness.” The rigorous daily schedule and list of thirteen virtues in Benjamin Franklin’s posthumous but bestselling autobiography epitomized this lifelong pursuit.  

Primary Sources:
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (ca. 340 BC)
Cicero, The Tusculan Disputations (ca. 45 BC)
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
Joseph Addison, The Spectator (1711–12)
David Hume, Essays, Moral Political, and Literary (1758)
George Mason, Committee Draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (May 27, 1776) 
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1791)

the consent of the governed: Under social-contract theory, legitimate government requires the “consent,” or agreement, of the people being governed. As John Locke put it in the Second Treatise, “[m]en being . . . by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be . . . subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.” Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government likewise insisted that “general consent” was “the ground of all just government,” and that “Government is not instituted for the good of the Governor, but of the Governed.”

Primary Sources:
John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1690)
Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (1698)

the right of the people to alter or abolish it: In social-contract theory, the people had a right to withdraw their consent—in other words, a right of revolution—when government became tyrannical or despotic. Whenever rulers “endeavour . . . to reduce [the people] to slavery under arbitrary power,” John Locke wrote in the Second Treatise, they “forfeit the power the people had put into their hands,” and the people “have a right to resume their original liberty.” 

Primary Sources:
John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1690)

a long train of abuses: John Locke recognized a right of revolution, but only as a last resort. “[L]ittle mismanagement[s] in public affairs” could not justify revolution, Locke explained in the Second Treatise, nor even did “[g]reat mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty” ordinarily suffice. Instead, offenses had to be grave and recurrent to justify revolution. Only when “a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design [to subvert liberty] visible to the people,” Locke wrote, would the people “rouze themselves” and exercise their right of revolution. 

Primary Sources:
John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1690)

King: According to an English legal maxim, the king could do no wrong (rex non potest peccare). To accuse the “King,” rather than his ministers, of wrongdoing was therefore revolutionary. Jefferson had been among the first to do so: in scathing terms, his 1774 Summary View of the Rights of British America held King George III personally responsible for colonial grievances. (“Let those flatter who fear,” Jefferson snapped; “it is not an American art.” Later, in the bestselling 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine condemned the very concept of hereditary monarchy and proclaimed that “in America the law is king.” 

Primary Sources:
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)

Facts: Just as a plaintiff’s declaration in English law presented a statement of charges against the defendant being sued, a regime-ending declaration presented grievances against the monarch being deposed. Where the famous Declaration of Rights of 1689 had listed thirteen grievances against James II—among them that he kept standing armies in times of peace without Parliament’s consent, quartered troops in violation of law, and interfered with jury-trial rights—the Declaration of Independence listed eighteen grievances against King George III. 

In drafting the Declaration, Jefferson drew on a repertoire of long-voiced American grievances. His own Summary View had featured eight grievances, a list he expanded to sixteen in a June 1776 draft preamble for the Constitution of Virginia. In addition, the Stamp Act Congress’s Declaration of Rights and Grievances (1765), the First Continental Congress’s Declaration and Resolves (1774), the Second Continental Congress’s Declaration on Taking Up Arms (1775), and the same’s May 15 preamble had all accumulated grievances against the Crown, as had dozens of state and local resolutions issued in the weeks leading up to independence. 

Primary Sources:
Declaration of Rights (1689)
Stamp Act Congress, Declaration of Rights and Grievances (1765)
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)
First Continental Congress, Declaration and Resolves (1774)
Second Continental Congress, Declaration on Taking Up Arms (1775)
Second Continental Congress, Preamble to the Resolution on Independent Governments (May 15, 1776)
Thomas Jefferson, Draft Preamble for the Constitution of Virginia (June 1776)

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good: In English law, no legislative act was complete without the King’s formal approval, known as royal assent. In his Summary View, Jefferson had charged the King with “reject[ing] laws of the most salutary tendency,” including laws prohibiting or taxing the international slave trade. The Massachusetts legislature, for instance, voted in 1771 and 1774 to abolish the slave trade, but on both occasions the royal governor, acting in the King’s name, blocked the measure. The Constitution’s Presentment Clause would later allow Congress to override a presidential veto by a two-thirds vote of both houses. 

