Ethelred Unraed's Journal: And leading up to the Declaration...

It's easy to forget what foundations underlie the Declaration of Independence. Quite often we think of it having sprung fully-formed from American minds, and fail to acknowledge the debt we owe to those who came before, particularly in British and European thought.

In particular, the Declaration echoes repeatedly the provisions of Magna Carta, a document that formed the basis of civil and human rights in Britain ever since it was wrung out of King John in 1215.

Let's look at some of the "Facts be submitted to a candid world" that are the basis of the Declaration:

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.

This is straight from Magna Carta -- the right of the people to have representation in the form of Parliament, regardless of the whims or wishes of the Crown.

Same goes for a lot of the complaints regarding taxation without due process or representation -- these are the very same things that the barons at Runnymede wrung out of King John in 1215. The point the Founding Fathers were making was that the King, in this case George III, and the British Parliament were going back on their own agreements with their people, with things like the Navigation Acts, the Stamp Tax and so on.

It should also be noted here that the Founding Fathers never argued against taxation itself. They argued clearly against quite a separate matter. Indeed, one of the "Facts" listed says point blank:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.

Many of the concepts of the Declaration also are based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- the idea of an inviolate "social contract" between the governed and the government, the "expressed will of the people", and so on. This is all reflected in Jefferson's phrase:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states...a prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people...we therefore...solemnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are...independent states...

Then there is of course the British philosopher Locke, whose concept of rights being intrinsic to our existence, rather than being merely granted to us by a ruler, is repeated by Jefferson here: "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", as Jefferson says.

And I can't resist this one Fact:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

This is a reference to the British tactic of deporting suspected criminals -- especially political ones -- to faraway places for trial and punishment, often without habeas corpus. Sounds an awful lot like Guantanamo ("pretended", by the way, meant more like "alleged" in those days -- not "fake", but "supposed" or "unproven").

Anyway, returning to the Declaration of Independence: there are even some echoes of the Declaration of Arbroath, which was Scotland's declaration of independence from England after Robert the Bruce succeeded in hurling the English under Edward I out of Scotland in 1320. Echoes of the right of self-determination, and in particular the right to choose one's leaders ("Yet if he [Robert the Bruce] should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King").

Jumping ahead to this phrase:

A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

This one is straight from the Act of Settlement of 1701 and Glorious Revolution of 1688, where the supremacy of Parliament and the Commons over the Crown was established -- that is, the monarch could be chosen (and deposed!) with the assent of the Commons, i.e. the people's representatives. In effect the American colonists were saying, you've abused us and ignored our rights, now we've decided we don't want to be governed by you anymore, just as the British Parliament chose to dump King James II/VII in the so-called Glorious Revolution in 1688 and appoint the Dutch William of Orange and his wife Mary Stuart as monarchs in his stead -- then Parliament secured the Hannoverian succession to the throne by act of Parliament in 1701, in spite of the existence of a Stuart heir to the throne.

So the principle of "rule by consent of the governed" was hardly a new thing, not even in Britain. Indeed, it was the cornerstone of the British constitutional monarchy as established by Parliament some 75 years before, and to some degree by the English barons some five and a half centuries before.

What the Founding Fathers were saying was that Parliament and the Crown weren't living up to their own standards or the law anymore -- a position shared by the British Whigs and numerous leading politicians in Britain at the time, most especially William Pitt the Elder (for whom Pittsburgh is named).

The ideas of the "American Revolution" were not new at all -- it was a continuation of trends in British politics and the ultimate realization of British liberty: a liberty whose ideals had become sidetracked in Britain's long twilight struggle with Bourbon France. The irony is that while Britain lost sight of that ideal, if only for a while, Bourbon France (a place anything but free) helped to realize British ideals by supporting those libertine colonists an ocean away -- then the French echoed them just 13 years later with the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Nicely Done (N/T)

[LPetrazickis]

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