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Dissension, Destruction, and War

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the European social and political world that included the Anglo-American colonies was on the verge of radical social, political, and economic transformations, but are the institutions our forebears created then fit for purpose today?

When a Doctrine Becomes Destructive of These Ends

Jacob T. Levy

June 2026

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Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University. Levy is the Chair of the Department of Political Science at McGill, as well as the coordinator of McGill’s Research Group on Constitutional Studies and the founding director of McGill’s Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds.

The 250th anniversary of American independence arrives at a time of constitutional crisis, a breakdown across the whole governing legal and political order. The separation of powers, the rule of impartial law, federalism, the autonomy of civil society, domestic freedom from military power, a distinction between the public fisc and private enrichment, and a political order characterized by the peaceful transfer of authority following regular elections: all of these principles and institutions are teetering at best, crumbling at worst. There’s a natural response: reevaluate the political order by the standard of still-more fundamental ideals.

In the United States this takes the form of subjecting the functioning of the Constitution to examination in the light of the soaring language and inspirational vision of the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps the examination will reveal ways to reform the 1787 edifice in a way that situates it more firmly on the 1776 foundation. Perhaps it will reveal that what’s needed is a more radical return to first principles, of the sort that Machiavelli says republics cannot endure without. The first is a familiar feature of American history, most famously associated with Abraham Lincoln and the refounding of the republic that began with the Gettysburg Address and culminated with the Reconstruction Amendments. The second goes beyond anything that the United States has ever quite done, or admitted to doing. Still, it finds capable advocates such as Yale’s Stephen Skorownek or the University of Texas’ Sanford Levinson in moments of particularly severe dysfunction.

Questions about the scale and scope of needed constitutional reform are urgent, but I want to look past them in this essay. The foundation, not only the edifice, is worth worrying about. I worry that there are sources of the contemporary crisis older than the institutional forms of the Constitution, as old as those principles in the Declaration itself.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the European social and political world that included the Anglo-American colonies was on the verge of radical social, political, and economic transformations—what North, Wallis, and Weingast refer to as the “doorstep” moment before the development of what they call the “open access order” in the nineteenth century. That order was marked by the overthrow of mercantilist privilege by open access to trade, commerce, and incorporation; the expansion of elite-only political rivalries into broad-based competitive elections; and the transformation of legal procedures and civil rights from tools of the few to rights of the many. In a word, the fifty years or so following 1776 saw the emergence of liberalism. Enlightenment philosophy, Protestant religious dissent, the first steps of the Industrial Revolution, the long decay of the social bases of aristocratic political power, the rise of global commerce, and more were all changing the world in increasingly visible ways before the first shots were fired in Lexington and Concord in 1775. In the critical following year, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations each offered distillations of some of what was happening, and articulated visions that in turn partially shaped the developments to come. But none of them did, none of them could, see the full shape of the unprecedented revolutions to come— American, French, Haitian, industrial, social, legal, political, and economic.[1] I think it’s no insult to the authors to examine where their imaginations about the future ran out, and what we have learned since their time.

The Declaration in particular was not only of its time, but in some crucial ways of an earlier one. It was firmly grounded in the revolutionary social contractarianism of John Locke from almost a century before. By the 1770s, Lockean contract theory was not the dominant idiom in British or European Whig or Enlightenment political thought. Smith’s friend David Hume had subjected it to withering criticism, and Smith in his own lectures, to gentle mockery.[2]

I take seriously the Lockean roots of the Declaration (and of Common Sense as well). These have been repeatedly but unpersuasively denied, giving rise to a long debate that takes the form of the question: is the document Lockean and therefore liberal? Or is it Harringtonian or Ciceronian or Machiavellian and therefore civic republican?[3] I don’t propose to rehearse that debate here. Rather, I suggest that the Declaration was Lockean, and therefore not liberal, in ways that continue to impede the American struggle for a free society.

In John Locke’s Second Treatise, the formation of civil government by consent takes place in two steps. In the first, which as far as Locke tells us is irrevocable, some large number of individual persons unanimously agree to join together as a community, which he sometimes refers to as a people. In the context of both Biblical times and of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, he refers to them as nations. He doesn’t discuss which persons know to come together in order to form which community or nation; he doesn’t explain how the world is divided up among distinct peoples prior to the institution of government. The theory requires that this be easy, obvious, something like a natural fact, since at this stage we lack institutions and procedures to help us resolve disagreements. There must already be a community, a people, a nation, for there to be a legitimate chooser that could create such institutions and procedures. This is the second stage, the one that he thinks indigenous American nations haven’t yet taken: the creation of civil government.

