Why Independence?

The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence though well known, does not receive the attention it deserves. Let us remind ourselves of the words and ominous cadence of that all-too-neglected opening:

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.

The better-known second sentence, the one that begins “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” receives most of the attention in any serious discussion of the Declaration’s core philosophic principles. The first sentence, however, is quite extraordinary in that it announces the moral impulse and moral logic that caused the American people to declare their independence from their mother country and the world’s greatest military power.

The first sentence introduces in abstract form the Declaration’s purpose and the actions that follow therefrom. Its purpose is to identify and “declare” to the world the “causes which impel” the colonists to separate from Great Britain, and its actions are defined by the necessity to dissolve their connection to the mother country. By publicly declaring the “causes” which impel them to the separation and by showing their “respect to the opinions of mankind,” American revolutionaries demonstrated that reasoned discourse and moral principles guided their actions. Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Americans appealed to nature (i.e., to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”) as the standard of moral and political right, and they appealed to man’s reason as the means of knowing and demonstrating those principles.

According to the Declaration’s first sentence, man’s reason can apprehend three important things: first, the evidentiary facts proving that British imperial officials had a design to enslave them; second, the moral standard against which to judge these unjust acts; and third, the necessity of separation. The overarching principle of the Declaration’s first sentence is that reason can distinguish between right and wrong, just and unjust, freedom and tyranny.

The Declaration’s main burden was to show that King George III and the British Parliament’s actions necessarily amounted to despotism. From the beginning of the imperial crisis, the most impressive American minds charged British authorities with a “design” to enslave them. As early as 1765, John Adams raised the alarm in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law in response to the Stamp Act: “Nothing less than this seems to have been meditated for us, by somebody or other in Great Britain. There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America.”¹ Likewise, Thomas Jefferson warned in his 1774 Summary View of the Rights of British-America that “single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions begun at a distinguished period, and pursued, unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”² And according to the Declaration, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

To “prove” to a “candid world” the charge that there was indeed a design to impose a tyranny over the American colonies, the Declaration enumerates twenty-seven injuries and usurpations that the king allegedly committed. Each charge cites a specific action the king took or did not take. The list of injuries and usurpations can be divided into three main sections. The first section — counts one through twelve — enumerates the king’s abuse of his executive powers. His offenses include disallowing or suspending colonial legislation, dissolving colonial legislatures, obstructing the colonial justice system, corrupting the separation of powers by making judges dependent on his will, and keeping standing armies. The second section — counts thirteen through twenty-two — details the King’s collusion with Parliament to subject the colonies “to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.” His offense here was failing to veto Parliament’s abuses, such as: quartering British troops in America and putting them above criminal law, restricting American trade, restricting trial by jury and other common law rights, imposing taxes without the consent of the governed, and destroying the colonists’ right to self-government. Of special significance is the charge that Parliament had declared its power to be arbitrary in America with the passage of the Declaratory Act of 1766. The third section — counts twenty-three through twenty-seven — identifies those abuses that amount to an undeclared state of war. The King’s abuses include what might be described as war atrocities: he initiated the use of physical force by turning his navy and army against the colonists’ lives and property.

In sum, George III had violated the British constitution, the colonial charters, common-law rights and liberties, and, most importantly, the colonists’ natural rights to life, liberty, property, and their pursuit of happiness. In response, the Americans did not view these actions as discrete, separate, and unconnected events. They were not concrete-bound pragmatists. The Americans studied, weighed, and measured the separate actions of king and Parliament (i.e., the evidence of the crime); they integrated the totality of British actions and drew the conclusion that king and Parliament had a “design” (i.e., the motive) to reduce them under absolute despotism (i.e., the ultimate crime itself); and then they contrasted British imperial officials’ actions with their own moral principles (i.e., the standards of natural justice). In 1768, John Dickinson in his famous Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania described perfectly the Americans’ mode of reasoning: “Ought not the People therefore to watch? to observe facts? to search into causes? to investigate designs? And have they not a right of Judging from the evidence before them, on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness?”³ The revolutionaries’ Enlightenment moral principles provided the touchstone by which to judge the actions of king and Parliament, and their principles necessitated the nature of their response.

Returning now to the Declaration’s first sentence, let us ask: Why in the course of events from 1765 to 1776 did it become “necessary” for the Americans to dissolve their political connection to their king and mother country? To say that separation is necessary is to say that it must be, but why must it be? Imagine how the meaning of the Declaration would have changed if Jefferson had not written “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary, but “optional,” “possible,” “expedient,” “preferable,” or even “prudent.” To repeat: Why was separation said to be necessary?

Our entry point for examining this necessity is a phrase the Americans of the 1760s and 1770s invoked repeatedly: the “spirit of liberty.” The phrase “spirit of liberty” united theory and practice for America revolutionaries; it implied an action in defense of a principle; certain virtues in defense of liberty characterized it. The spirit of American liberty is a sentiment, a mindset, a disposition, a virtue. As a sentiment, it loves freedom and hates slavery. As a mindset, it is watchful, suspicious, and skeptical. As a disposition, it is active, jealous, restless, resolute, protective, and, most of all, vigilant. And as virtues, integrity, fortitude, perseverance, courage, and patriotism define it.

