66 communities by a publicist who himself Government." The author of a life of held slaves"; while, in its specifications Jefferson, published in the year of Jefferof fact, it is not more scrupulously son's retirement from the Presidency, sugtruthful than are the general utterances gests that the credit of having composed of the statesman who was its scribe. Its the Declaration of Independence "has charges that the several offensive acts of been perhaps more generally, than truly, the King, besides "evincing a design to given by the public" to that great man. reduce the colonists under absolute Charles Campbell, the historian of Virdespotism," ""all had as their direct object ginia, intimates that some expressions in the establishment of an absolute tyranny," the document were taken without acare simply propositions which history knowledgment from Aphra Behn's tragicannot accept." Moreover, the declaration "blinks the fact that many of the acts, styled steps of usurpation, were measures of repression, which, however unwise or excessive, had been provoked by popular outrage." No government could allow its officers to be assaulted and their houses sacked, its loyal lieges to be tarred and feathered, or the property of merchants sailing under its flag to be thrown by lawless hands into the sea." Even "the preposterous violence and the manifest insincerity of the suppressed clause" against slavery and the slave-trade "are enough to create suspicion as to the spirit in which the whole document was framed." Finally, as has been already intimated, not even among Americans themselves has the Declaration of Independence been permitted to pass on into the enjoyment of its superb renown without much critical disparagement at the hands of statesmen and historians. No doubt Calhoun had its preamble in mind when he declared that "nothing can be more unfounded and false" than "the prevalent opinion that all men are born free and equal"; for "it rests upon the assumption of a fact which is contrary to universal observation." Of course, all Americans who have shared to any extent in Calhoun's doctrines respecting human society could hardly fail to agree with him in regarding as fallacious and worthless those general propositions in the declaration which seem to constitute its logical starting-point, as well as its ultimate defence. Perhaps, however, the most frequent form of disparagement to which Jefferson's great state paper has been subjected among us is that which would minimize his merit in composing it, by denying to it the merit of originality. For example, Richard Henry Lee sneered at it as a thing "copied from Locke's Treatise on comedy, The Widow-Ranter, or the History of Bacon in Virginia. John Stockton Littell describes the Declaration of Independence as "that enduring monument at once of patriotism, and of genius and skill in the art of appropriation ”— asserting that "for the sentiments and much of the language" of it, Jefferson was indebted to Chief-Justice Drayton's charge to the grand jury of Charleston, delivered in April, 1776, as well as to the Declaration of Independence said to have been adopted by some citizens of Mecklenburg county, N. C., in May, 1775. Even the latest and most critical editor of the writings of Jefferson calls attention to the fact that a glance at the Declaration of Rights, as adopted by Virginia on June 12, 1776, "would seem to indicate the source from which Jefferson derived a most important and popular part" of his famous production. By no one, however, has the charge of a lack of originality been pressed with so much decisiveness as by John Adams, who took evident pleasure in speaking of it as a document in which were merely recapitulated" previous and well-known statements of American rights and wrongs, and who, as late as in the year 1822, deliberately wrote: 66 There is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before. The substance of it is contained in the declaration of rights and the violation of those rights, in the journals of Congress, in 1774. Indeed, the essence of it is contained in a pamphlet, voted and printed by the town of Boston, before the first Congress met, composed by James Otis, as I suppose, in one of his lucid intervals, and pruned and polished by Samuel Adams." Perhaps nowhere in Our literature would it be possible to find a criticism that ugly quarrel, their notions of justice, of civic dignity, of human rights; finally, their memories of wrongs which seemed to them intolerable, especially of wrongs inflicted upon them during those twelve years by the hands of insolent and brutal men, in the name of the King, and by his apparent command? and deliberate utterances, had all along been using. In the development of political life in England and America, there had already been created a vast literature of constitutional progress-a literature common to both portions of the English race, pervaded by its own stately traditions, and reverberating certain great phrases which formed, as one may say, almost the vernacular of English justice, and of English aspiration for a free, manly, and orderly political life. In this vernacular the Declaration of Independence was written. The phraseology thus brought forward by a really able man opinions as to men and as to events in all against any piece of writing less applicable to the case, and of less force and value, than is