Locke’s famous theory of the dissolution of government is not an account of the return to the isolated individuals with which we began. Rather, when a government exceeds its legitimate powers and the terms under which those powers were granted, it breaches its trust and therefore dissolves the agreement, returning authority to the pre-institutional nation or people.

The pre-political unity of a people is thus a critical piece of Locke’s model, both at the beginning and at the end of a civil government.

Or, as Jefferson beautifully paraphrased it:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It is the act of one people to dissolve existing political bonds, to alter or abolish governments, to institute new ones. Most of the Declaration consists of the particulars of the British Crown and Parliament’s breach of trust, their actions that have been destructive of these ends. It is the Lockean theory of legitimacy that turns those from mere complaints into decisions that have thrown authority back to that one people in whose name the Continental Congress speaks.

The revolutionaries and founders famously struggled with the lack of real communal unanimity, even among the free white citizens who could plausibly be said to be the decisionmaking nation. The suppression of Tory Loyalists during the Revolution was sporadically brutal, and their expropriation widespread. Notwithstanding Madison’s deliberately provocative defense of factional politics in Federalist 10, the default view remained that parties and factions were a mortal threat to republics. We find it expressed elegiacally in George Washington’s Farewell Address, aggressively in John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts, and presumptuously in Jefferson’s own first inaugural address: we are all Federalists, we are all Republicans. Parties in fact developed, but each side insisted that its own organization was a temporary, defensive expedient until the treasonous dangerous cabal on the other side was defeated. The institutions of the Constitution were badly designed for the reality of parties. The initial mechanism for electing the president and vice-president made no sense once there were partisan tickets, leading to the Jefferson-Burr impasse of 1800. That problem was addressed through the targeted fix of the 12th Amendment. But the basic constitutional model of the separation of powers, including accountability mechanisms such as impeachment, was not rethought or amended in the same way.

The eventual transition into the open access order and liberalism was a transition into the acceptance of foundationally legitimate pluralism. Benjamin Constant made this explicit in his crucial 1819 “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared With That Of The Moderns.” Liberty for the ancients— and for their admirers among the French revolutionaries— consisted of a share in decisionmaking about public life. But this won’t do for us moderns. We have too many differences and disagreements. We have too many various things we want to do with our private lives. The division of labor allows for too many distinct economic interests, careers, and specialties. Our opinions and beliefs about the divine have split apart, and we can no longer accept the obligation to worship whatever gods the city tells us to. Tellingly, Constant both as a political theorist and as a parliamentary actor helped to shape the idea of ongoing, legitimate competition between political parties, each seeking the chance to govern by popular election. He saw that under the circumstances of modern pluralism, political disagreement did not have to mean the kinds of factional disputes that tore apart ancient Greek or medieval Italian city-states. It did not have to mean the treasonous sedition the American founders feared. It could be a healthy mechanism of accountability and responsibility within an ongoing political system.

The liberal vision of free societies is about such acceptance of difference, and of its expression through institutions and organizations. We find it in Constant’s defense of heterogeneity and parties, in Tocqueville’s celebration of voluntary associations, and in Mill’s endorsement of debate and of experiments in living, as well as in Smith’s rejection of mercantilist monopoly political economy.

We don’t find it in the Declaration. We don’t find it in the mechanisms of a US Constitution that was built for a world without parties. This is the liberal, open access world that the Americans of 1776 helped to bring about but couldn’t foresee.

Over the decades that followed, the practice of American political life gradually expanded and pluralized, across all of these dimensions. General incorporation, voluntary associations, religious disestablishment and a flourishing of new sects, and partisan elections all became familiar facts on the landscape. But I’m not sure that this pluralist practice ever fully displaced the holistic theoretical aspirations. I think the Lockean foundations might help explain why fully liberal politics has had such a hard time taking hold in the United States.

