The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Of Declarations and Independence

Posted on | July 4, 2025 | No Comments

Today is the 249th anniversary of the publication of the Declaration of Independence. The Fourth of July is celebrated as Independence Day because it was on this date in 1776 that printers in Philadelphia issued the first public copies of the declaration. The Second Continental Congress had voted for independence two days earlier, but took time to revise and ratify the final wording of the declaration. As we approach the 250th anniversary of that event, there are a few key points about this which must be emphasized for the sake of historical accuracy and a true understanding of what our independence actually means.

First, it was not the words of the declaration, but rather the military action of soldiers, to which Americans owe our independence. By the time Congress in Philadelphia issued the declaration, the American colonists had been in a de facto state of war against Britain for more than a year. The “shot heard ’round the world” — the battles of Lexington and Concord — had happened on April 19, 1775. Patriot militia then besieged the British troops in Boston, and the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought on June 17, 1775, which was five weeks after Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys captured Fort Ticonderoga. All this military action preceded the words of the Declaration of Independence by more than a year, and the war lasted another seven years until the Treaty of Paris was signed in September 1783. While it is good that we celebrate the Fourth of July to commemorate the Declaration of Independence, we ought not forget that it took a war to give practical meaning to those words.

A second error is to misunderstand the meaning of the Declaration of Independence by confusing it with the Constitution. It was the late historian Forrest McDonald who pointed out how common it has become for writers to scramble up phrases from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence with various bits of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, creating a sort of philosophical gumbo of liberal sentiment, sometimes with a few scraps and pieces of the Gettysburg Address and lyrics of patriotic songs thrown into the mix for seasoning.

There is no “We the People” in the Declaration (that’s the Constitution), and while the words “rights” or “right” appear nine times in the Declaration, most of these are in reference to accusations against King George III for violating those rights, e.g., “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. . . . He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”

What you see in those passages is that the Americans had, over the course of more than 150 years since the establishment of the first English colonies here, become accustomed to self-government, and considered themselves as possessing “the right of Representation in the Legislature.”

Here we reach the third point I wish to emphasize, namely that the sentiments of the Declaration of Independence express a specifically English understanding of political “rights.” As I’ve said before, the Declaration’s famous phrases about “self-evident truths” and “unalienable rights” cannot be removed from their historical context. If these “truths” were indeed so “self-evident,” why had they never been declared somewhere else at some other time by some other people?

No, it was the English-speaking colonists at Philadelphia who made that declaration, and their beliefs had a specific history that can be traced back to Magna Carta in 1215. It was in England alone that the idea of parliamentary “rights” developed into a practical system limiting the royal authority. Not long after the first settlers arrived at Jamestown, the quarrel between Parliament and the Crown became so fierce that it led to the English Civil War (1642-1651), and the beheading of King Charles I in 1649. For 11 years, England was a Commonwealth, acknowledging no king at all until, in 1660 — after the death of Cromwell — the monarchy was restored under King Charles II. But the example of the 1649 regicide was ever thereafter a reminder to any English monarch that there were limits to his authority, and that the rights of his subjects (as expressed through their representation in Parliament) were not to be disregarded.

It was by war, you see, that the English established their rights. The delegates at Philadelphia in 1776 were, in political terms, the heirs of those Roundheads who had accomplished that feat.

The Battle of Naseby, 1645

There are, in America today, probably not 1 in 50 high school seniors who could tell you anything at all about the English Civil War, and even most college graduates know almost nothing about the history by which the Americans in 1776 came to think of themselves as possessing rights, which they considered “unalienable.” This is perhaps the most ironic part of what is called “American exceptionalism,” the specifically English pedigree of those “self-evident” rights. There were European colonies all over the Western Hemisphere — the Spanish, the Portuguese,the French and the Dutch were England’s chief colonial rivals — but nowhere else prior to 1776 had the colonists of those other European powers risen in rebellion over the infringement of their rights. Why? Because only an Englishman would think in such terms! The whole business of writing up a petition to express a collective grievance against the crown — when had any collection of Spaniards or Frenchmen ever done such a thing?

It is the prevailing ignorance of history that makes so many Americans vulnerable to demagogues whose rhetoric about “rights” is intended to make envy a source of political power. People are deceived into thinking that have a “right” to this, that or the other thing — free medical treatment, free education, etc. — and then told that they are being oppressed by some conspiracy to deprive them of those things.

Such a concept of “rights” had nothing to do with the motivations behind the Declaration of Independence, the first paragraph of which states:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Everything else in the Declaration was written in service to this “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” It had become “necessary” for the American colonists to part ways with their English motherland, and thus they would “declare the causes” that led them to take that step. They invoke “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as their justification, being thereby entitled to “assume” their status as independent states.

It would be foolish to overlook the fact that this language was written with a European readership in mind. The Americans knew they had little chance of defeating the British military without assistance from France, Spain or other rivals to Britain’s power. So at the end, after announcing themselves “to be Free and Independent States . . . Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown,” the Americans are careful to add:

“. . . that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”

Translation: “Hey, France, we could be useful to you.”

The practical aims of the Declaration of Independence are nowadays seldom taught — or at least, it’s evident that these lessons are not learned very well — because our schools are run by liberal idiots whose chief purpose is to turn their students into duplicates of their own idiocy.

The men who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence were not engaged in some faculty lounge moot discussion of political philosophy. There was a war going on and, for more than a year, the delegates at Philadelphia had been among the leaders of an armed rebellion against the world’s most formidable military power.

By signing their names to the Declaration of Independence, they were in effect signing their own death warrants — if America lost the war.

The good news is, we won the war. Now, 249 years after the Declaration of Independence, the question remains to be answered whether we are still capable of self-government, and preserving our independence.



 

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Category: History

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