this particular criticism by John Adams and others, as to the lack of originality in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, for such a paper as Jefferson was commissioned to write, the one quality which it could not properly have had, the one quality which would Moreover as the nature of the task laid have been fatal to its acceptance either upon him made it necessary that he should by the American Congress or by the thus state, as the reasons for their inAmerican people-is originality. They tended act, those very considerations both were then at the culmination of a tre- as to fact and as to opinion which had mendous controversy over alleged griev- actually operated upon their minds, so ances of the most serious kind-a con- did it require him to do so, to some extroversy that had been steadily raging tent, in the very language which the for at least twelve years. In the course people themselves, in their more formal of that long dispute, every phase of it, whether as abstract right or constitutional privilege or personal procedure, had been presented in almost every conceivable form of speech. At last, they had resolved, in view of all this experience, no longer to prosecute the controversy as members of the empire; they had resolved to revolt, and, casting off forever their ancient fealty to the British crown, to separate from the empire, and to establish themselves as a new nation among the nations of the earth. In this emergency, as it happened, Jefferson was called upon to put into form a suitable state- characteristic of it is the very phrasement of the chief considerations which prompted them to this great act of revolution, and which, as they believed, justified it. What, then, was Jefferson to do? Was he to regard himself as a mere literary essayist, set to produce before the world a sort of prize dissertation-a calm, analytic, judicial treatise on history and politics with a particular application to AngloAmerican affairs-one essential merit of which would be its originality as a contribution to historical and political literature? Was he not, rather, to regard himself as, for the time being, the very mouthpiece and prophet of the people whom he represented, and as such required to bring together and to set in order, in their name, not what was new, but what was old; to gather up into his own soul, as much as possible, whatever was then also in their souls, their very thoughts and passions, their ideas of constitutional law, their interpretations of fact, their ology of the champions of constitutional expansion, of civic dignity and progress, within the English race ever since Magna Charta; of the great state papers of English freedom in the seventeenth century, particularly the Petition of Right in 1629, and the Bill of Rights in 1789; of the great English charters for colonization in America; of the great English exponents of legal and political progress-Sir Edward Coke, John Milton, Sir Philip Sidney, John Locke; finally, of the great American exponents of political liberty, and of the chief representative bodies, whether local or general, which had convened in America from the time of the Stamp Act Congress until that of the Congress which resolved upon dependence. To say, therefore, that the official declaration of that resolve is a paper made up of the very opinions, beliefs, unbeliefs, the very sentiments, prejudices, passions, even the errors in judg. our in ment and the personal misconstructions- Livingston, and, best of all, but for his if they were such-which then actually impelled the American people to that mighty act, and that all these are expressed in the very phrases which they had been accustomed to use, is to pay to that state paper the highest tribute as to its fitness for the purpose for which it was framed. Of much of this, also, Jefferson himself seems to have been conscious; and perhaps never does he rise before us with more dignity, with more truth, than when, late in his lifetime, hurt by the captious and jangling words of disparagement then recently put into writing by his old comrade, to the effect that the Declaration of Independence "contained no new ideas, that it is a commonplace compilation, its sentences hackneyed in Congress for two years before, and its essence contained in Otis's pamphlet," Jefferson quietly remarked that perhaps these statements might "all be true: of that I am not to be the judge. Whether I had gathered my ideas from reading or reflection, I do not know. I only know that I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before." Before passing from this phase of the subject, however, it should be added that, while the Declaration of Independence lacks originality in the sense just indicated, in another and perhaps in a higher sense, it possesses originality-it is individualized by the character and by the genius of its author. Jefferson gathered up the thoughts and emotions and even the characteristic phrases of the people for whom he wrote, and these he perfectly incorporated with what was al ready in his mind, and then to the music of his own keen, rich, passionate, and enkindling style, he mustered them into that stately triumphant procession wherein, as some of us still think, they will go marching on to the world's end. There were then in Congress several other men who could have written the Declaration of Independence, and written it