The last quarter-millennium of American history has not lacked for the belief that political dissent and disagreement are basically un-American and treasonous. It has had no shortage of the belief in one true national people that is the ultimate rightful political decisionmaker about politics, a rightfulness that precedes institutions and procedures like counting votes in elections. It has all too often looked for a plebiscitary tribune of that unified people in the one man who occupies the presidency, a man who can seem to stand above the squabbling pluralistic disagreement of a partisan legislature where democratic debate actually takes place. As Nancy Rosenblum has shown in a prescient book published just before the current populist era, it has often carried on the Founding’s tradition of anti-partyism.

I am obviously racing through a variety of the problems in American political life and can’t do any of them full justice here. What I mean to make plausible are two thoughts. One is that those problems are connected. Populist politics, ethnonational exclusivism, a rhetoric of liberty that has belied the phenomena from slavery to mass incarceration, a reluctance to embrace partisan competition, a tendency toward executive centralization, a willingness to persecute dissent: these are all expressions of an organicist holism. The other is that they aren’t atavistic holdovers of a previous age, or alien interruptions into the American tradition. They have roots in the very doctrine to which Americans appealed in their fight for freedom.

The Declaration of Independence’s celebration of universal fundamental rights has stirred the moral imagination of many who have since fought for liberty. It was among the most important events paving the way for the eventual emergence of liberalism:  modern, pluralistic liberty, under the rule of law, allowing dissent, enshrining democratic debate and peaceful alternations in power, with institutions and procedures over which no ethnonational or racial people can assert priority.

More than one legacy can be real at the same time, however, and the Declaration’s legacies include forces that have long obstructed the struggle for freedom. The organic holism of the national people might have seemed, on Locke’s and Jefferson’s best understanding, a necessary piece of an argument against the tyranny of kings who stood outside the body of the people, whether the Catholic James II or the German George III. But that doctrine of a social contract resting on the will of a unanimous pre-intuitional national people, of a state that imputes tacit consent to all those under its power and thereby makes dis-sent pathological or treasonous, does not today secure our rights. Indeed it has become destructive of these ends. For the sake of the preservation, protection, and pursuit of our freedom, it is time to alter or abolish it.

 

[1] In my judgment Smith saw farther and more clearly into the unfolding developments than either of these Americans, or for that matter than any of his European contemporaries, but he certainly couldn’t see everything. Anyone who has struggled alongside students to connect Smith’s critique of joint stock corporations to the flourishing open access order of general commercial incorporation that began in the following two generations will recognize the limits to even Smith’s foresight.

[2] Lectures on Jurisprudence, Tuesday March 22 1763, pp. 279-80.

[3] There have been other candidates as well: Hutchesonian and therefore sentimentalist, for example. I have never understood that one, since Frances Hutcheson borrowed the political part of his philosophy pretty completely from Locke.

Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University. Levy is the Chair of the Department of Political Science at McGill, as well as the coordinator of McGill’s Research Group on Constitutional Studies and the founding director of McGill’s Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds.

Declaring War and Independence

Viewing the Declaration as a declaration of war enables us to appreciate it beyond its first two paragraphs, accounts for its international appeal, explains its conservative and radical elements, and respects the immense blood and treasure expended in a civil war that became a war for independence.

Glenn Moots

June 2026

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Dr. Glenn Moots is the Political Science and Philosophy Department Chair at Northwood University. Dr. Moots earned a Ph.D. and two Master of Arts degrees from Louisiana State University, a Master of Science from Walsh College, and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan. He has taught for Northwood since 1993. He is author or editor of two academic press books and author of almost two hundred conference presentations or essays, chapters, and articles published in academic or popular outlets.

The Declaration of Independence has become a lodestone for political morality. During the Revolution, enslaved people in New England seized on it to argue for abolition, as would Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison two generations later. Abraham Lincoln appealed to the Declaration, and politicians and statesmen have rallied to it for support in the years since. Americans even fancy our Declaration to be the root of other declarations of independence abroad. Greece, Belgium, New Zealand, Liberia, and Hungary all issued similar declarations in the 19th century. More recently, movements for independence cribbed from it in Europe (Czechoslovakia, Kosovo, Catalonia), Asia (Korea, Vietnam), Africa (Rhodesia, South Sudan), and the Middle East (Israel).