Primary Sources:
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)
Article I, Section 7 (1787)

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them: On the Crown’s orders, colonial laws lay dormant until they secured royal assent. As Jefferson explained in A Summary View, the “suspending clause[s]” required by the Crown combined with the King’s “inattention” to pending laws to produce a double evil. First, “the law cannot be executed till it has twice crossed the [A]tlantic”—a voyage that took months—by which time the mischief that motivated the law would have “spent its whole force.” Second, if assent eventually came, the law would take effect only when “time, and change of circumstances, shall have rendered” the law moot and potentially even “destructive to [the] people.”

Primary Source:
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only: In A Summary View (1774), Jefferson had charged the King with categorically ruling out “assent to any law for the division of a county, unless the new county will consent to have no representative in assembly.” With Virginia’s western border undefined, some counties stretched “many hundred miles,” their courts located nearer to the distant eastern edge. Frontier Virginians with court business thus faced a punishing choice, Jefferson explained: either trek across vast distances with their witnesses until litigation ended or forfeit their representation in the colonial assembly. Similar episodes played out in New Hampshire, New York, and New Jersey. The Constitution as amended would later guarantee representation to all adult resident nonfelon citizens.

Primary Source:
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures: Royal governors in Massachusetts moved the state legislature from Boston to Cambridge and Salem in 1768 and 1774, respectively.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people: The Crown sanctioned the dissolutions of the New York and Massachusetts legislatures in 1767 and 1768, respectively. 

In New York, when the colonial legislature refused to make fund certain provisions for quartered troops as required by the Quartering Act of 1765, Parliament responded by suspending the assembly’s legislative power in the New York Restraining Act of 1767. “If [the people of New York] may be legally deprived in such a case of the privilege of making laws,” John Dickinson warned in Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, “why may they not, with equal reason, be deprived of every other privilege?”

In Massachusetts, the colonial legislature circulated to the other twelve colonies a 1768 letter, drafted by Samuel Adams and James Otis Jr., protesting taxation without representation under the Townshend Acts of 1767. Lord Hillsborough, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, branded the letter “seditious” and instructed royal governors to treat it “with the contempt it deserves.” The royal governor dissolved the Massachusetts Assembly after it refused (by a 92-17 vote) to rescind the letter. 

Jefferson reminded readers in A Summary View that English judges in prior centuries had been impeached and executed “as traitors to their country” for wrongly advising the King that he could dissolve Parliament at will. The Constitution would vest the power of legislative adjournment in Congress itself, rather than the executive. 

Primary Sources:
Quartering Act (1765)
New York Restraining Act (1767)
John Dickinson, Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer (1767–78)
Townshend Acts (1767)
Massachusetts Circular Letter (1768)
Lord Hillsborough, Circular Letter to the Governors in America (1768)
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)
Article I, Section 5 (1787)

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within: When royal governors dissolved colonial legislatures, colonists simply formed substitute extralegal assemblies. In 1768, with the Massachusetts assembly dissolved for protesting the Townshend Acts of 1767 and with British troops en route to Boston to maintain order, James Otis Jr., Samuel Adams, and John Hancock convened a town meeting in Faneuil Hill, which resolved to hold a “convention” to discuss measures for the “peace and safety” of the people. When the convention met, nearly a hundred towns sent delegates. In 1774, moreover, seven colonies faced with suspended legislatures selected delegates to the First Continental Congress through similar popular bodies. 

Embracing this model of popular sovereignty, the Constitution would later require ratification not by state legislatures, but by state “Conventions.” In this way, ratification would “proceed[] directly from the people,” in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland. 

Primary Sources:
Townshend Acts (1767)
Resolutions of the Boston Town Meeting (1768)
Article VII (1787)
McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands: Population growth—through both natural increase and immigration—was vital to colonial prosperity. Yet beginning in 1763, the King restricted western settlement, and in 1774 he adopted new land policies making land acquisition more costly. “[T]he acquisition of lands being rendered difficult,” Jefferson complained in A Summary View, “the population of our country is likely to be checked.” At the same time, the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations routinely vetoed colonial schemes to attract immigrants, and in 1773, the Crown prohibited the naturalization of foreigners altogether, further discouraging immigration. 

