The Moral Foundation of America: Revisiting Jefferson's Declaration of Independence

This essay began as an essay for a college English class, and has been adapted to be suitable for publication on The Radical Times

NEW YORK - When the Founders of our country began the fight for independence from King George’s tyranny, they did not know concretely what they were fighting for ,only what they were fighting against. This lack of a unified goal beyond freedom from the oppressive yoke of the far-away British Government allowed for colonists to claim different things about the same battles that were being fought, draw different conclusions from the lessons that were being learned at that time. Thomas Jefferson’s great moment of inspiration was not in the originality of his writing, which he himself admitted that the declaration was not a particularly original document, but rather in compiling and condensing the American grievances against the King, alongside the normative ideology that Jefferson proclaimed they were fighting for. That is to say that Jefferson’s great exercise in imagination was not in making revolutionary ideas out of thin air, but rather in the compilation of the thoughts of other great thinkers to make the beginnings of the moral foundation of America, meaning that Jefferson’s great and consequential action in writing and publishing the declaration is not the declaration of a legal separation, or in the declaration of war (both of which were somewhat empirically clear to have already begun by the time of the publishing of the declaration) but rather in compiling the thoughts of philosophers and thinkers as distant as 16th century revolutionary Dutch thinkers, to John Locke, and his contemporaries in Thomas Paine and George Mason. 

Jeffersons great work in the writing and publication of the Declaration of Independence is, by his own admission, not in making an original and completely novel philosophy or justification of the war that was already raging between the (now Independent) Colonies and Britain, but rather in taking his vast wealth of knowledge in philosophy and historical writings and using both to compile what he thought would be a compelling piece of propaganda, but what would eventually in part become the moral ideal of American politics and life. One of the more obscure sources that it has been speculated that Jefferson had referenced in his drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the Dutch Plakkaat van Verlatinge. An expert on historical rhetoric has said of the idea that the Plakkaat was the genesis of the Declaration that “Of all the models available to Jefferson and the Continental Congress, none provided as precise a template for the Declaration as did the Plakkaat”, demonstrating that scholarly sources since at least the late 1990s have thought that this relatively obscure document held high regard in Jefferon’s mind when he was drafting the Declaration (Wolff). Experts have also continually noted that the Declaration and the Plakkaat have remarkably similar structures, both containing a preamble that emphasize the natural and divine rights of people to overthrow governments when those governments represent a threat to their natural rights, invoking the thoughts of enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke (who even suggested that it is a citizen’s duty to revolt when a government violates natural law) (Wolff). It is also notable that the Plakkaat mirrors the Declaration’s thoughts in a way that other sources that Jefferson may have been able to easily access might not have, the right to revolution, for example, is not invoked in other speculated inspiration for the Declaration such as British State Papers (Wolff). The Plakkaat and Declaration have even further similarities in that both have a list of grievances demonstrating the author’s disapproval of their respective oppressive colonial King’s government, and both emphasize the numerous attempts at reconciliation that both countries made in attempting to maintain their rights without invoking the right to revolution (Wolff). These similarities suggest that Jefferson was both aware of the Plakkaat and drew heavy inspiration from the document in ways that might not have always been readily known. The Plakkaat and Declaration share similarities because, according to scholars on the time period, imitation in writing was sincerely viewed as a form of expressing admiration for the other document, and it should be noted that the Plakkaat was absolutely not the only inspiration behind the Declaration, nor is the inspiration that Jefferson took from the Plakkaat devalue the philosophical arguments made by Jefferson in the Declaration, or the document’s status as the foundation of America’s moral justification of itself and its style and system of government. In fact, the right to revolution could almost be seen as a violent alternative to the right for citizens to ‘overthrow’ unpopular governments at regularly scheduled free, fair, and competitive elections. 

Another one of the various philosophers that influenced Jefferson in his drafting of the Declaration of Independence was clearly John Locke. As mentioned earlier in this essay, the idea of natural rights that are granted by a higher authority than political government that is espoused by John Locke in his treatises were the bedrock upon which the Declaration of Independence was built upon. John Locke, an English philosopher slightly before the time of Jefferson and American independence, was the enlightenment philosopher that most of the founders most clearly based their ideology on. The idea of natural rights, and even a duty to revolt against tyrannical governments was not only completely incendiary in Britain at the time of publication, but was in fact the gasoline that fueled the great bonfire of the American Revolution. It has been said of the ideas that Locke posited in the decades before the Revolution that “Locke’s justification of revolt, as based on his theory of natural rights, was the background from which the Declaration sprang.” It is not just in the philosophical ideals of freedom and natural rights that Locke espoused that Jefferson garnered inspiration from, but also echoes of the syntax and general structure of Locke’s arguments are seen prominently in the Declaration (Swanzy). For example, Jefferson in the Declaration says “…But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government…”, Locke similarly states “...But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going; it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouze themselves…” (Swanzy). These similarities in philosophy and even to a small extent in syntax and structure of arguments makes a strong and irrefutable case that John Locke, particularly his Second Treatise and A Letter Concerning Toleration influenced Jefferson’s thinking and writings, especially in the Declaration, making Locke the foundation of America’s moral foundation.

