Appendix C: The Declaration of Independence — A Reader's Guide
How to use this appendix
This is a reader's guide, not a reproduction. The full text of the Declaration is about 1,300 words and is available, free, in canonical form:
National Archives transcript:
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcriptNational Archives engrossed parchment:
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declarationLibrary of Congress:
https://www.loc.gov/collections/declaration-of-independence/(the Dunlap broadside, the earliest printed text, alongside the engrossed parchment)Other reputable collections: the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, the National Constitution Center.
Read the document there, then return to this guide. It covers (1) the structure of the document, (2) the philosophical premises that have done most of the document's political work, (3) the bill of grievances against George III with their constitutional echoes, (4) the signers, and (5) how the Declaration functions in American political life today.
Context: what the Declaration is and is not
The Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. The principal author was Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, then 33 years old, working from a five-person drafting committee that also included John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. Jefferson's draft was edited substantially — first by Adams and Franklin in committee, then by the full Congress over three days of debate from July 2 to July 4. Congress made roughly 86 changes. Jefferson complained about them for the rest of his life.
The most consequential edit was a deletion. Jefferson's draft included a paragraph blaming George III for the Atlantic slave trade and calling it a violation of "the most sacred rights of life and liberty" of "a distant people who never offended him." Congress struck the passage at the insistence of the South Carolina and Georgia delegations, with the acquiescence of northern delegates whose constituents profited from the trade. The deletion is not incidental. We will return to it.
The Declaration is not a legal document of the United States in the way the Constitution is. It preceded the Constitution by eleven years. It is not the supreme law of the land; it confers no rights enforceable in court; federal judges do not "apply" it the way they apply the Fourth Amendment.
But it is a foundational document — perhaps the foundational document of American political identity, distinct from American constitutional law. Contested questions about who Americans are, what the country is for, and how the Constitution should be read frequently invoke it. Lincoln invoked it. Frederick Douglass invoked it. Suffragists invoked it. Civil-rights activists invoked it. Tea Party activists invoked it. Originalist judges invoke it. Living-constitutionalist judges invoke it. The Declaration is, in this sense, a charter not of American law but of American argument. That is what makes it worth reading carefully.
Section 1: The structure of the document
The Declaration has four parts. Knowing them in advance makes a first reading considerably more productive.
1. The Preamble (one paragraph). The famous opening, beginning "When in the Course of human events…" The Preamble does not yet make philosophical claims about rights. It does something narrower and rhetorically clever: it frames separation from Britain as something a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" requires the colonists to explain. The document presents itself as a kind of legal brief — a "declaration of the causes" — addressed to a "candid world." The Declaration does not argue independence is desirable; it argues that independence has already become necessary and that the document's purpose is to set out the reasons.
2. The philosophical premises (two paragraphs). The section that begins "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…" It is the shortest section and has done more work in American political life than the rest of the document combined. It states a theory of legitimate government — that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed and exists to secure pre-political rights — and a theory of revolution: that when government becomes destructive of those rights, the people may alter or abolish it.
3. The bill of grievances against George III (the longest section, roughly two-thirds of the document). A list of 27 specific accusations against the king. This is the legal-brief part — rarely read carefully today, even by Americans who can recite the philosophical premises. The grievances tell you what the colonists were actually angry about.
4. The conclusion (the final paragraph). The formal pronouncement that the colonies "are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States." The signers pledge "to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."
Mark these four sections in the margin when you read the National Archives text. The Declaration is short enough — fewer than 1,400 words — that this takes three minutes and pays off for the rest of the appendix.
Section 2: Reading the philosophical premises
The two paragraphs beginning "We hold these truths to be self-evident" are the most analyzed sentences in American political thought. They state the Lockean trinity (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), the consent-of-the-governed claim, and the right of revolution. They also contain tensions that have generated two centuries of argument.
The Lockean tradition
Jefferson did not invent these premises. He drew openly on a recognizable tradition of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought, most centrally John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689). Locke argued that humans in a "state of nature" possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property; that they form governments by consent to secure those rights; and that they retain the right to dissolve a government that becomes destructive of those ends.