Primary Source:
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. In North Carolina, a standoff with the Crown over the power of colonial courts to reach British merchants left the colony without a judicial system for three years. When colonial creditors sued British merchants doing business in the colony through agents without stepping foot there themselves, the legislature authorized courts to “attach”—or temporarily seize—the merchants’ in-colony property. Without this power, colonial courts would not be able to enforce decisions against such out-of-colony defendants, meaning that colonists would have to cross the Atlantic and sue in Great Britain if they hoped to recover their debts. 

In 1772, however, the King instructed the royal governor to withhold assent for any law authorizing this sort of attachment. The North Carolina Assembly refused to renew the court system without renewing this power, so the governor dissolved the legislature, leaving the colony without superior courts for three years. In his first draft of the Declaration, Jefferson thus charged the King with “suffer[ing] the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these colonies.” 

Primary Source:
Thomas Jefferson, “Original Rough Draught” of the Declaration of Independence (1776)

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries: Colonists repeatedly battled the Crown over judicial independence. In the 1750s and 1760s, royal governors vetoed colonial efforts to insulate judges from unilateral executive removal. In 1761, a royal order provided that colonial judges would serve only at “the pleasure of the crown.” And in Massachusetts, the Crown usurped the payment of judicial salaries from the colonial legislature, a development that the Townshend Acts of 1767 had foreshadowed. 

All this starkly departed from the independence English judges had enjoyed since 1701 under the Act of Settlement (and that American federal judges would later enjoy under the Constitution): life tenure (“Quam diu se bene Gesserint,” Latin for “during good behavior”) and fixed, non-diminishable salaries (“Salaries ascertained and established”). 

Primary Sources:
Act of Settlement (1701)
Townshend Acts (1767)
Article III, Section 1 (1787)

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance: In the 1760s, colonists railed against the mushrooming ranks of customs officers and the intrusive powers they wielded.

To enforce imperial taxes and crack down on smuggling, the Townshend Acts of 1767 created the Boston-based American Board of Customs Commissioners and granted it sweeping investigative authority. In particular, the Acts authorized courts to grant customs officials “writs of assistance,” judicial orders empowering customs officers to search homes and buildings for smuggled goods and even compel “assistance” from bystanders to force entry. (In law, a writ is a judicial order directing its addressee to act—or not to act—in a specified way.) Customs officers personally profited from seizures, pocketing a third of the proceeds from their forfeiture, giving them a corrupt incentive to “harrass” the colonists.

These general writs had long been controversial and, with the Stamp and Townshend Acts, became notorious. In 1761, James Otis Jr. denounced them in Massachusetts’s highest court as “the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law-book.” Though he lost the case, Otis’s argument galvanized opposition to Great Britain (and would later inspire the Fourth Amendment’s protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures”). John Adams, who witnessed Otis’s argument as a young lawyer in the audience, marked it “the first scene of the first Act of opposition to the Arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the Child Independence was born.”

The colonists also resented the proliferation of customs officials. As the Massachusetts Circular Letter (1768) complained, the Board could “make as many appointments as they think fit, and . . . pay the appointees what sum they please,” incentivizing customs officers to pursue customs claims aggressively, perhaps to the point of overenforcement. This “multipli[cation]” of officers was “dangerous to the liberty of the people.”

Primary Sources:
James Otis Jr., Against Writs of Assistance (1761)
Stamp Act (1765)
Revenue Act (1767)
Commissioner of Customs Act (1767)
Massachusetts Circular Letter (1768)
Fourth Amendment (1791)
John Adams, Letter to William Tudor (March 29, 1817)

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures: Taxation without representation provoked colonial resistance, sometimes in the form of intimidation of royal officials and British loyalists. In 1768, London dispatched over a thousand British troops to Boston to protect the customs officers charged with enforcing the Townshend Acts of 1767. At the height of the occupation, one of every three adult males in Boston was a Redcoat. 