well-notably Franklin, either of the two Adamses, Richard Henry Lee, William own opposition to the measure, John Dickinson; but had any one of these other men written the Declaration of Independence, while it would have contained, doubtless, nearly the same topics and nearly the same great formulas of political statement, it would yet have been a wholly dif ferent composition from this of Jefferson's. No one at all familiar with his other writings, as well as with the writings of his chief contemporaries, could ever have a moment's doubt, even if the fact were not already notorious, that this document was by Jefferson. He put into it something that was his own, and that no one else could have put there. He put himself into it-his own genius, his own moral force, his faith in God, his faith in ideas, his love of innovation, his passion for progress, his invincible enthusiasm, his intolerance of prescription, of injustice, of cruelty; his sympathy, his clarity of vision, his affluence of diction, his power to fling out great phrases which will long fire and cheer the souls of men struggling against political unrighteousness. And herein lies its essential originality, perhaps the most precious, and, indeed, almost the only, originality ever attaching to any great literary product that is representative of its time. He inade for himself no improper claim, therefore, when he directed that upon the granite obelisk at his grave should be carved the words: "Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence." If the Declaration of Independence is now to be fairly judged by us, it must be judged with reference to what it was intended to be-namely, an impassioned manifesto of one party, and that the weaker party, in a violent race-quarrel; of a party resolved, at last, upon the extremity of revolution, and already menaced by the inconceivable disaster of being defeated in the very act of armed rebellion against the mightiest military power on earth. This manifesto, then, is not to be censured because, being avowedly a statement of its own side of the quarrel, it does not also contain a modcrate and judicial statement of the opposite side; or because, being necessarily partisan in method, it is likewise both fact, when he should make his first atpartisan and vehement in tone; or be- tempt to gain all power over his people, cause it bristles with accusations against by assuming the single power to take the enemy so fierce and so unqualified their property without their consent. as now to seem in some respects over- Hence it was, as Edmund Burke pointed drawn; or because it resounds with cer- out in the House of Commons only a tain great aphorisms about the natural few weeks before the American Revolution rights of man, at which, indeed, political entered upon its military phase, that: science cannot now smile, except to its own discomfiture and shame-aphorisms which are likely to abide in this world as the chief source and inspiration of heroic enterprises among men for self-deliverance from oppression. Taking into account, therefore, as we are bound to do, the circumstances of its origin, and especially its purpose as a solemn and piercing appeal to mankind on behalf of a small and weak nation against the alleged injustice and cruelty of a great and powerful one, it still remains our duty to inquire whether, as has been asserted in our time, history must set aside either of the two central charges embodied in the Declaration of Independence. 66 "The great contests for freedom . . . were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing. Most of the contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates, or on the balance among the several orders of the state. The question of money was not with them so immediate. But in England it was otherwise. On this point of taxes the ablest pens and most eloquent tongues have been exercised, the greatest spirits have acted and suffered. . . . They took infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people must in effect, themselves, mediately or immediately, possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty could subsist. The colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, these ideas and principles. Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing. Liberty might be safe or might be endangered in twenty other particulars without their being much pleased or alarmed. Here they felt its pulse, and as they found that beat, they thought them selves sick or sound." 66 The first of these charges affirms that the several acts complained of by the colonists evinced "a design to reduce them under absolute despotism," and had as their "direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the American people. Was this, indeed, a groundless charge, in the sense intended by the words " despotism and tyranny" --that is, in the sense commonly given to those words in the usage of the Eng- Accordingly, the meaning which the lish speaking race? According to that English race on both sides of the Atlantic usage, it was not an Oriental despotism were accustomed to attach to the words that was meant, nor a Greek tyranny, nor tyranny" and "despotism," was a meana Roman, nor a Spanish. The sort of ing to some degree ideal; it was a meaning despot, the sort of tyrant, whom the drawn from the extraordinary political English people, ever since the time of sagacity