You can see Locke's structure in the Declaration's claim that "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." That is a one-sentence summary of Second Treatise §95–§99. Jefferson substituted "pursuit of happiness" for Locke's "property" — probably a deliberate broadening rather than a rejection of property rights. The Scottish Enlightenment (particularly Francis Hutcheson on the right of resistance) and the seventeenth-century English republican tradition (Algernon Sidney, James Harrington) are also clearly present. The Declaration is a synthesis of a body of political theory Jefferson and his colleagues had been reading and arguing about for decades.
What "all men are created equal" meant in 1776
Here is the inescapable contradiction. The Declaration was signed by 56 men, of whom at least 41 — including its principal author — owned other men. Jefferson at the time of writing owned roughly 175 enslaved people; he owned approximately 600 over his lifetime. The men who signed a document declaring all men equal were, in many cases, presiding over plantations that depended on the categorical denial of that equality.
This contradiction is not a footnote. It is part of what the document is. There are three ways to read it, each with serious defenders.
The first: the universalist language was sincere but bounded by 18th-century categories. "All men are created equal" meant, for many signers, equal in the sense relevant to political authority — that no person possesses an inherent right to rule another by birth, as the British Crown claimed. It did not, for most of them, entail the immediate abolition of slavery or the political enfranchisement of women, free Blacks, or unpropertied white men.
The second: the contradiction was visible to the founders themselves. Jefferson's struck slave-trade passage shows that the founders could see, when they wanted to, the implication of their own principles. So does Jefferson's later line in Notes on the State of Virginia about trembling for his country when he reflected that God is just. The signers understood, on some level, that they were laying down a principle that condemned their own institutions. They did it anyway.
The third reading is the contemporary one, articulated piercingly by Samuel Johnson in his 1775 pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny, written before the Declaration was drafted. Johnson asked: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" That sentence captured a critique that has shadowed the Declaration for two and a half centuries.
A modern reader does not have to choose one of these three readings to the exclusion of the others.
The Frederick Douglass response
The most influential American reading of the Declaration's contradictions is Frederick Douglass's. In a Fourth-of-July oration in Rochester, New York, in 1852 — "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" — Douglass, who had escaped from slavery fourteen years earlier, addressed a white audience that had asked him to celebrate American independence.
He refused. The oration is a sustained denunciation of American hypocrisy: "This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice; I must mourn." But the oration's analytical move — its lasting importance for American political argument — is that Douglass did not reject the Declaration. He embraced it. The Declaration's principles, he argued, were correct. What was monstrous was the gap between those principles and their application to the four million people then enslaved in the American South.
The Declaration, on Douglass's reading, is therefore not the document of the slaveholders who signed it. It is the document that condemns them. It is the basis of emancipation, not the obstacle to it. This "redemptive" reading became the central rhetorical move of the abolitionist movement, the suffragist movement, the labor movement, and the civil-rights movement. The document's principles outrun its authors' practice; the authors' practice does not bind the principles.
The Lincoln invocation
Abraham Lincoln gave the Douglass reading its highest political expression. At Gettysburg in November 1863, Lincoln opened: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
Two things to notice. First, the date: four score and seven years before 1863 is 1776 — the Declaration, not 1787 (the Convention) or 1788 (ratification). Lincoln located the founding at the Declaration. Second, the principle: Lincoln treated "all men are created equal" as the proposition the nation was dedicated to — the constitutive idea of the country.
This Lincoln-Douglass reading has been enormously influential. It treats the Declaration as the charter of American identity and the Constitution as the instrument by which the Declaration's principles are operationalized. When the Constitution falls short — when it tolerates slavery, denies women the vote, or permits "separate but equal" — the Declaration's principles supply the standard against which the Constitution can be amended and reformed. This is why the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments are sometimes called the "second founding": they brought the Constitution closer to the Declaration.
Modern political invocations across the spectrum
A common student misconception is that the Declaration is a document of one political tradition — usually, in students' minds, the progressive one. It is not. The Declaration's language is invoked across the American political spectrum, and on each side the invocation is serious.
