DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.   Term Paper ID:25887 Click to get this paper

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Paper Abstract: Background, purpose, effect, authorship, historical & political significance. Paper Introduction: The Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776 as a statement of the Second Continental Congress of the independence of the American colonies from British rule. Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft, and ideas were then incorporated from John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The document was adopted on July 4, and along with success in the American Revolution, the Declaration ushered in a new political age (Carruth 138). The document produced at the behest of the Second Continental Congress expressed a number of political ideas then current in the colonies, ideas which had been expressed by others in a different form and which were now brought together by Jefferson in a final statement of independence from England. Jefferson based much of the document on ideas derived from Locke and Rousseau concerning the value of natural law, to the Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. A number of events led up to the writing of the Declaration ofIndependence. New York: Penguin Classics, 1986.Maier, Pauline. The cry became "taxation without representation." The colonistsraised fundamental issues concerning the limits of parliamentary power.They also raise issues of sovereignty and of their own right to makedecisions rather than a sovereign who was thousands of miles away.Americans saw the stream of British tax regulations as posing the gravestthreat to their freedom as individuals. Thisplaced a burden on merchants and farmers who had to provide these goods.In effect, they were paying a tax in the form of provisions, a taxunequally distributed and falling only on those who happened to be wherethe troops billeted (Zinn 59-66). Adams wanted the colonialresistance to continue, and he and other Radical leaders stirred up troubleto see that this did not happen. However,on June 1 , a vote was held to appoint a committee to "prepare adeclaration to the effect of the said first resolution," and a committeewas appointed the next day and consisted of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams,Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. The Quartering Act was one of the mostbitterly opposed, for it was a form of indirect taxation that requiredAmerican assemblies to provide British troops with temporary housing and anassortment of provisions when they passed through the colonies. New York: HarperCollins, 198 .----------------------- 8 There were different factions among therevolutionaries, and they defined the war in different terms. The Constitution is most certainly a statement ofuniversal human rights and should be seen as such, and it has indeed beenimitated by others seeking to claim their rights and defy tyrannicaloverlords around the world. Knopf, 1956.Carruth, G. There was a whole series of taxes, of which the Stamp Act wasonly one of the most onerous. The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. Works CitedBecker, Carl. The book was publishedanonymously in 1776, and the sentiments expressed in this work by Painehelped direct the energies of the rebels and point the way to Americanindependence from England. Parliament had responded with aseries of "Coercion Acts" that asserted the sovereignty of the crown anddenied the power of the Massachusetts Assembly. New York: Alfred A. One reason set forth wa to make thedocument more persuasive given that the Continental Congress had no placein the British constitutional tradition: It was new, and the Crown did not recognize its legitimacy. The British in 1759had disallowed measures passed by the popular assemblies and had takenother actions that affirmed British control and reduced the effectivenessof colonial bodies. The original draft had the heading A Declarationby the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congressassembled, while the final parchment copy has the heading The unanimousDeclaration of the thirteen united States of America (the oddcapitalization is part of the document)(Becker 2-3). Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1978.Zinn, Howard. Jefferson based much of the document on ideas derived from Locke andRousseau concerning the value of natural law, to the effect that naturallaw should stand as the principle which protects the rights of individualsagainst the abuses of government. It was estimated that only about one-third of those who were assembled in Philadelphia at the Congress in 1775and 1776 were in favor of independence. The people were now declaring their independencebecause of these excesses, and inherent in what Jefferson writes is thebelief that the people have an absolute right to do this, a right given tothem by God, a right that neither King George III nor any other civilauthority can take away (Hall 222-223). Once then Committee of the Whole reported that it had agreed upon aDeclaration, the text was read and congress accepted it, ordered itauthenticated, and printed it under the supervision of the draftingcommittee. The colonists were delighted with this change of heart, butthere was still dissension in Boston where Samuel Adams and his followerssaw the issue as broader than specific taxation. The opposition to this duty grew,leading to the Boston Tea party among other acts of opposition. Richard Henry Lee started the move toward the writing of theDeclaration of Independence on June 7, 1776 when he acted on behalf of theVirginia delegation to the Continental Congress and submitted threeresolutions. Paine wasjoining in a debate that had been ongoing for some time and that hadalready erupted into the beginnings of war. . "Introduction." In Common Sense, Thomas Paine. However,researchers have found that the document was probably signed at that timeonly by John Hancock, the President of the Congress, for his name appearsas the sole signer on the published broadside. Our current system of justice is baseddirectly on the principles set forth in this document, and from ahistorical perspective, this challenge to the King asserted a differentview of the relationship between ruler and ruled. The colonists were fighting the British, but they were not certain whythey were fighting. By affixing their signatures, the delegates signaled that each of the colonies mentioned supported the petition, and also founded it upon their own personal authority and dignity (Maier 152).The Declaration was an especially important document because it was anavowal of revolution: From the viewpoint of those who opposed its message, the Declaration was nothing less than a public confession of treason. When Parliament placed taxes on American trade as amethod of regulation for the first time in their history, the result wasexplosive. It is true that much of the Declaration was derived from the politicalthought of John Locke, and George Mason had anticipated many of the ideasJefferson would use in his draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights onJune 12, 1776, "though the literary