Declaring War—and Loyalty

Was the Declaration of Independence a declaration of war on England? Before we get to its 250th anniversary in 2026, we should first recognize two other fast approaching semiquincentennial observances. The first recognizes the ‘shot heard round the world:’ British assaults on American colonials at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, igniting what became the American War for Independence. The second is the July 2, 1775, A Declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies of North-America … Setting Forth the Causes and Necessity of Their Taking Up Arms.[1] In what follows we will look at the justifications for self-defense, and calls for reconciliation, of the 1775 Declaration. We will also take a look at Loyalist arguments that continued up through the early days of the war. These elements help us come to an answer as to whether the 1776 document was a declaration of war.

Historical Context and the 1775 Declaration

The story of Britain’s North American colonies in Massachusetts, Virginia, and elsewhere is well-known. Beginning in 1620 with the Mayflower Compact, local citizens were largely responsible for their own survival and for the forms of government and cooperation under which they would operate. Though largely of British ancestry, with infusions of other European nations, the next 150 years saw the gradual development of viable and often thriving farms, businesses, and communities assuming a basic format of British common law resting on provincial charters and a widespread, shared Christian worldview. Though danger was present, whether from the storms of Nature or attacks by hostile indigeneous peoples, nonetheless the next century and a half was a time of developing distinctive regional and national (American) characteristics within a generally British (English) atmosphere.

While colonies such as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Jersey were being established in the New World, an entirely different set of circumstances ravaged the Old World, most notably the devastating Thirty Years War (1618-1648) on the continent and the destructive English Civil War (1642-1651). Britain was involved in numerous wars in the decades that followed, such as the Wars of Spanish and Austrian Succession. In many of these European conflicts, religious identity was closely tied to political affiliation, thus the term “religious wars” in the seventeenth century. A distracted Britain focused much attention on Europe’s shifting political variables and its own internal struggles while its North American citizens built a new society from the ground up with little oversight.

When a global war pitting England and its allies against France and its allies reached the Western Hemisphere in the form of the Seven Years War (French and Indian War, 1754-1763), the colonists were for the first time engaged in the global stratagems of Great Britain.[3] Moreover, the vast expenditure of manpower and financial resources to protect Britain’s North American colonies resulted in decisions by Parliament to tax the American colonies to pay the war’s debts and contribute to future investments in defense. Those taxes, in the forms of “acts” such as the Stamp Act and so-called Intolerable Acts, were the basis for increasing resistance by the American colonists and set up an increasingly potent back-and-forth between London and the colonies that resulted in red-coated British soldiers killing American colonists at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. By this point, the cultural drift and difference in expectations between London and the average American colonist, engendered by 150 years of semi-independence, was far wider than most in the mother country realized.

One day after the shots were fired, Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore attempted to seize gunpowder and ammunition belonging to the Virginia militia, sparking a pro-independence movement in Virginia. By May 1775, a second continental congress had been called, which immediately sought cooperation across all thirteen colonies, commissioned George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Army (June 19), and on July 2 sent a declaration to London articulating a catalogue of British wrongs and justifying a self-defensive posture in the colonies.

Underlying the arguments of both sides are classic arguments from the Christian just war tradition, which was affirmed by Anglicans, Presbyterians, and most other Christians at the time and firmly entrenched in customary international law. In brief, classical Christian thinking on security argues that legitimate political authorities have an obligation to protect and defend their citizens, and thus at times may employ force when acting on a just cause (self-defense of the community, righting wrong) with right intentions (e.g. motives of peace and justice rather than destruction and revenge). We will see some of these arguments within the claims of the Second Continental Congress and the Loyalists.