The American spirit of liberty was virtually synonymous with the colonists’ moral constitutions, and it provided them with a worldview through which they interpreted and responded to the cascade of events between 1764 and 1776. No theme ran as broadly or deeply through American culture in the 1760s and 1770s. The colonists’ spirit of liberty served as a kind of moral and psychological tripwire that the Stamp Act’s passage first triggered and that the passage of every piece of British legislation aimed at the Americans in the decade leading up to 1776 kept active. During these years, American Whigs developed objective standards by which to measure the justice and injustice of British legislation. These standards, when combined with their spirit of liberty, provided the Americans with an early warning system that alerted them day or night to the abuse or growth of arbitrary power. That early warning system was most famously expressed in Paul Revere’s galloping words — “The redcoats are coming, the redcoats are coming!” — during his midnight ride on April 18, 1775, to warn American Minutemen of British troop movements before the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

Rekindling and stoking the spirit of American liberty became a central theme repeated countlessly in the writings of leading American patriots. Let us consider just one example of how American revolutionaries thought about the spirit of liberty. In 1767, John Dickinson penned his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which many historians regard as one of the Revolutionary period’s most influential pamphlets. Dickinson’s Letters present a powerful analysis of the ways in which unchecked power asphyxiates liberty. The letters also provide the best analysis of the American spirit of liberty written during the Revolutionary period.

Dickinson’s primary concern in the Letters was to sound the alarm against the Townshend Acts, particularly the New York Suspending Act and the Townshend duties. The Americans, he warned, must be vigilant and exert “the most watchful attention” against Parliament’s subtle designs; they must prevent a creeping form of slavery under the guise of legalities, otherwise “a new servitude may be slipped upon us, under the sanction of usual and respectable terms.” He goes on to warn against those “artful rulers” who attempt to subtly manipulate language and legal technicalities to “extend their power beyond its just limits.”

And with every passing generation, the noose tightened just a little bit more. Every usurpation, whether large or small, eventually requires additional usurpations to keep all prior usurpations in force:

A free people therefore can never be too quick in observing, nor too firm in opposing the beginnings of alteration either in form or reality, respecting institutions formed for their security. The first kind of alteration leads to the last: Yet, on the other hand, nothing is more certain, than that the forms of liberty may be retained, when their substance is gone.

Thus, it was necessary, Dickinson argued, that the people should always be on guard to protect their liberty as they protect their property. He encouraged them to “watch,” “observe facts,” “search into causes,” and “investigate designs,” and of course he insisted that they assert their “right of judging from the evidence before them, on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness.” He implored his fellow Americans to be ever vigilant. Quoting from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Dickinson reminded his readers that “slavery is ever preceded by sleep.”⁴

Dickinson equated the American spirit of liberty with jealousy, watchfulness, and vigilance. “A perpetual jealousy, respecting liberty is,” he told the American people, “absolutely, requisite in all free states.” They must keep up the “utmost vigilance,” and they must be “watchful of their liberty.” He went on to remind his fellow colonists of Machiavelli’s famous chapter in Discourses on Livy, which “proves that a state, to be long lived, must be frequently corrected, and reduced to its first principles.” The lesson of all history proves “that every free state should incessantly watch, and instantly take alarm on any addition being made to the power exercised over them.”⁵

Dickinson attacked the Townshend duties precisely because they were so comparatively small. It would be a “fatal error,” he warned, to disregard and therefore to acquiesce to these new duties because of their trifling amount. In fact, the duties’ “smallness” is a trap. No matter how inconsequential the tax, no matter how reasonably and equitably applied, the colonists should regard the act with “abhorrence.” He suggested that Parliament intentionally designed the Townshend duties to be small so that the Americans would not notice or object, and thereby they could establish a noose-tightening precedent. He went on to posit that the British were testing the colonists’ moral disposition. He then raised the very real possibility that their goal in establishing such a small tax was to create a “precedent, whereupon the future vassalage of these colonies may be established.” Once the precedent existed, Dickinson argued, Parliament might then levy any amount of tax on the colonists. Thus, it was imperative that the colonists resist every attempt to tax them without their consent regardless of the size or amount.⁶

The Townshend Act “is founded,” according to Dickinson, “on the destruction” of the colonists’ “constitutional security.” If members of Parliament “have a right to levy a tax of one penny upon us,” Dickinson noted, then “they have a right to levy a million upon us.” What this means, of course, is that possession and control of American property depended not on the colonists’ will and their rights but on Parliament’s pleasure. The Townshend duties are clearly a tax, Dickinson concluded, and “Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves. We are taxed without our own consent, expressed by ourselves or our representatives. We are therefore — slaves.”⁷

The logic of Dickinson’s moral reasoning was simple, compelling, motivating, and explanatory. It is what makes the American revolutionary mind unique and distant from the twenty-first-century way of thinking. This idea of preserving natural liberty in its pristine form and so resisting even one small precedent against it had come close to the center of the American consciousness. This idea is precisely why the colonists viewed the rather trifling stamp tax and Townshend duties so ominously: they viewed each as the entering wedge of a broader campaign to deprive them of rights and liberties.

Like modern historians, British imperial officials never understood the American revolutionaries’ principles, temperament, and character, which meant they never understood their deepest motives. They had no way to know that the revolution’s trigger was embedded in the spirit of American liberty. British officials, therefore, could never understand why it was necessary for the Americans to sever the political ties that had bound them to Britain for over 150 years. Likewise, twenty-first-century Americans who still revere the revolutionaries’ spirit of liberty are beckoned to recover the moral impulse and moral logic that drove their ideological ancestors to independence and freedom.

¹ John Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” in The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, ed. C. Bradley Thompson (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2000), 34.

² Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British-America, in Colonies to Nation, 1763–1789: A Documentary History of the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene (New York: Norton, 1975), 231.

³ John Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1768), in Political Thought of the American Revolution, ed. C. Bradley Thompson (Seneca, SC: Loco-Foco Press, 2024), 184.

⁴ Political Thought, ed. Thompson, 184-189

⁵ Political Thought, ed. Thompson, 186–87.

⁶ Political Thought, ed. Thompson, 185, 187.

⁷ Political Thought, ed. Thompson, 185–86.

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