Tensions exploded in downtown Boston on March 5, 1770. With a mob hurling snowballs, ice, and stones at them, British troops opened fire, killing five and wounding six. Within a week, a Boston newspaper printed a cartoon by Pual Revere four of the victims’ coffins; within a month, Revere’s engraving The Bloody Massacre, depicting Redcoats firing on unarmed innocents, was circulating widely. Later that year, John Adams defended the soldiers against murder charges, securing acquittals for most and reduced convictions for two and exemplifying a leading colonist’s commitment to the rule of law and fair jury trial. 

Primary Sources:
Townshend Acts (1767)
Paul Revere, Four Coffins of Men Killed in the Boston Massacre (1770)
Paul Revere, The Bloody Massacre (1770)
John Adams, Argument for the Defense (1770)

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power: In 1770, Parliament repealed all but one of the duties imposed by the infamous Townshend Acts of 1767, and in 1773 it granted the East India Company a special exemption from all taxes except for the Townshend tea duty it left in place. On the night of December 16, 1773, Samuel Adams and other Sons of Liberty, disguised as Native American Mohawk warriors, protested this government-supported monopoly by boarding three vessels and dumped 342 chests of East India Company tea into the Boston Harbor. Parliament retaliated with the Coercive (or Intolerable) Acts. Among them, the Massachusetts Government Act, “revoke[d]” Massachusetts’s charter and concentrated sweeping authority in its royal governor, who doubled as commander-in-chief of British forces in North America and who would soon dispatch hundreds of British troops to Boston. The Constitution would later vest commander-in-chief powers in an elected president and grant Congress the powers to appropriate military funds and make military rules. 

Primary Source:
Massachusetts Government Act (1774)
Article I, Section 8 (1787)
Commander in Chief Clause (1787)

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: The “others” were the members of Parliament. Early colonial protests focused narrowly on taxation: Parliament could not tax without representation, though many conceded it could still legislate for the colonies on trade and other smatters.

But the Declaratory Act of 1766 and the Coercive Acts of 1774 showed the colonists they were thinking too small. The Declaratory Act asserted Parliament’s right “to bind the colonies and people of America . . . in all cases whatsoever.” The Coercive Acts abolished Massachusetts’s charter, closed Boston’s harbor, quartered troops, and curtailed jury trials—all “intolerable” measures, even though none taxed. 

The Coercive Acts incited the colonists to reject Parliament’s jurisdiction over the colonies altogether. For James Wilson, the idea that “the colonies . . . should be bound by the legislative authority of the parliament of Great Britain” was “repugnant to the essential maxims of jurisprudence.” Jefferson likewise insisted that the colonies were “exempt . . . from the jurisdiction of the British parliament.” In the vivid words of John Adams, “[t]hat ‘supreme power over America is vested in the estates in parliament,’ is an affront to us; for there is not an acre of American land represented there.”

Primary Sources:
James Wilson, Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (1774)
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)
John Adams, Novanglus No. VII (1775)

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: The Quartering Acts of 1765 and 1774 compelled colonists to house British troops in inns, taverns, and vacant buildings and to supply them with food and supplies. The Third Amendment would later prohibit quartering in homes without owners’ consent. 

Primary Sources:
Quartering Act (1765)
Quartering Act (1774)
Third Amendment (1791)

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: Despite the fact that John Adams had secured acquittals for most of the Boston Massacre defendants, the Administration of Justice Act of 1774 shielded royal officials in Massachusetts from local juries by allowing them to be tried in Great Britain if accused of murder or another capital crime. Colonists derided it the “Murder Act,” and in 1775, the Second Continental Congress charged Parliament and the King with “exempting the ‘murderers’ of colonists from legal trial, and in effect, from punishment.” The Sixth Amendment would, “in all criminal prosecutions,” require “impartial” jury trials drawn from the “State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

Primary Sources:
Administration of Justice Act (1774)
Second Continental Congress, Declaration on the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms (1775)
Article III (1787)
Sixth Amendment (1791)

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: The Boston Port Act of 1774 shut down Boston Harbor until Boston repaid the East India Company for its dumped tea, and the Restraining Acts of 1775 barred New England from trading outside the British Empire.

