Why, I Declare!

After “the,” “and” and “for,” the most common word in the Declaration of Independence is “he.”

And we all know who “he” is: George III, the king of Britain. Congratulations! You may have just answered one of history’s easiest trivia questions: “Whom does the Declaration of Independence declare independence from?”

But not so fast! There is a hidden enemy in the Declaration — never actually named — from whom the Americans were actually trying to get away. George III wielded more power than Charles III does today, but already by 1760, when George ascended to the throne, the nation’s true executive was plural: the king’s cabinet.

Then as now, cabinets survived only with the constant approval of the House of Commons. Theoretically the monarch enjoyed a comparable check on Parliament: a veto over its legislation. But no king or queen had dared to use the veto since 1708 when Queen Ann declined to arm the Scottish militia. Really, Parliament’s supremacy over the king went back to the Glorious Revolution and the accession of William and Mary in 1689. Even George III’s speeches to Parliament, like Charles’ today, were ventriloquist acts, dictated to him by the very people he was speaking to.

But how can Parliament be the Declaration’s target? The word does not appear there. Actually, you can find the British legislature in the document if you look hard enough.

By far the longest section of the Declaration — with nearly as many words as the other four combined — is Congress’ list of British “Oppressions.” Two-thirds of these abuses, as Jefferson called them, start with “He,” but the others open with “For” and list such British aggressions as “For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.”

This formulation seems strange until you look back at the introduction to the “For” paragraphs: “He has combined with others...giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.”

“Others” means Parliament. Their “Acts of pretended Legislation” refer to parliamentary legislation respecting the colonies.

If Parliament adopted anti-American laws and kept an anti-American cabinet in power, why does the Declaration of Independence hide Parliament and hoist up George III? I once thought the Continental Congress focused on the king in order to tap into Enlightenment anti-monarchism. But, as Julian Boyd, the founding editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, pointed out in 1945, the Declaration “bore no necessary antagonism to the idea of kingship in general” — only to George III.

Congress had another, more pressing reason to focus its ire on George III rather than Parliament. The way the delegates in Philadelphia saw it, the colonies did not need to rebel against Parliament because Parliament already exerted no power over them and in fact never had. That is why Congress refers in the Declaration to laws like the Stamp Act and the Tea Act as “pretended Legislation.” The situation would be comparable, for example, to the Virginia House of Burgesses adopting laws for Massachusetts: The burgesses too would be playing make-believe.

What better way for Congress to reinforce Parliament’s irrelevance to the colonies than to never even mention that body by name?

By instead referring to the rulers of an empire upon which the sun never set as simply “others,” Congress delivered not only a sick burn but a bold constitutional claim—one that most Britons found absurd, and indeed most modern historians do as well, since Americans had long accepted Britain’s monopoly of their trade, control over their post offices and so on.

The principal sources for the Americans’ claim were pamphlets published in 1774 by two attorneys, James Wilson of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson. In essence Wilson and Jefferson invented a new constitutional history of the relationship between the mother country and the colonies.

Jefferson originally composed his pamphlet as instructions for the Virginia delegates to the First Continental Congress. He (or possibly his printer) entitled it A Summary View of the Rights of British America. In the Declaration, Jefferson reinforced his claim against Parliament by using some very clever word choices. Those unnamed “others” had empowered themselves to adopt “pretended” laws only by asserting a jurisdiction “foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.” Foreign. Jefferson was suggesting that, at least legislatively, Britain was a foreign country. Only American assemblies could legislate for Americans. Since the colonists’ only constitutional tie was to the king, that was the only one they needed to break.

By asserting that Parliament had never ruled them, white colonists could also plausibly reject the mother country’s favorite epithet for them: rebels. Citizens of India and slaves and the Irish might rebel, they could say, but we are simply ending our alliance of equals with Britain by replacing their monarchical figurehead with...an abstraction, “the united States of America,” a term that had never before appeared in print.

But denying that Parliament had any authority over the colonies was still new territory, even for Jefferson, and he sometimes lost his footing. For example, in one complaint against George III, he referred to himself and his fellow colonists as British “subjects.” At the last minute, he caught himself, wrote “citizens” instead and blotted out “subjects” — so thoroughly, in fact, that for 234 years no one knew what word he had originally written. But then in 2010, Library of Congress researcher Fenella France used light at varying wavelengths to unveil the chemical signatures of “subjects” and finally the word itself.

Jefferson was so angry at Congress for “mutilating” his rough draft that he sent his friends a version tracking Congress’ changes so they could agree that his original was better. Most did, but at several points in the Declaration, Congress provided a valuable service. It caught Jefferson backsliding from the claim that Parliament had never ruled the colonies. In his very first sentence, the Virginian stated that it sometimes becomes necessary for “a people to advance from [their] subordination.” Congress changed that to “one people to dissolve the political bands” — which is how two equal nations might describe the end of their alliance. Think Brexit.