grace and felicity of Jefferson'sDeclaration eclipsed the ponderous lawyer's couplets and triplets of theVirginia Declaration" (Hall 223). New York: Harvest Books, 1954.Wills, Garry. At the time, there were a number of other "declarations ofIndependence" produced by different colonies. The rivalry between Hamilton, a keyfigure in the development of the Constitution, and Jefferson may obscurethis fact, but in a real sense "Hamilton fought the revolution thatJefferson . Many of these documents alsodid not assert themselves declarations of Independence at the time and wereinstead a miscellaneous set of documents written for different purposes: Some officially ended the old regime within a state . Inventing America. The Declaration of Independence wasdirected at abuses charged to King George III, and many of these abuses areindicated in the document--he had refused to agree to laws that were forthe public good, he had made judges dependent on him rather than the law,he had created new offices and sent officers to harass the people, he hadinstituted military control, and he had altered the forms of governmentcreated by the colonists. What Paine did in this small book was toenunciate important principles of individual human rights and the specificright of the people to challenge unjust laws and an unjust government.What Paine did was to gather together many of the intellectual currents ofhis time, specifically those describing the importance of and effects ofnatural law and its consequences for government and the relationship of thepeople to their government. Even before the end of the French and Indian War, there hadbeen indications of dissensions within the colonies. Kramnick notes: "The publicationof Paine's Common Sense could not have been better timed" (Kramnick 8). These are the truths that Jefferson setsforth in the opening paragraph as "self-evident," that all men are createdequal, that they have certain rights given to them by God and which cannotbe taken away, and that these rights include the rights to life, liberty,and the pursuit of happiness. New York: Penguin Classics, 1986.Parrington, Vernon L., The Colonial Mind 162 -18 . American Scripture. The British contributed to tensions bytrying to help the nearly bankrupt East India Company by passing a law thatallowed the company to ship tea directly to the colonies without payingimport duties, and in effect this granted the company a monopoly. Thomas Paine's political declaration in his tract Common Sense strucka chord with the Americans of his time. The document endured and formed a basis for the Constitution thatwould be written several years later. New York: Signet Books, 1991.Hall, Kermit. The book was so popular that itwent through fifty-six editions in the first year. It is possible that thedelegates signed a copy which has since been lost, but it is alsoconsidered possible that Jefferson was simply wrong. John and SamAdams and Benjamin Franklin saw the battle as a war for independence.Others wanted to stay within the British empire, and they saw the war as achance to force Parliament to admit the justice of colonial claims and toredress a long list of grievances. Thisresolution was voted by the Continental congress on July 2, 1776. The first declared that "these United colonies are, and ofright ought to be, free and independent states" (Becker 5). The British were making it legalto take a man's property without his consent. Knopf, 1997.Paine, Thomas, Common Sense. Tensionscontinued to mount until the British tried to quell demonstrations withtroops, and this led to the rebellion of the colonists first in the city ofBoston and then outward from there as the British troops made their wayinto the interior. These are familiar words to us today butwere not such common ideas in 1776. Livingston. It was the Radicals, who had by then started callingthemselves the Patriots, who forced the crisis with the Boston Tea Party.This was described by Adams as an attack on property that might lead to amore violent confrontation in the future. Thedocument was adopted on July 4, and along with success in the AmericanRevolution, the Declaration ushered in a new political age (Carruth 138).The document produced at the behest of the Second Continental Congressexpressed a number of political ideas then current in the colonies, ideaswhich had been expressed by others in a different form and which were nowbrought together by Jefferson in a final statement of independence fromEngland. Jefferson in his notes stated that on the evening of July 4,the document was signed by every member except Mr. Dickinson. . The Quartering Act appliedto all colonies. A People's History of the United States. Once the work waspublished, however, delegates did sign, some at the time and some later.There has been some discussion as to why the document was signed at all,since this was not accepted practice. The Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776 as a statement ofthe Second Continental Congress of the independence of the Americancolonies from British rule. What Happened When. Parrington takes note of the powerof Common Sense and sees its great popularity as flowing "from its directand skillful appeal to material interests" (Parrington 335). This wasthe Tea Act of 1773, and the colonists interpreted it as a plot to persuadethem to drink taxed tea at a low price. The committeereported to the Congress on June 28 with a draft of the declaration whichwas passed, with a few modifications on July 4, 1776. Those carefully drafted, formal statements proclaimed a state's commitment to separate nationhood and justified that position (Maier 49).The national Declaration of Independence was drafted largely by Jefferson,with only minimal participation by the others on the committee. Theassertion of inalienable rights "to life, liberty, and the pursuit ofhappiness" would become central to the Constitution and to the form ofgovernment it shaped. Jeffersonthought little of the originality of his work and stated that while he hadnot consulted other source during the writing, the finished documentcontained little that he considered original in terms of political thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.Kramnick, Isaac. New York: Alfred A. The Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft, andideas were then incorporated from John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. This document isknown as the Declaration of Independence, though that name was never usedon the document itself. could brely bring himself to attend" (Wills 358-359). . And conviction for treason meant death and confiscation of estate (Maier 152). Isaac Kramnick (in anintroduction to Common Sense, 1986) writes: Americans fought Englishmen on the battlefields of the new world in January 1776, even as, among themselves, they debated the nature and purpose of those battles (Kramnick 7). The intent was to isolate the resistance, but instead itincreased the resistance, spread it throughout the colonies, and led to war(Zinn 67-8 ). Vernon L. Tensions in the coloniesmounted, and the Americans were partially successful as the British removedall duties. . If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.