with which that race is endowKing John, and especially during the ed, from their extraordinary sensitiveperiod of the Stuarts, had been accus- ness as to the use of the taxing-power tomed to look for and to guard against, in government, from their instinctive perwas the sort of tyrant or despot that could ception of the commanding place of the be evolved out of the conditions of Eng- taxing-power among all the other forms lish political life. Furthermore, he was of power in the state, from their perfect not by them expected to appear among assurance that he who holds the purse them at the outset in the fully developed with the power to fill it and to empty it, shape of a Philip or an Alva in the holds the key of the situation-can mainNetherlands. They were able to recog- tain an army of his own, can rule without nize him, they were prepared to resist consulting Parliament, can silence critihim, in the earliest and most incipient cism, can crush opposition, can strip his stage of his being at the moment, in subjects of every vestige of political life; should be the policy of each administration, what opinions his ministers should advocate in Parliament, and what measures Parliament itself should adopt. Says Sir Erskine May: in other words, he can make slaves of ly succeeded - himself determining what them, he can make a despot and a tyrant of himself. Therefore, the system which in the end might develop into results so palpably tyrannic and despotic, they bluntly called a tyranny and a despotism in the beginning. To say, therefore, that the Declaration of Independence did the same, is to say that it spoke good English. Of course, history will be ready to set aside the charge thus made in language not at all liable to be misunderstood, just so soon as history is ready to set aside the common opinion that the several acts of the British government, from 1764 to 1776, for laying and enforcing taxation in America, did evince a somewhat particular and systematic design to take away some portion of the property of the American people without their consent. The second of the two great charges contained in the Declaration of Independence, while intimating that some share in the blame is due to the British Parliament and to the British people, yet fastens upon the King himself as the one person chiefly responsible for the scheme of American tyranny therein set forth, and culminates in the frank description of him as "a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant." Is this accusation of George III. now to be set aside as unhistoric? Was that King, or was he not, chiefly responsible for the American policy of the British government between the years 1764 and 1776? If he was so, then the historic soundness of the most important portion of the Declaration of Independence is vindicated. an "The King desired to undertake personally the chief administration of public affairs, to direct the policy of his ministers, and himself to distribute the patronage of the crown. He was ambitious not only to reign, but to govern." "Strong as were the ministers, the King was resolved to wrest all power from their hands, and to exercise it himself.” “But what was this in effect but to assert that the King should be his own minister? . . . The King's tactics were fraught with danger, as well to the crown itself as to the constitutional liberties of the people." Already, prior to the year 1778, according to Lecky, the King had " laboriously built up" in England a "system of personal government"; and it was because he was unwilling to have this system disturbed that he then refused, "in defiance of the most earnest representations of his own minister and of the most eminent politicians of every party ... to send for the greatest of living statesmen at the moment when the empire appeared to be in the very agonies of dissolution. . . . Either Chatham or Rockingham would have insisted that the policy of the country should be directed by its responsible ministers and not dictated by an irresponsible sovereign." ... This refusal of the King to pursue the course which was called for by the constitution, and which would have taken the Fortunately, this question can be an- control of the policy of the government swered without hesitation, and in a few out of his hands, was, according to the words; and for these few words, same great historian, an act "the most American writer of to-day, conscious of criminal in the whole reign of George III. his own basis of nationality, will rightly .. as criminal as any of those acts prefer to cite such words as have been which led Charles I. to the scaffold.” uttered upon the subject by the ablest Even so early as the year 1768, accordEnglish historians of our time. Upon ing to John Richard Green, George their statements alone it must be con- III. had at last reached his aim. . cluded that George III. ascended his In the early days of the ministry throne with the fixed purpose of resuming to the crown many of those powers which, by the constitution of England, did not then belong to it, and that in this purpose, at least during the first twentyfive years of his reign, he substantial 66 (which began in that year) “his influence was felt to be predominant. In its later and more disastrous days it was supreme; for Lord North, who became the head of the ministry on Grafton's retirement in 1770, was the mere mouthpiece |