While we can admire the eloquence
of Thomas Jefferson’s pen, and regard with awe his sweeping vision of the
natural rights of human beings, I think that it is important to remember that
the Declaration of Independence was meant to serve a very specific purpose. Though
it has come to be regarded as a sort of statement on the philosophical
foundations of the United States of America, it is also contains a very
specific list of grievances, and uses language that is not quite as
revolutionary as one might assume.
One thing that becomes apparent
on first reading the Declaration is its preoccupation with the notion of
rights. Now I don’t suppose this comes as much of a surprise. After all, wasn't
the American Revolution really a battle over rights? Over who possessed them
and by what authority? Thing is, though, the rights that the Declaration
discusses can arguably be fit into two different categories, radical and
conservative.
The radical rights are the ones
that come to mind first, I'm sure. The right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit
of Happiness,” is, after all, fundamental to the liberal-democratic view of the
world which most of us in the West (or East or wherever) share. And what could
have been more radical in the 18th century than to say that all
people possessed a right to liberty? Wasn't that the age of kings and emperors?
Weren't governments in that era based on tradition, and order, and discipline?
The answer, to all of these
questions, is yes. Yes, it was a radical thing that Jefferson and his
colleagues did when they asserted the “unalienable rights” of all human beings.
And yes, the 18th century was dominated by governments that valued
precedent and stability over freedom and liberality. But the fact is that the
Declaration gives over far more space to conservative rights, based in
tradition and precedent, than radical ones. And even among his radical
assertions, Jefferson drew on established, though untested, principles.
But perhaps I get ahead of
myself. I’ll return to the radical elements of the Declaration in short order.
For now, let’s discuss these conservative rights.
Among the accusations that the
Declaration levels at the British monarch, many claim that his actions or
inactions violated some right or privilege traditionally enjoyed by the
colonists. By Jefferson’s estimation it seems that George III wasn't guilty of
violating abstract philosophical principles, but of breaking with the laws that
had governed the Thirteen Colonies for over a century. Some of the accusations
are fairly explicit, claiming that the king wished his American subjects to
“relinquish the Right of Representation in the Legislature,” that he had invaded
“the Rights of the People,” that he had attempted to subject the colonists to
“a Jurisdiction foreign to [their] Constitution, and unacknowledged by [their]
laws,” and that he was guilty of “taking away [their] Charters, abolishing
[their] most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of [their]
Governments.” Other claims were more implicit, and seemed to refer to some
unspoken precedent or covenant that the king’s actions had violated. Among
these are the accusations that George III had “obstructed the Administration of
Justice,” that he had kept among the colonists, “in Times of Peace, Standing
Armies, without the consent of [their] Legislature,” and that he was guilty of,
“cutting off [their] Trade with all Parts of the World,” “imposing taxes on
[the colonists] without [their] Consent,” and, “depriving [them], in many
Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury.”
This is heady stuff, to be sure, but it’s far
from revolutionary. I say this because while Jefferson and his colleagues certainly
developed a novel conception of their rights over the course of the Revolution,
they undoubtedly began by first trying to reaffirm their traditional rights as
Englishmen.
Allow me to clarify.
By the standards of the 18th
century, the English were a people that were peculiarly aware of their rights.
This was the result of a series of incidents that had unfolded over the course
of the 17th century: three civil wars, the beheading of a king, a
period of republican government, the restoration of the monarchy, and a
bloodless, but extremely significant, revolution. Over the course of this long,
and rather bizarre, sequence of events the people of England became very conscious
of the dangers of unchecked monarchical power and of the importance of
protecting what they believed were their traditional rights. In 1689, as a
means of guarding against any future abuse of power by the crown, the most
important of these rights were written into a bill that subsequently became an
Act of Parliament.
These rights included:
1. A
prohibition against royal interference with the law or the administration of
justice
2. The
right of taxation only through the consent of parliament
3. A
bar against standing armies being raised in time of peace without the consent
of parliament
4. An
injunction against royal interference in the election of members of parliament
5. A
guarantee that the freedom of speech and debates of parliament shall not be
questioned or impeached by any court or body outside of parliament itself
Sound familiar?
This “Bill of Rights” became the
foundation of what it still referred to as the Britain’s unwritten
Constitution. More to the point, however, it would also have been the
foundation of what people like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin
Franklin believed where their rights
as Englishmen. They had, after all, been raised in a political and social
climate that attached a great deal of significance to English history in
general and the Bill of Rights in particular. Thus when Jefferson claimed that
the colonists had a right to have their laws respected and their streets free
of soldiers he was not asking for something that was particularly revolutionary
or radical. Rather, he was asserting what he believed were his, and his fellow
colonists, rights as British citizens.
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