Moreover, the delegates of several colonies, including Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York, were bound by instructions that precluded their voting for independence.
The colonies should negotiate agreements with potential European allies before declaring independence, they said. According to notes kept by Thomas Jefferson, most delegates conceded that independence was justified and inevitable, but some argued for delay.
#Declaration of independence year free
As a result, on 7 June 1776, Richard Henry Lee introduced the following resolution: "That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved." Lee also moved that Congress "take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances" and prepare "a plan of confederation" for the colonies' consideration.Ĭongress debated Lee's resolution on Saturday, 8 May, and again the following Monday. News of Parliament's Prohibitory Act (December 1775), which declared colonial ships and cargoes forfeit to the Crown as if they were the possessions of "open enemies," added force to Paine's argument, as did news that the Crown had hired German mercenary soldiers to help subdue the Americans.įinally, on 10 and, Congress passed a resolution written by John Adams with a radical preface that called for the total suppression of "every kind of authority under the … crown" and the establishment of new state governments "under the authority of the people." Simultaneously, on 15 May, Virginia instructed its Congressional delegation to move that Congress declare independence, negotiate foreign alliances, and design an American confederation.
The pamphlet opened a widespread public debate on the previously taboo subject of independence.
Americans could secure their future and that of their children only by declaring their independence and founding a new government whose authority rested on the people alone, with no king or other hereditary rulers. American freedom would never be secure under British rule, Paine argued, because the British government included two grave "constitutional errors," monarchy and hereditary rule. Instead, in a proclamation of August 23, 1775, he asserted that the colonists were engaged in an "open and avowed rebellion." Then, on October 26, he told Parliament that the American rebellion was "manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent Empire," and that the colonists' professions of loyalty to him and the "parent State" were "meant only to amuse." News of the speech arrived at Philadelphia in January 1776, just when Thomas Paine's Common Sense appeared. The king did not formally answer to the petition. In July of that year, the Second Continental Congress sent the King a petition for redress and reconciliation, which Dickinson drafted in conspicuously respectful language. The colonists were proud of being British and had no desire to be separated from a mother country with which they were united, as John Dickinson put it in his popular newspaper "letters" from "a Farmer in Pennsylvania" (1767–1768), "by religion, liberty, laws, affections, relation, language and commerce." Not even the outbreak of war at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts on 19 April 1775 produced calls for independence. The original thirteen British colonies of mainland North America moved toward independence slowly and reluctantly. Although it was first drafted as a revolutionary manifesto, Americans of later generations came to honor the Declaration less for its association with independence than for its assertion that "all men are created equal" and "are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights," among which are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," individual rights that went unmentioned in the federal Constitution and Bill of Rights. This document, which the Second Continental Congress adopted on 4 July 1776, proclaimed the original thirteen American colonies independent of Great Britain and provided an explanation and justification of that step.
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