The 1775 Declaration of the United Colonies, primarily penned by John Dickinson with assistance from Thomas Jefferson, provides a robust overview of the history of the colonies and the dramatically changed political landscape of the 1760s: “Our forefathers . . . left their native land, to seek on these shores a residence for civil and religious freedom.” The writers note that at little cost to the Crown, over a period of nearly 150 years, British colonists had through their own blood, sweat, and fortunes, settled the “distant and unhospitable wilds of America.” They were largely self-governing with royal charters; the relationship was so “mutual[ly] beneficial” as to “excite astonishment.”[4]

But, the social contract changed at the whim of London and to the disadvantage of the colonies. The Declaration lists some of the colonists’ many grievances such as loss of trial by jury, taxes, and the quartering of troops in private homes:

Parliament . . . in the course of eleven years, [has]:

– undertaken to give and grant our money without our consent, though we have ever exercised an exclusive right to dispose of our own property;

– statutes have been passed for extending the jurisdiction of courts of admiralty and vice-admiralty beyond their ancient limits;

– for depriving us of the accustomed and inestimable privilege of trial by jury, in cases affecting both life and property;

– for suspending the legislature of one of the colonies;

– for interdicting all commerce to the capital of another;

– and for altering fundamentally the form of government established by charter, and secured by acts of its own legislature solemnly confirmed by the crown;

– for exempting the” murderers” of colonists from legal trial, and in effect, from punishment;

– for erecting in a neighboring province, acquired by the joint arms of Great-Britain and America, a despotism dangerous to our very existence;

– and for quartering soldiers upon the colonists in time of profound peace.

– It has also been resolved in parliament, that colonists charged with committing certain offences, shall be transported to England to be tried.

The 1775 Declaration described the motivation for this economic warfare: “These devoted colonies were judged to be in such a state, as to present victories without bloodshed, and all the easy emoluments of statuteable plunder.” London could pillage its own people and they were required to submit. And now, the king and parliament had called the self-defensive actions of the colonists “a rebellion” and promised to take “measures to enforce due obedience.”[5]

Was the colonists’ goal the establishment of a new empire in North America or the break up the United Kingdom? No,

Lest this declaration should disquiet the minds of our friends and fellow-subjects in any part of the empire, we assure them that we mean not to dissolve that union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely wish to see restored. Necessity has not yet driven us into that desperate measure, or induced us to excite any other nation to war against them. We have not raised armies with ambitious designs of separating from Great-Britain, and establishing independent states. We fight not for glory or for conquest…

In fact, they deliberately label the downward cycle of violence caused by London’s intransigence not a revolt, revolution, or independence movement, but civil war, concluding,

With an humble confidence in the mercies of the supreme and impartial Judge and Ruler of the Universe, we most devoutly implore his divine goodness to protect us happily through this great conflict, to dispose our adversaries to reconciliation on reasonable terms, and thereby to relieve the empire from the calamities of civil war.

Importantly, the “revolution” was not truly a revolution. By definition, a revolution is characterized by the complete overthrow of the existing social and political system, usually by a small elite employing violence to impose their idealistic blueprint on the citizenry. So, the French, Russian, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, and other revolutions began with the violent destruction of existing institutions (family, religion, government, culture) and the forceful imposition of an entirely new way of life, controlled by the totalitarian state.

In contrast, the American colonists kept arguing for their rights as Englishmen. They asserted their fundamental rights under Magna Carta, natural rights, and the colonial charters and the right to defend themselves.

In sum, the 1775 Declaration was written after three months of continuing attacks by British forces following the violence at Lexington and Concord. It would be a full year before the Congress published the Declaration of Independence, demonstrating that the war began as an act of legitimate self-defense, not a pre-meditated civil war or a revolution, and evolved toward a more comprehensive conception of full independence.

Loyalist Arguments Against Independence

By the 1770s, the two sides of the debate about union, or disunion, with England were labeled as Patriots and Loyalists. We have seen the arguments made by a mix of Patriots, Loyalists, and undecideds, in the 1775 Declaration. But what were the larger, public arguments made by the Loyalists during this time? One can find in their writings, articles, speeches, and sermons a number of arguments. As historian Greg Frazer has shown, a number of pastors, particularly in the Anglican (Episcopal) Church, argued that Romans 13’s demanded that citizens respect British authority [6]:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the [government] powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resists the power, resists the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.