Progressive invocations emphasize the universalist and egalitarian language. "All men are created equal" is read as a principle whose extension to groups not originally included (free Blacks, women, immigrants, LGBT Americans) is the progressive completion of the founders' unfinished work. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 read the Declaration this way, calling it a "promissory note" the country had not yet redeemed.
Conservative invocations emphasize the language of "Creator-endowed" rights and the framing of government as instituted to secure rights pre-existing the state. On this reading, the Declaration grounds individual liberty against state encroachment: rights are not gifts of government but logically prior to it. Modern religious-liberty arguments, contemporary federalism arguments, and Tea-Party-era constitutional-conservative arguments often invoke the Declaration in this register.
These two invocations are not the same. They are not even fully compatible. But each is honestly grounded in the document's text. A reader serious about the Declaration as American political philosophy has to take both seriously.
The deletion that wasn't there
Jefferson's struck slave-trade passage deserves one more look. It accused George III of having "waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him." Congress struck the entire passage. South Carolina and Georgia would not sign a document that condemned the slave trade in the language of natural rights; New England merchants who profited from the trade acquiesced.
What the deletion shows: the Declaration's universalist language was not accidental, and the founders knew exactly what extending it to slavery would mean. They drafted the universal language. They considered applying it to the slave trade. They drew back. The retreat was political and was made by people who saw the implication clearly. Modern readings that emphasize either the universalist principle or the slaveholding contradiction alone are missing the document that was actually adopted.
Section 3: Reading the grievances
The 27 grievances against George III are the longest section of the Declaration and the section most often skipped today. The grievances tell you what the colonists were actually angry about — the specific acts of imperial administration that drove them to revolution. They also map, with surprising precision, onto the constitutional structure the same generation put in place a decade later. Reading the grievances is, in a sense, reading the rough draft of the Constitution.
The Declaration attributes everything to the king ("He…"), even though many of the actions complained of were Parliament's. The colonists had largely given up on Parliament by 1776 and were addressing the sovereign directly. Here is a partial walk through the grievances most worth reading carefully, with their constitutional echoes.
Judicial independence. The Declaration complains that the king "has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries." This maps directly onto Article III, Section 1: federal judges hold office "during good Behaviour" and their compensation "shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office." Federal judges cannot be fired by the president and cannot have their pay cut. This is one of the cleanest grievance-to-Constitution mappings in the document.
Standing armies. The Declaration complains that the king "kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures." The constitutional response is several-layered: Congress declares war (Article I, Section 8); army appropriations are limited to two-year terms (Article I, Section 8); and the Third Amendment forbids quartering troops in private homes in peacetime without consent.
Jury trial. The Declaration complains of "depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury" and "transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences." The Sixth Amendment guarantees jury trial in criminal cases in the state where the offense was committed; the Seventh Amendment preserves jury trial in civil cases. The constitutional architecture of the criminal jury trial is a direct answer to this grievance.
Taxation without representation. The Declaration complains of "imposing Taxes on us without our Consent." The constitutional answer is Article I, Section 7, requiring all revenue bills to originate in the House — the chamber closest to the people, with the shortest terms. The deeper principle that taxes require legislative authorization runs through the entire Article I structure.
Legislative obstruction. The grievances open with "He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good." Royal vetoes had repeatedly blocked colonial legislatures. Article I, Section 7 preserves a presidential veto but constrains it: ten-day return window, two-thirds override in each chamber, no power to prevent legislation indefinitely.
Dissolving legislatures. The Declaration complains that the king "has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people." Article I, Section 5, with the Twentieth Amendment, gives Congress control of its own schedule; the president cannot dissolve it.
Suspension of laws. The Declaration complains the king "has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers." This is the colonial echo of the Stuart kings' suspending and dispensing powers, abolished in the English Bill of Rights of 1689. The American constitutional answer is the rejection of any executive suspension of duly enacted statutes; modern debates about executive non-enforcement (Chapters 11 and 14) trace, distantly, to this lineage.