Primary Sources:
Boston Port Act (1774)

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: To pay off debts from the French and Indian War, Parliament enacted the Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765 (which covered pamphlets and newspapers and thus burdened the freedoms of speech and press); and the Townshend Acts of 1767 (which included the tax on tea). Colonists condemned these laws as tyrannical taxation without representation. James Otis Jr. insisted that the colonists could not be “taxed without their consent,” while John Dickinson affirmed that “[t]hose who are taxed without their own consent . . . are slaves.” In 1765, the Stamp Act Congress declared “[t]hat it is inseparably essential to the freedom of a people, and the undoubted right of Englishmen, that no taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent.” The Constitution’s Origination Clause would later require that revenue-raising bills originate in the House of Representatives, the most representative chamber of the most representative branch. 

Primary Sources
Sugar Act (1764)
James Otis Jr., The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764)
Stamp Act (1765)
Stamp Act Congress, Declaration of Rights and Grievances (1765)
Townshend Acts (1767)
John Dickinson, Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer (1767–78)
Article I, Section 7 (1787)

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: The Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765 transferred customs cases from colonial courts to juryless vice-admiralty courts, staffed by royal judges who collected fees from litigation. In 1765, the Stamp Act Congress declared that “trial by jury is the inherent and invaluable right of every British subject in these colonies” and that extensions of “the jurisdiction of the courts of Admiralty beyond its ancient limits, have a manifest tendency to subvert the rights and liberties of the colonists.” The Seventh Amendment would later guarantee the right to jury trial in civil cases. 

Primary Sources:
Sugar Act (1764)
Stamp Act (1765)
Stamp Act Congress, Declaration of Rights and Grievances (1765)
Seventh Amendment (1791)

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences: A 1772 act allowed colonists accused of destroying British military property to be tried in Great Britain, far from local juries. The Sixth Amendment would later guarantee jury trials “[i]n all criminal prosecutions” in “the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

Primary Sources:
“An Act for the better securing and preserving his Majesty's Dock Yards, Magazines, Ships, Ammunition, and Stores” (1772)
Sixth Amendment (1791)

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies: The Quebec Act of 1774 extended French civil law in place of English common law, sanctioned Roman Catholicism, and enlarged Quebec’s western territory, fueling colonial conspiracies of a plot to strip Canadians of English liberties and to plant a hostile province on America’s frontier.

Primary Source:
Quebec Act (1774)

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: In retaliation to the Boston Tea Party, the Massachusetts Government Act revoked the colony’s charter and vested sweeping powers in the royal governor. Thomas Jefferson, in a draft of the Declaration on Taking Up Arms, warned that this measure along with the Declaratory Act of 1766 were alone sufficient “to erect a despotism of unlimited extent.” The Constitution’s Guarantee Clause would later “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”

Primary Sources:
Massachusetts Government Act (1774)
Thomas Jefferson, Draft Declaration on Taking Up Arms (1775)
Guarantee Clause (1787)

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever: The New York Restraining Act of 1767 suspended the colony’s legislature after it refused to funds provisions for quartered troops, as required by the Quartering Act of 1765. If New Yorkers could be stripped of their legislature in such a case, John Dickinson wondered in his Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, “why may they not, with equal reason, be deprived of every other privilege?” Meanwhile, the Declaratory Act of 1766 infamously asserted Parliament’s “full power and authority . . . to bind the colonies and people of America . . . in all cases whatsoever.” In 1774, the Second Continental Congress condemned as tyrannical this claim to “so enormous, so unlimited a power,” made as it was by a Parliament in which Americans had no voice.

Primary Sources:
New York Restraining Act (1767)
Declaratory Act (1766)
John Dickinson, Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer (1767–78)
Second Continental Congress, Declaration on Taking Up Arms (1775)

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us: In August 1775, four months after Lexington and Concord, King George III proclaimed the colonies in “open and avowed rebellion,” words he echoed in an October address to Westminster. Parliament soon passed the Prohibitory Act of 1775, prohibiting American trade and declaring that colonial ships and cargo were subject to forfeiture “as if [they] were the ships and effects of open enemies.”