Later Jefferson slipped again with a reference to “his present majesty” — a common synonym for George III among the people who were still loyal to him. Congress changed that to “the present King of Great Britain,” referring to the British monarch the way someone on the European continent might.

Modern Americans generally believe not only that the Declaration’s primary villain was King George III but that its most precious treasure is individual rights. Most Americans today claim to cherish personal liberty, and so did the delegates to the Continental Congress. But they had come to Philadelphia to fight for something else entirely: what a later generation would call “states’ rights.”

Read the Declaration’s final paragraph. What is the one phrase that the delegates use three times in a row? “Independent States.” The purpose of the Declaration was to justify 13 bits of the British Empire breaking off from all the rest.

Indeed, it would be fair to describe Congress’ Declaration of Independence as an ordinance of secession.

Why did the colonists, who had been fighting the mother country since April 1775, make independence official in July 1776? For many reasons, but the most pressing of these will help explain why Congress was so careful to say nothing bad about the idea of monarchy: They knew they could not win the war without help from Britain’s archenemy, King Louis XVI.

France was already secretly supplying the Americans with arms and ammunition, but what they really needed were battalions and battleships, and they would not get either while they officially remained part of the British Empire. If, on the other hand, the colonies were to break ties with the mother country early enough in the summer, many congressmen believed that French warships and troop transports would sail into American waters before autumn.

In its immediate purpose of attracting massive French aid, the Declaration of Independence failed. It would be another two years before a French fleet put into an American harbor. Had Congress confined itself to asserting 13 British states’ right to secede from the rest, its declaration might have long since been forgotten. In Abraham Lincoln’s words, that document would have just been “wadding left to rot on the battle-field” — the tattered remains of a sack of gunpowder that has just exploded to fire a cannonball. But the Declaration is so much more.

Remembered today are the Declaration’s higher ideals. But if these were not Congress’ primary objective, why did Jefferson even mention them? Harvard professor Danielle Allen explains that Congress’ nods to equality and human rights introduced a syllogism, a series of claims that lead sequentially to the author’s main point. The phrases that have become the most beloved ones in the Declaration appealed to the Continental Congress only as stepping stones to its real goal:

1. Everyone has certain rights.
2. To protect these rights, people form governments.
3. But when a government invades these rights instead of protecting them, the people may justly exercise another right: to overthrow the government.

Congress’ — and other white Americans’ — absorption with states’ rights as opposed to individual freedom becomes clear from the phrases that were quoted most often in the decades just after Congress adopted the Declaration. As Harvard’s David Armitage and others have shown, white Americans as well as copycat revolutionaries in other countries invoked the Declaration’s final paragraph, declaring the former British colonies “Free and Independent States.” That was the phrase cited by everyone from George Washington when addressing Continental army troops to the Rhode Island and Maryland assemblies in declaring their independence from Britain.

Hardly anyone quoted “all men are created equal” or “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But one group of Americans did find inspiration in the Declaration’s affirmation of human equality and individual rights. The first known person to quote “created equal” and other liberation phrases from the Declaration was Lemuel Haynes, a Continental army veteran with a white mother and African American father. Haynes used this passage to open his pamphlet Liberty Further Extended, calling for the abolition of slavery.

Eric Slauter, who teaches literature at the University of Chicago, discovered that many of Haynes’ fellow abolitionists — white and African American — quoted these same phrases. Among them was Benjamin Banneker, the mixed-race almanac author who helped design Washington, D.C. The ringing phrases that Jefferson had intended only as rest stops along his path to states’ rights were put to equally good use by other antislavery Americans. In fact, between 1776 and 1800, about 70% of the texts quoting “created equal” and printed in the United States came from the pens of Americans battling slavery.

In the 19th century, the women and handful of men seeking equal rights for women joined abolitionists in quoting the Declaration’s tribute to equality and rights. In fact, the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”

Simply by repeatedly foregrounding a section of the Declaration that most white men had skimmed over, antislavery and pro-women’s rights authors and speakers shifted the whole focus of the Declaration of Independence from states’ rights to human rights. At Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln culminated this process by reminding Americans that their nation had been “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

In time, unsung Americans’ battles against slavery and for women’s rights had the happy side effect of shifting the Declaration’s focus, as dramatically as a spotlight moves from one actor to another, from states’ rights to human rights. With that change, antislavery and proto-feminist Americans made the significance of the Declaration of Independence global and perpetual. They also turned a trophy into a challenge. 

Woody Holton is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches and researches early American history, especially the American Revolution. He is the author of Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution.