The Foreign Policy Meaning of the Declaration
The Declaration served multiple purposes — not just securing foreign alliances, but rallying Americans themselves, as shown by Washington ordering it read aloud to his troops just days after its passage.
When trying to understand the meaning and implications of any document, the first recourse should always be to the ostensible reasons presented in the text itself. With respect to the Declaration of Independence, this has led to a rich interpretive literature on Congress’s international objectives when it issued the statement announcing the independence of the thirteen formerly British colonies of North America on July 4, 1776. Specifically, the Declaration delineates, in three passages, the intended audience to which the argument for separation is addressed. In the famous opening paragraph, a “decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind” is said to require the colonies “to declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.” The next paragraph then promises to deliver on that pledge, “To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World;” while the final paragraph concludes the list of reasons by “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions.”
These passages have long been recognized as an appeal for international recognition for very practical purposes. These include the possibility of foreign trade, financial assistance, international pressure for negotiations, and, perhaps most importantly, military alliance and intervention. Among the most obvious powers for such an appeal was France, the only nation then capable of mounting a credible counterforce by land or sea to British power.
With such clear statements of intention in the text itself, and the eventual success of the effort to secure financial and military help from abroad, the temptation has long existed to interpret the Declaration solely in light of its international objectives. This tendency began quite early, when attempts were made to constrain political appeals to the Declaration’s more sweeping moral claims, such as the idea of an equal creation that endows all men “with certain unalienable Rights,” and that inclination has continued with varying degrees of intensity to the present day.
The interesting issue raised by such an interpretation is the question of the existence of other aims beyond those overtly stated. No one has denied the international objectives set forth in the text, but to what degree were these aims supplemented and perhaps even furthered by inter-colonial and more domestic concerns? Considering this question closely provides valuable insight into the richness of the document’s intellectual foundations and possible aims.
Not long after ratification of the Constitution, the formation of parties heralded what Pauline Maier has dubbed the more “mature form” of the Declaration’s reputation as a founding document. Democratic-Republican organizers were keen to promote their party’s candidacies by associating them with the Declaration’s draftsman, Thomas Jefferson, and the document itself was elevated to an essential statement in favor of more democratic government. In response, Federalist adversaries attacked such an association by denigrating Jefferson’s text’s lack of originality, with some accusing him of outright theft of passages from John Locke. Thus, commonplace and unoriginal, the document was not to be counted on a par with the Constitution. Variations on these themes were echoed in later debates as political parties changed and regional alliances shifted.
During the Antebellum years, anti-slavery abolitionists openly appealed to passages in the Declaration to support their call for emancipation. Southern Democrats, on the other hand, asserted that the primary end of the Declaration was its announcement of thirteen independent sovereignties onto the world stage, while denouncing as unnecessary or even wrong the assertion of an equal creation. Such back-and-forth has been fairly typical across ages, as members of successive generations have attempted to employ the Declaration for their own purposes or to constrain its use by others. This political aspect remains a powerful undercurrent influencing and often complicating scholarship about the Declaration.
Emphasizing the International
The emphasis on the document’s role in international affairs gained particular traction in the late 1990s among those who sought to deemphasize the radical philosophical nature of the preamble.
Robert Bork, in his book Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996), endorsed the practical need of the Declaration for “justifying the colonists’ rebellion to the world,” but he lamented an unreflective acceptance of it as “a guide to action, governmental or private.” When taken in the latter sense, he elaborated, “the words press eventually towards extremes of liberty and the pursuit of happiness that court personal license and social disorder.”
Likewise, in his work The Myth of American Individualism (1996), political scientist Barry Shain has contended that the document was meant, not for Americans themselves, but was almost entirely directed to the enlightened international community of European intellectuals. The primary effort was to facilitate international cooperation by justifying America’s independence “not for American Patriots who already considered this claim unexceptional, but for their European and recalcitrant Loyalist audiences.” In his more recent collection of documents contextualizing the Declaration, Shain again pointed to the international audience as the document’s intended readership, noting that for the colonies, with their “great need for financial and military support, what passed for world public opinion — mainly the views of wealthy or powerful European nations — obviously mattered.” That view has also been influential among historians of both European and American international relations. Walter McDougall is particularly adamant in this regard, contending, without qualification, that “The primary purpose of the Declaration of Independence had been to secure foreign alliances, and even before it was voted, Congress began work on a ‘model treaty’ to be offered abroad.”
More recently, in a collection of his lectures, McDougall extrapolates further, noting that Benjamin Franklin had fulfilled “the principal purpose of the Declaration of Independence, which was to enable Congress to solicit foreign assistance. The Declaration was first and foremost a war measure.” More provocatively still, McDougall deflates the Declaration’s message for contemporaries. “All that happened on the Fourth,” he writes, “was official approval of the text of the Declaration. It was printed, widely distributed, read publicly on parade grounds, tavern steps, and village greens, cheered and forgotten. Patriots had more pressing concerns.” Most historians of international affairs, even if defending the primacy of foreign relations, have taken a somewhat more balanced view of its meaning, conceding that it did serve some domestic ends.