To the Loyalist pastors, resistance to divinely appointed civil authority was a temptation for fallen human beings, in short, a sin. These Anglicans pointed to a historic Christian principle, that civil society was important for providing public order and restraining human sin. By resisting London, they warned, the so-called Patriots were unraveling the bonds of civil society, leading to discord, violence, and dangerous unexpected consequences.

Today’s citizens may not recognize just how powerful the pulpit was in 1775. The back and forth was newsworthy and deeply consequential to the hearts and minds of a highly religious society. Anglican pro-status quo arguments were challenged by other pastors, especially but not limited to Presbyterians (Reformed), including Jonathan Mayhew[7] and Samuel West[8], who argued that colonial governments were “intermediate authorities” with a moral obligation to protect the colonists from tyrannical London.[9]

A second set of Loyalist arguments mixed British patriotism with practicality. Even with higher taxes, higher costs, and more state intervention, the colonies were extensions of Britain and the colonists were British citizens, tied by bounds of culture and history to the United Kingdom and freer than the average man or woman in Europe. Britain had come to the colonists’ aid during the French and Indian War (1754-1763); who else would protect the colonists from the Spanish, hostile native Indians, and other threats? Moreover, life was relatively good and successful in the colonies. Indeed, Parliament had, on occasion, responded to the colonists’ displeasure by repealing or toning down taxes and tariffs such as the Stamp, Townsend, and Sugar Acts. Loyalists recognized real colonial grievances because they felt the effects of those bad policies, just like their neighbors. Loyalists were often critical of ham-fisted, tone-deaf leaders in London. True, they argued, London can make mistakes both in policy and in application, but the right response is more negotiation, remonstration, and public statements.  Patriots countered that despite a dozen “Declarations” entreaties to Parliament, the historical record was one Act after another from 1764 onward.[10]

Loyalists took this argument a step further, noting with some irony that Patriots could be just as heavy- handed with their own neighbors, particularly in Boston and throughout Massachusetts. At times Patriots demanded, as an act of solidarity and as a way of punching back at the British, ‘voluntary’ non-importation agreements targeting British goods. Furthermore, various Patriot secret societies, such as the Sons of Liberty, developed loyalty oaths and by 1777 all of the colonies were moving toward such oaths rejecting the King and affirming loyalty to their individual states. Loyalists argued, first and foremost, that the citizens’ obligations extended to King and Parliament. When it came to competing declarations of fealty, the Loyalists argued that Patriot oaths were designed to intimidate and coerce.

To many of the claims that Patriots made in the run-up to 1775, and especially those in the Declaration of the United Colonies such as the quartering of troops and the erosion of trial by jury, the Loyalists had to resort to pleas such as “It’s understandable that this is happening … It’s a misunderstanding stoked by hot-heads … It may not be as bad as you think …” One argument that they criticized was the Patriot claim that the religious freedom consensus[11] in the colonies was in jeopardy.[12] Loyalists retorted that not only was there really no danger of bishops being imposed in New England, but how could the Patriots claim to defend religious freedom and ally themselves with Catholic France?[13]

Finally, Loyalists suggested that it was not patriotism, but pecuniary gain, that made New England financiers and merchants call for rebellion.[14] Of course, historical studies have largely demonstrated the falseness of this accusation in two ways. First, most of those businessmen were among the hardest hit not just by the various tariffs and taxes, but also by the closing of Boston and later raids by the British Navy. Second, as much as 80% of the citizenry across the colonies, from urban to rural and across many walks of life, ultimately came to see themselves as both aggrieved and as distinct from the motherland.

