Declaration of independence

why was it created

declared their independence from the British Empire with the DOI by the second constitutional congress.

Lee Resolution

(2 days before DOI) passed the second constitutional Congress, resolving that the 13 colonies were “free and independent states” separating from the British to create the United States of America.

Committee of Five

John Adams, Benjamin Franki, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston—had been working in the DOI, with TJ as main drafter

DOI

was a formal declaration by Congress that the US was an independent nation. TJ looked to the English Declaration of Rights and Virginia’s Declaration of Rights (George Mason)

DOI grievances against King George III

• 1 TJ draft attacked the slave trade, it was removed by the Georgia and South Carolina delegates to Congress

power of preamble, “unalienable Rights”

the people themselves as ultimate authority

the DOI changed American freedom

but it also was a global document—justified freedom by natural rights

TJ initially included among the grievances on addressing the slave trade; King George III

"has 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, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.... Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

response to quote

he was presuaded to alter the language to refer to “domestic insurrections among us” by South Carolina’s delegates