In his work Among the Powers of the Earth (2014), Eliga Gould has underscored the international while still recognizing that the document served as the essential formal recognition of American identity as a people. With direct reference to the Declaration, Gould sets out in part to show that “Americans in 1776 could and did refer to themselves as a single people,” an essential and necessary affirmation, especially because they were already “an entangled nation.” For Gould, America was born into a complex global context of alliances, whether it chose to recognize it or not. Thus, for Gould, as with McDougall, the act of declaring independence was “the ‘most effectual’ means for ‘forming foreign alliances’ in Europe.” There is, however, an intriguing ambiguity that haunts both accounts.
Gould references both the Declaration and the earlier congressional resolution calling for independence submitted to Congress by Richard Henry Lee on June 7, 1776. That resolution was passed on the second of July, two days before the Declaration of Independence. Does Gould mean to assert that only the resolution without the Declaration of Independence might have sufficed for the formation of alliances? He does not specify.
While this may seem a rather minor point given the separation of only two days between the two official statements, it actually has a number of significant implications for those who would contend for the document’s exclusively international purpose.
An Interesting Ambiguity
The most sustained examination of the Declaration of Independence’s international meaning and implications is David Armitage’s The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007). Armitage has drawn out further details of the Lee resolution preceding the Declaration, noting that in many ways it served the primary function often ascribed to the later document. Citing much of the previous scholarship on the Declaration, including the seminal study of Pauline Maier, American Scripture (1997), Armitage notes that the Declaration was but the culmination of a number of texts, including “some fifteen other state papers.” Among these was Lee’s resolution, which Armitage called “effectively Congress’s original declaration of independence.” This raises a key question regarding the aim and purpose of the document that followed.
Drawing out the purpose of Lee’s resolve, Armitage clarifies its “international context,” citing the rest of the motion, which directed Congress to forthwith “take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances” and form both “a plan of confederation” and a model treaty. But then the obvious question arises: Why was Lee’s resolution not sufficient in its own right? Indeed, Armitage notes that John Adams was convinced that the day of the resolution’s passage on the second, rather than the Declaration’s passage on the fourth, would be remembered by posterity.
An Odd Way to Address an Absolute Monarch
At this juncture, it is important to recall that support for independence in Congress was not unanimous. John Dickinson famously resisted passage of Lee’s resolution, and a chief reason for his opposition was the belief that it might, in fact, backfire in the realm of international politics: “Suppose on this event Great Britain should offer Canada to France and Florida to Spain with an extension of the old limits. Would not France and Spain accept them?” He had a point.
In an old but classic study of the French alliance, James Breck Perkins put the matter in stark relief:
Why should a Bourbon monarchy throw in its lot with a people in revolt against their King, who proclaimed the equal rights of men and denounced the evils of monarchical rule? … It seemed unlikely that the successor of Louis XIV, the grandson of Louis XV, would take up arms in behalf of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
Perkins’ historical observation alongside the contemporary fears of Dickinson bring to life the contingencies of the moment. It seems unlikely, then, that the full text of the Declaration issued by Congress was solely for international reasons, even if this was the ostensible audience addressed in print. Among the strongest reasons for suspecting otherwise is, as Perkins implies, the enunciation or re-articulation of the American cause itself. The importance of such a recitation of commonly held views has not been given its due.
Pauline Maier is correct, as both Shain and McDougall agree, that “As a statement of political philosophy, the Declaration was … purposefully unexceptional in 1776.” But that by no means translates to superfluous or useless. Here, Jay Fliegelman’s work takes on particular significance. The Declaration was written to be performed, “to be read aloud,” and so it was, as both Maier and McDougall recognize. Its first usage, in fact, its most immediate deployment, was not to France but to General George Washington to bolster the morale of a flagging Continental army and state militia units.
In his monumental biography of Washington, Ronald Chernow has set in vibrant prose the difficult state of Washington’s forces. Every statement, restating the cause, was utilized by the commander-in-chief to hold his units together, and in this context, but four days after its issuance on the 8th of July 1776, the Declaration was in Washington’s hands. He ordered that the document be read out loud and in full the next evening “at the head of each brigade.”
By contrast, the use of the Declaration as a document for negotiating alliances seems not to have been as expeditiously employed as might otherwise have been expected of a document whose sole purpose was supposedly to serve as an international instrument. As McDougall himself noted, it was not until 1778 that Franklin finally secured agreement for direct French military intervention. For that end, the victories, first, at Trenton and, later, at Saratoga, were likely the more salient factors.
If the Declaration had served a role in holding American forces together, then repetition of the justice of the American cause for domestic consumption likely played some part in the reason for its structure and composition beyond merely international aims. Written for English-speaking audiences throughout the Atlantic world, it was, as Jefferson stated, “to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.” The Declaration was then, in that sense, as Fliegelman eloquently observes, “an event rather than a document.”