In our last examination of particular philosophical thinkers, it is important to look at the contemporaries of Jefferson in his writing of the Declaration. After all, the Declaration is meant to purely represent the thoughts and grievances of the American public, so much so that Jefferson wasn’t even credited as the principal author of the Declaration until decades after the publication of the Declaration. His notable contemporaries who almost certainly colored the thoughts of Jefferson when making his draft of the declaration were certainly (although not limited to) Thomas Paine, particularly his pamphlet Common Sense as well as George Mason and Virginia's Declaration of Rights. Both of these documents were greatly influential at the time that Jefferson and the Second Continental Congress published their Declaration of Independence and would have almost certainly been on the minds of the colonists' turned statesmen. Thomas Paine (ironically, a recent British immigrant) particularly was influential in rousing up support for the fighting (that was at that point limited to Boston and the surrounding area) to not just be seen as a petty revolt over taxation but indeed as a complete and total rejection of the British monarchy, and the British domination of the colonies in what he saw as an unnatural and perverse state of affairs. Those ideas almost certainly heavily influenced Jefferson during his time of writing, and in fact was part of the reason why the Continental Congress had adopted the resolution to pass a Declaration of Independence in the first place. Another thinker, less radical by all accounts, George Mason, almost certainly heavily influenced Jefferson, having not only written an influential piece of propaganda in the fight against the British- but also having done so in service of Jefferson’s home state, it is inconceivable that Jefferson wasn’t aware of this document, and hadn’t absorbed some of its ideals. The foundational arguments that build the foundation of America’s moral and political philosophy are vital to analyze in order to better understand not just the general philosophy of the moment in newly-free America, but also what thoughts were in the crucial moments of the drafting of the declaration and what the general mood of the nation that informed Jefferson’s declaration. One may think that this isn’t that important, that the declaration’s words are the thoughts and feelings of but one man, and not necessarily indicative of the mood and attitudes of the nation. But Jefferson himself would disagree with those who think that, Jefferson said of his drafting of the declaration that he “did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before” meaning that Jefferson did not even attempt to make new ideas (or claim to make any) but instead tried to exemplify the common consensus in the newly liberated American states, through the derivation of the thoughts of both his contemporaries and the great thinkers that preceded him and the revolution (Postell). This means that undoubtedly Paine and Mason heavily influenced the ideas that had been expressed freely and passionately in the declaration, both by their popularity in distribution and proximity to him in their publication and distribution. Common Sense at the time of the publication of the Declaration of Independence was one of the most popular and widely distributed pieces of literature in the American states, purportedly having sold 500,000 copies of the pamphlets to Americans at the time (Kiger) . Considering there were only 2.5 million americans around the time of its publication, this means that ⅕ Americans owned a pamphlet (Census.gov). This means that if Jefferson was earnest in his charge in attempting to make a document that recognized and canonized the feelings of the American people in 1776, Jefferson must have read, recognized, and incorporated the ideas of Paine and Mason in his document. 

Jefferson’s great accomplishment in writing the declaration of independence wasn’t the propaganda boost that his exceptional piece of writing might have provided the patriots of the revolution, but in fact, when he amalgamated together some of the great works of writing of political thought of the western world, from the Dutch Revolutionaries of the 16th Century, to Locke, to Paine and Mason, created the moral and ethical foundation that America still stands upon today. America has not always lived up to its ideal of respecting each person's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but the civic ideal that those famous words represent have given life to the idea of democracy, and have inspired many revolutionary democratic thinkers after Jefferson and the American revolution had long been gone. Jefferson’s thoughts may not be unique, and may very well draw parallels to other great writers and philosophers, but one wonders if Jefferson had not built this sturdy ground for America o build itself upon, would we be the people that we are today, or simply the same as any other country of the fray?

Access to bibliography and citations: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TQgT9jLipd4v3yW127ZhVzNnPB4DRsq5rPHTQOQUS3s/edit?usp=sharing