What became of the Loyalists? In the run-up to the War of Independence, most of the back and forth between Patriots and Loyalists was peacefully handled, whether in letters, verbal arguments, or via elections. That said, a sad fact is the numerous accounts of tarring-and-feathering, usually of Loyalists, that were physically harmful and publicly humiliating. There were isolated instances of arson and criminality, perhaps the best known being the burning of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s home in 1774. The Boston Tea Party was a destructive act of protest targeting not just a tax, but a government-protected monopoly (a similar Philadelphia Tea Party sent the tea home, rather than tossing it overboard). In any of these types of incidents, it was likely that there was intimidation, physical violence, and the destruction of property.

As the war developed, for the most part, both the American and British militaries were generally careful to avoid attacks on civilians. The British occupied Boston (April 1775-March 1776) and Philadelphia (September 1777 – June 1778) as well as other lesser cities and towns, but usually paid for food and other supplies. At first the British had good reason to try to assuage local feelings, in part because the British leadership believed for some time that this was a rebellion inspired by a small coterie of criminals and not a popular movement. There were exceptions to this rule, particularly over time as the war developed and sentiment in parts of the British military hardened against the colonists.

That said, in the run-up to the war and in its early years, societal pressures could be extremely hard on some Loyalists. Historians believe that only about fifteen percent of the colonial public supported the Loyalist cause, at least by 1778. As many as 80,000 Loyalists left by 1783, the majority of whom had left several years earlier. Perhaps ten percent went to England; some resettled in the Caribbean and elsewhere; the vast majority relocated to nearby Canada. In a sense, what the American War for Independence became was a sort of partition: Loyalists remained within the British Empire by fleeing, moving, or self-exiling themselves to British Canada, leaving behind a largely unified, pro-independence American public.[15] Perhaps most importantly, the fledgling republic did not create tribunals or show trials to hound Loyalists. There was no systematic campaign to erase British influences and symbols from colonial history. George Washington and other national leaders realized the necessity for peace at home and abroad, and they made every effort to move forward in a spirit of national unity and reconciliation.

1776: The Declaration of a New Reality

Was the July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence a declaration of war on England? No. It was written in a unique historical milieu: 150 years of British citizens in North America slowly expanding their sense of localized patriotism, overcoming threats and obstacles, and slowly evolving a different society. A series of political and strategic events, from the French and Indian War to Parliament’s assertion of its authority through changes to law, custom, and taxation made clear that the Old and New Worlds were drawing apart. When, in April 1775, British troops killed colonists in Massachusetts and Virginia’s royal governor tried to apprehend the Virginia militia’s equipment, it became clear that this had moved from the realm of politics to an armed struggle. Nevertheless, the colonies did not declare independence but issued a statement of reconciliation and justified self-defense, The Declaration of the United Colonies. A few days later they sent a second missive, also penned by John Dickinson, to London: a more supplicatory appeal that came to be known as the Olive Branch Petition.[16] London brushed them both aside.

The conflict became an all-out war waged by the most powerful military on the face of the earth against what it believed to be some rabble-rousers fomenting rebellion among its subjects. But, over 15 months of war, waged in part by foreign-born mercenaries from Germany set loose on British citizens, a new understanding of the status quo developed. The Declaration of Independence, by mid-1776, was a statement of fact observing that a de facto state of war already existed between the British Empire and what had been its American colonies.

More importantly, the Declaration of Independence was the first formal statement of the American ethos, what John Adams famously declared a generation later to be a “revolution of the mind.”[17] In 1818 Adams reflected, “But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people … This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.” That change was from subjects to citizens, and from a “tender” feeling toward London as a distant parent to a sense of London as a dangerous bully. Most importantly, it was the maturation of an early national identity with roots in Magna Carta, the Reformation, and English common law and customs, seasoned by self-government, that became a uniquely American construction of principles and sentiments: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

References

[1] The Avalon Project, A Declaration of the Representatives of the United Colonies of North America, July 6, 1775, Yale Law School.

