From The Files: 2 July 1776 ... The 6th of 70 Entries (One for Today)

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[1978] Gary Wills, "Adjunct" Professor of History, Northwestern University

INVENTING AMERICA: JEFFERSON’S DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, (Garden City, New York: DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC., 1978. 398 pp.).

"The Declaration was not a legal instrument. Its issuance was a propaganda adjunct to the act of declaring independence on July 2--and that act, in turn, was just the necessary step towards the treaties with France and the Articles of Confederation, the two projects men were principally wrestling with." (p.333)

"The general structure and strategy of argument in the Declaration was affected by the petitioning process. The language of a mutual pledge at the end, and the insertion of Lee’s resolution of independence, gave the document some appearance of a charter; yet it could not be a formal compact of government, since the colonies had withheld the power to make such a pledge from their delegates…Actually there was no confusion at the time about the document’s genre. It was a paper issued subsequent to an action in order to explain that action." (p.334).

"The very precision of the term, a declaration, would lead to later confusion. This was perhaps unavoidable, since state declaration had two quite different meanings in the legal literature familiar to Jefferson’s fellows in the Congress. Declaration sometimes meant just the explanation of an act. But at other times declaring was the act itself-e.g., when a sovereign declares war. William of Orange’s Declaration was just an explanation; but one of the things that led to that document was James II’s Declaration for Liberty of Conscience of April 4, 1687--an instrument that "effected" the state it described. The Parliament’s Declaration of Rights was both explanatory (describing the failure of petitions to James) and declaratory of an effect (the naming of William and Mary as King and

Queen)."

"Jefferson’s Declaration is explanatory of an act; but the act itself had been declaratory. Declaring independence, like declaring war, is an act of state. That act was accomplished on July 2, when the Congress voted on Lee’s resolution that the colonies ‘are [at that very moment], and of right ought to be, free and independent states.’ The condition of independence was declared to exist, already, at that vote"…

"Those immediately involved in the process understood, at the outset, the difference between declaring as an act and the Declaration as an explanation of that act." (p.336)

"Confusion was probably inevitable in any case; but Congress made sure that confusion would not only exist but spread when it incorporated the July 2 resolution in the July 4 explanation. The latter document is thus made to say that the "united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states." OF COURSE, THE DECLARATION COULD NOT MAKE THE COLONIES INDEPENDENT IF THEY WERE ALREADY INDEPENDENT; so the Declaration does not declare them independent at that moment. It merely repeats what has been declared, that they are still in the condition effected by the act of declaring on July 2. But later on, as the Declaration acquired its popularity, it became the custom to misread it as both the first enactment (contained in it) "and" the later explanation--but principally the former." (p.336)

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