{"id":797282,"date":"2019-07-02T08:00:01","date_gmt":"2019-07-02T14:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.summitdaily.com\/?p=368221"},"modified":"2019-07-02T08:00:01","modified_gmt":"2019-07-02T14:00:01","slug":"opinion-morgan-liddick-declaration-of-independence-still-bears-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/local-news\/opinion-morgan-liddick-declaration-of-independence-still-bears-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Morgan Liddick: Declaration of Independence still bears reading"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Two hundred forty-three years ago today, delegates from 12 of the 13 colonies meeting in Philadelphia to form a united front on the war already underway against Great Britain voted to accept a motion offered by Virginia\u2019s Richard Henry Lee that \u201cthese United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The Second Continental Congress spent the next two days debating and revising the language of a statement drafted by Thomas Jefferson to flesh out the idea before officially adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 4. Nearly a month would go by, however, before the document was formally signed. New York\u2019s delegates didn\u2019t officially give their support until July 9<\/a> because their home assembly hadn\u2019t yet authorized them to vote in favor of independence.Some things change slowly, one supposes.<\/p>\n

Our Declaration of Independence didn\u2019t happen in a vacuum. Much of its language reflected that of the political philosophers of the Enlightenment, particularly Englishmen Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The colonial leaders who debated and signed the document were familiar with these and other figures of the ongoing intellectual revolution in Western thought; in his 2007 book \u201cThe Great Upheaval,\u201d historian Jay Winik describes the lively transatlantic traffic in ideas that made America a node in the \u201cRepublic of Letters\u201d central to the development of political thought as we know it today.<\/p>\n

Hobbes, writing in the shadow of the English civil war, thought government an absolute necessity in the face of natural life, which he described as \u201c\u2026 poor, nasty, brutish and short.\u201d In response, a community had the right to enter into a \u201csocial contract\u201d with a ruler to establish order and provide protection. Hobbes was agnostic on the type of government the ruler should establish, but he saw no limit on the ruler\u2019s power in the name of public safety.<\/p>\n

Locke saw a far more limited role for the state. Writing on the eve of England\u2019s \u201cGlorious Revolution,\u201d he envisioned government as a social contract for the enumerated purposes of protecting individual citizens\u2019 \u201clife, liberty and property.\u201d He also developed the radical theory that, should a government fail to perform as promised, the people had an inherent right to cancel its contract<\/a>. The American Declaration of Independence was the embodiment of these theories of government, and as such, was the truly revolutionary aspect of the American revolution: a people canceling the contract of a government that no longer protected their interests \u2014 the tacit understanding between ruler and ruled.<\/p>\n

The bulk of the Declaration of Independence was, unsurprisingly, a bill of indictments against the government of King George III. Canceling a contract requires proof of cause, and the colonists provided this full well. From the depredations of unaccountable royal governors and admiralty courts to the myriad of taxes, regulations, fees, fines and harassments petty and gross to misfeasance and plain bad government, the latter part of Jefferson\u2019s document was a list of wrongs submitted \u201cto a candid world.\u201d It\u2019s an interesting read.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear Jefferson had help writing it. A nice comparison of the various drafts of the Declaration<\/a> with the final document provided by \u201cushistory.org\u201d shows evolution in Colonists\u2019 concerns. The first draft of the declaration contained nothing on the impressment of American sailors by the British navy, nor about the Royal habit of calling governing assemblies to order in remote locations. Both the final draft and the signed copies, however, have detailed complaints about these practices.<\/p>\n

The process also flowed the other way: Jefferson\u2019s first draft and the \u201creported draft,\u201d or the language the delegates used for debate, had very long articles on the slave trade. It was described in the first as \u201ccruel war against human nature itself,\u201d as \u201cpiratical warfare,\u201d an \u201cassemblage of horrors\u201d and \u201cexecrable commerce.\u201d The reported draft retains these criticisms. The signed copy eliminates the entire three paragraphs, Jefferson later recalled that the edit was made at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia; James Madison also hints at this. As with the later \u201cthree-fifths clause\u201d in the Constitution, this void pointed to an expediency in the name of unity, and a disagreement that would come to a violent head 84 years later.<\/p>\n

Foreshadowing aside, the declaration still bears reading; today, tomorrow or Thursday might be good days to do it. It tells much about the ideas on which this nation was formed, being the intellectual architectural drawing of the republic.<\/p>\n

Free health care isn\u2019t in it.<\/p>\n

via:: Summit Daily<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two hundred forty-three years ago today, delegates from 12 of the 13 colonies meeting in Philadelphia to form a united front on the war already underway against Great Britain voted to accept a motion offered by Virginia\u2019s Richard Henry Lee that \u201cthese United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states\u2026\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-797282","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-17 11:06:31","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797282\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}