[2] An approachable American history is Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story (New York: Encounter Books, 2019).

[3] Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic: 1763–1789 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 26-27.

[4] Eric Patterson, Just American Wars: Ethical Dilemmas in U.S. Military History (New York: Routledge, 2019).

[5] See Eric Patterson, “Moral vs. Immoral Resistance: The American War for Independence” in Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy (August 2023).

[6] Gregg L. Frazer, God against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy’s Case against the American Revolution (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2018).

[7] J. Patrick Mullins, Father of Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2017). Also see Eric Patterson and Nathan Gill, “The Declaration of the United Colonies: America’s First Just War Statement” in Journal of Military Ethics (2015).

[8] Samuel West, “On the Right to Rebel Against Governors,” (sermon delivered in Boston in 1776) in Charles Hyneman and Donald Lutz, American Political Writing During the Founding Era, 1760-1805 (Liberty Fund, 1983).

[9] Examples of the historical literature include: John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women in The Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing, 6 Volumes (Edinburgh, 1846; repr. ed., New York: AMS Press,1966) Volume 4: 429-540. An online version of the First Blast is available here. Others influential Reformed authors included Christopher Goodman, How Superior Power Ought to be Obeyed [1558] ed. Charles H. McIlwain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), George Buchanon , A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship Among the Scots [1579] edited by Roger A Mason and Martin S. Smith (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). In the Netherlands, the most important Reformed figure was Johannes Althusius, a notable apologist for Dutch revolt against the Spanish Emperor Phillip II. See The Politics of Johannes Althusius. An abridged translation of the Third Edition (1614) of Politica Methodice digesta atque exemplis saris et profanis illustrata. Translated, with an introduction by Frederick S. Carney. Preface by Carl J. Friedrich. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

[10] Some argue that the first such Act was the 1763 declaration, following the French and Indian War, that colonists could not settle west beyond Appalachia. Further limits came in the Sugar Act (1764), Currency Act (1764), Stamp Act (1765), Quartering Act (1765), Declaratory Act (1766), Townsend Acts (1767), Tea Act (1773), Intolerable Acts, which included the closing of Boston Harbor (1774), and New England Restraining Act (March 1775).

[11] “Religious freedom consensus” is a term of art used to describe the widely-held American sentiment, shared for centuries, that humans are innately religious, that religion is a public good, and that civil government should largely stay out of religious matters. See Eric Patterson and Jennifer Marshall Patterson, eds., Religious Freedom: Six Theological Views (Brentwood, TN: B&H Publishing Group, forthcoming 2026).

[12] On the importance of religious freedom in the colonial era and its longer-term effect on U.S. history, see Sydney Ahlstrom’s magisterial Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972). Also see the two volumes edited by Timothy Samuel Shah and Allen D. Hertzke, Christianity and Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 2021).

[13] Mark David Hall, Jeffry Morrison, and Daniel Dreisbach, eds., The Founders on God and Government (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).

[14] For differing regional and economic sector-based views, see Alan Taylor’s American Revolutions: A Continental History (1750-1804) (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016).

[15] Native American Indians who fought alongside the British, such as the Cherokee, are not well classified as Loyalists, but they did have to deal with changes in the new situation. As part of the peace ending the war, their lands in the West were to be protected from further American settlement, but those living with what had been the colonies had to deal with both the national and state governments. Separately, Virginia’s Lord Dunsmore and others promised freedom to black slaves and an estimated 50,000 fled. Approximately 20,000 were able to move to Canada. Again, these are not individuals who were able to make public arguments for the Patriot or Loyalist causes at the time. See, Shannon Duffy, “Loyalists,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon and The American Revolution: Loyalists, U.S. History.

[16] This can be found at Yale Law School’s Avalon Project: Journals of the Continental Congress – Petition to the King; July 8, 1775.

[17] This letter is available here at the National Endowment for the Humanities.