Military superiority over civil authority. The Declaration complains that the king "has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power." The constitutional answer is civilian control of the military: the president is commander-in-chief but is a civilian official, and the military is structurally subordinated through Congress's appointment, appropriation, and oversight powers.
One general observation about the grievances. Many of them would, on rigorous legal analysis, fail. Parliament had recognized authority over the colonies under prevailing British constitutional theory; the colonists' insistence on parliamentary representation that did not exist was, in legal terms, a radical claim, not a defense of established right. Many of George III's actions were within his recognized prerogative. The Declaration is, in technical terms, political rhetoric in the high mode — a brief written for a candid world, not a legal indictment that would survive a modern courtroom.
This is not a criticism. The Declaration's purpose was to mobilize a continent and persuade Europe (especially France, whose entry into the war was the strategic prize) that the American cause was just. By that measure the document succeeded spectacularly. But modern readers who treat the Declaration as a model legal indictment — or as a template for contemporary resistance to duly constituted authorities — misread the genre. It is a manifesto. Manifestos are evaluated differently from briefs.
Section 4: The signers
Fifty-six delegates signed the Declaration. The signing was not all on July 4 — the famous date is the date of adoption. Most delegates signed the engrossed parchment on August 2, 1776, and a few added their signatures later. (The familiar Trumbull painting in the Capitol depicts the presentation of the draft on June 28, 1776, not the signing.)
The delegates pledged, in the document's final sentence, "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." The pledge was real. By the war's end at Yorktown in 1781, five signers had been captured by the British and treated as traitors. At least twelve had had their homes burned. Several lost most of their fortunes financing the war or as a consequence of British raiding. Several died in poverty.
A few signers worth knowing:
John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, signed first. The story that he signed his name large so King George could read it without spectacles is probably apocryphal, but the signature is strikingly outsized. "John Hancock" became American slang for "signature" by the early nineteenth century.
Benjamin Franklin, at 70, was the oldest signer. He had spent more time in Britain and Europe than any other delegate; he would lead the diplomatic effort in Paris that secured French entry into the war.
Thomas Jefferson, 33, was the principal author. The biographical contradictions discussed in Section 2 — slaveholder, deist, sometimes revolutionary, sometimes conservative — make Jefferson the most analyzed of the founders.
John Adams of Massachusetts was the most active force pushing for independence in the months before July 4. Jefferson called him the "colossus" of independence on the floor of Congress. Adams predicted in a letter to Abigail on July 3, 1776, that Americans would celebrate with "Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other." He was off by two days — he thought the celebration would be July 2, the date of the vote, not July 4, the date the final text was adopted.
Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, at 26, was the youngest signer. He survived British capture, served as governor of South Carolina, and died in 1800.
Caesar Rodney of Delaware made the most dramatic individual contribution to the Declaration's adoption. The Delaware delegation was split; Rodney rode 70 miles overnight from Dover through a thunderstorm to break the tie, casting Delaware's vote for independence on July 2. He is the figure on horseback on the back of the Delaware state quarter.
The signers were not a cross-section of the colonial population — they were, with virtually no exceptions, white, male, propertied, and Protestant. (Charles Carroll of Maryland, a Roman Catholic, was a notable exception on the religious dimension.) They were lawyers, merchants, planters, doctors, and ministers. The democratic legitimacy of their action — 56 men committing 2.5 million colonists to revolution — was a real question at the time and remained one in the political theory of the early Republic. But the pledge they made was not symbolic. The Declaration is, among other things, a document that 56 specific people signed knowing it might end with their being hanged.
Section 5: How the Declaration functions today
The Declaration appears in contemporary American political life in three main registers. Each is honest; each is contested; each is worth understanding before you encounter the others on talk radio, in opinion columns, and in Supreme Court footnotes.