Primary Sources:
King George III, Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition (1775)
King George III, “His Majesty's most gracious speech to both Houses of Parliament” (1775)
Prohibitory Act (1775)

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people: In 1775, British forces set fire to Charlestown during the Battle of Bunker Hill and burned the town of Falmouth (in present-day Maine) to the ground. Both incidents were seared into colonial memory.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation: In May 1776, the Second Continental Congress received copies of treaties confirming that King George III had hired German troops to wage war against the colonists. State and local bodies widely cited this fact in their resolutions for independence. In total, some 30,000 foreign mercenaries fought shoulder to shoulder with the Redcoats.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands: The Prohibitory Act of 1775 authorized British crews to capture American sailors and compel them “in[to] the service of his Majesty,” a practice known as impressment. 

Primary Source:
Prohibitory Act (1775)

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions: In November 1775, Virginia royal governor Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation promising freedom to slaves willing to “join[] his Majesty’s troops” and “bear arms” against the American colonists, and in May 1776, Redcoats allied with Indian forces against the Americans in Canada. 

In his first draft of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson had indicted the King for complicity in the “piratical warfare” and “execrable commerce” of the international slave trade. But the Second Continental Congress deleted this passage—likely to preserve colonial unity but perhaps also because the charge would have been hypocritical coming from Americans who themselves had trafficked in international slaves and were holding men, women, and children in bondage. 

Primary Sources:
Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation (1775)
Thomas Jefferson, “Original Rough Draught” of the Declaration of Independence (1776)

Petitioned for Redress: A petition, like a declaration, was a special type of constitutional document. Where declarations declared, petitions requested. In 1628, King Charles II had accepted the Petition of Right, drafted by Edward Coke, which asked the Crown to respect various “rights and liberties” it had violated.

American colonists, however, had no such success with King George III. A “humble petition” the First Continental Congress submitted in 1774 received no response, and the King in 1775 refused even to receive the Second Continental Congress’s so-called Olive Branch Petition, which beseeched him to use his “royal authority and influence” to correct the misdeeds of his “Ministers.”

The First Amendment would later guarantee “the right of the people . . . to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” and petitions would became a powerful instrument in American constitutional conversation. In 1790, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, with Benjamin Franklin as its president, petitioned the First Congress to pay “serious attention to the Subject of Slavery” and “Step to the very verge” of its constitutional powers to extinguish it. In the 1840s, John Quincy Adams waged a campaign against the “gag rule” that barred the introduction of anti-slavery petitions in Congress. And in 1864, the Women’s Loyal National League, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, gathered 400,000 signatures on a petition for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery—the largest petition drive in American history to that point.  

Primary Sources:
Petition of Right (1628)
First Continental Congress, Petition the King (1774)
Second Continental Congress, Olive Branch Petition (1775)
First Amendment (1791)
Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Petition for the Abolition of Slavery to the First Congress (1790)
John Quincy Adams, Open Letter “To the Citizens of the United States” (1839)
Women’s Loyal National League, Mammoth Petition (1864)

our Brittish brethren: Alongside their petitions to the King in 1774 and 1775, the American colonists twice addressed the British people directly. In the 1774 general election, however, the British people largely returned Parliament to power unchanged.  

Primary Sources:
First Continental Congress, Address to the People of Great Britain (1774)
Second Continental Congress, “To the Inhabitants of Great Britain” (1775)

Free and Independent States: The Declaration’s final paragraph echoed the Lee Resolution, which resolved “[t]hat these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” Introduced by Richard Henry Lee in early June 1776, the resolution passed on July 2. John Adams accordingly predicted that each year “the Second Day of July” would become the nation’s “great anniversary Festival.” Instead, Americans came to celebrate the anniversary of the document that explained independence, rather than the one that merely asserted it.   

Primary Sources:
Second Continental Congress, Lee Resolution (1776)
John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams (July 3, 1776)

our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor: Under English law, treason was punishable by death and confiscation of estate. (“We must indeed all hang together, or we shall assuredly hang separately,” as Benjamin Franklin is said—probably apocryphally—to have quipped at the signing of the Declaration.) Many state and local resolutions had pledged “lives and fortunes.” The phrase “our sacred Honor” was Jefferson’s poetic touch.