1. As a charter of national identity. This is the Lincoln reading. The Declaration is the document at which America was founded, in the sense of being constituted as a moral community — even though the legal-political entity of "the United States" came later. The Fourth of July is a national holiday; the Constitution does not have one. American politicians of all parties begin their convention speeches and their State-of-the-Union responses with invocations of "all men are created equal" or "the consent of the governed." The Declaration is, on this reading, what Americans share — the basis of national identity that pre-exists, and is in some sense more fundamental than, the partisan disagreements of any given moment. Whether this reading is fully descriptive or partly aspirational is itself contested — there are scholars and citizens who argue that no single text can carry the weight of national identity, and that the Declaration's history of exclusion makes its claims to that role suspect. The reading is nevertheless deeply embedded in American political culture.
2. As a source of constitutional principle. The Declaration is not binding constitutional text — federal judges do not strike down statutes for violating the Declaration the way they strike them down for violating the First Amendment. But the Declaration is read, in interpretive practice, as evidence of the principles the Constitution is meant to operationalize. Justice Clarence Thomas has invoked the Declaration's "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" in originalist opinions arguing for a natural-law reading of constitutional rights. Justice William Brennan invoked the Declaration's "all men are created equal" in equal-protection opinions arguing for an expansive reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. These uses are not symmetric, but they share a structure: the Declaration provides the philosophical premises against which constitutional text is read.
This use of the Declaration is itself controversial in legal scholarship. Strict textualists argue that the Declaration's principles are not law and should not influence the reading of constitutional text. Other scholars argue that the Declaration is presupposed by the Constitution and is therefore unavoidable in interpretation. The textbook does not take a side in this debate; what matters for the careful reader is to recognize when judicial opinions are doing this work, and to understand what the Declaration's role in their argument is.
3. As a rhetorical resource for political movements. Both progressive and conservative political movements in the United States have grounded their arguments in the Declaration's language, and both invocations are sincere.
On the progressive side, the abolitionists, the suffragists, the Populists, the labor movement, the civil-rights movement, and contemporary movements for LGBT and immigrant rights have all read the Declaration as a charter of unfinished work — an unredeemed promise of equal rights that the country is morally obligated to extend. The Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848, drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, deliberately echoed the Declaration's structure ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal"). King's "I Have a Dream" speech treated the Declaration and the Constitution together as a "promissory note" the country had a duty to honor.
On the conservative side, the Tea Party movement of 2009–10 grounded its critique of federal expansion in the Declaration's framing of government as instituted to secure pre-existing rights, and constrained by the consent of the governed. Contemporary religious-liberty advocates ground their arguments in the "Creator-endowed" language of the Declaration's premises — the claim that rights derive from a source higher than government and are therefore not the government's to revoke. Constitutional originalists invoke the Declaration as part of the founding-era context that gives original meaning to the constitutional text.
These two sets of invocations are not the same. Progressive invocations tend to emphasize the universalist application of equal rights against existing inequalities; conservative invocations tend to emphasize the pre-political grounding of rights against government overreach. They emphasize different parts of the same short document. But each is grounded in language the Declaration actually contains, and a serious reader of American political argument has to be able to recognize and respect both.
A final observation, on the document's enduring force.
The Declaration has lasted, as American political scripture, in part because it states aspirations the country has rarely fully met. "All men are created equal" was not true of the country that adopted it. It was not fully true of the country that fought a civil war over slavery, or that denied women the vote until 1920, or that maintained legal racial segregation until 1965, or that — in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways — falls short still. Frederick Douglass's reading is the right one. The principles of the Declaration are correct. The application has been incomplete. The document is, therefore, a charter of unfinished business — a standard against which the Republic continually measures itself, and continually finds work still to do.
That is the most useful way to read it. Not as a triumphalist account of a country that has arrived, but as a charter of a country that is still trying.
Read the full text at the National Archives. Then return to whichever chapter of this book you are working through. The Declaration will appear, again and again, in arguments about equal protection, about voting rights, about religious liberty, about the nature of the Constitution, about who counts as American. You will be a better reader of those arguments for having read it carefully, and for having understood that the people you disagree with are reading it carefully too.
Cross-references: Chapter 2 (Founding Political Theory), Chapter 3 (The Constitution), Chapter 6 (Civil Rights), Chapter 12 (Constitutional Interpretation), Appendix A (the Constitution), Appendix B (the Amendments), Appendix D (the Federalist Papers).