It is therefore natural to wonder who inspired something so inspirational as the Declaration. Academics have filled volumes debating the Declaration’s sources, and Barry Shain briefly surveyed them in an essential Liberty Fund collection. One of the most popular interpretations attributes the Declaration to Enlightenment-era assertions about rights and makes the Declaration appear quite radical. More conservative interpretations, however, emphasize republican and commonwealth notions of community and virtue, Protestant ideas about covenanting, or British constitutionalism in the Declaration.

Such readings have rightly been given their due, but in this Semiquincentennial year we must advance another motivation for the Declaration’s form and content: it is best understood as a model declaration of war.

Viewing the Declaration as a declaration of war enables us to appreciate it beyond its first two paragraphs, accounts for its international appeal, explains its conservative and radical elements, and respects the immense blood and treasure expended in a civil war that became a war for independence. North America was not plunged into terror and chaos merely for high ideals about liberty and equality or class interests. The Declaration was written to legally and morally defend a violent war and to assert the sovereignty of a new government. It was addressed not just to the king, to Americans, to Britons, or even to potential allies. It was addressed to the whole world in order to respect what we now call international law and just war theory.

The just war tradition extends back to the Hebrews, the Roman jus gentium, and medieval Christian scholastics, but to frame the Declaration as a declaration of war obliges revisiting the work of three essential natural law ethicists writing between the Treaty of Westphalia and the Founding: Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Emer de Vattel. All three wrote substantial volumes providing nation-states with a science of law: also known as the droit des gens or law of nations. Vattel wrote closest to the time of the Founding and was widely read and cited by the Founders.

To Declare War is to Assert Sovereignty

Declaring war isn’t exclusive of declaring independence, of course. They overlap: to declare war was to declare independence for the Americans — not merely because the war (if won) would throw off British rule, but because to declare war presupposed sovereign status. According to international law, war generally ought to be waged by sovereign authorities or governments. Pufendorf, for example, calls war initiated by sovereigns solemn war. Vattel calls wars waged by sovereigns public war.

Of course, a sovereign declaring war had to acknowledge its moral responsibilities. Vattel connects the moral gravity of both sovereignty and warfare in a passage that surely hit home with Americans mindful not only of how George III had subjected them to violence, but how they were now subjecting one another to it under the authority of their new “sovereign” in Congress:

Whoever entertains a true idea of war, — whoever considers its terrible effects, its destructive and unhappy consequences, — will readily agree that it should never be undertaken without the most cogent reasons. Humanity revolts against a sovereign, who, without necessity or without very powerful reasons, lavishes the blood of his most faithful subjects, and exposes his people to the calamities of war, when he has it in his power to maintain them in the enjoyment of an honorable and salutary peace. And if to this imprudence, this want of love for his people, he moreover adds injustice towards those he attacks, — of how great a crime, or rather, of what a frightful series of crimes, does he not become guilty! . . . He is responsible to God, and accountable to human nature, for every individual that is killed, for every hut that is burned down.

Acknowledging moral responsibility for warfare requires that the just causes of the war are put into a declaration. Grotius elaborates on what he calls the “denunciation” or articulation of causes. Without denunciation (declaration), the state’s use of force is no better than that of pirates or robbers, a legal distinction extending back to the Romans. Vattel emphasizes that the declaration of war is not merely to justify the war to one’s citizens, or even to one’s enemies, but to all humanity. The published declaration of war is, he says, “at present the constant practice among the powers of Europe.” Hence, what Jefferson writes in the Declaration’s first paragraph about “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes” is not flowery verbiage. It reflected the diplomatic and moral norms expected of a lawful nation. Congress would not be taken seriously as a new sovereign power without a morally defensible declaration of war.

Likewise, the “religious” language of the Declaration, found at its beginning and end, reflected what was necessary for asserting the right of declaring war and adhering to legal norms. According to the law of nations, Americans could assume “among the powers of the earth” their “separate and equal station” only according to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” This phrase was a framework for sovereignty in the existing template set forth in Vattel and his predecessors, and not some pious or philosophical jaunt to be parsed by twentieth-century academics determining which flavor of deist or theist Jefferson was. Rather, according to Grotius, the appeal to God was customary in declarations/denunciations. As Grotius quoted it in the Roman case, “I call the Gods to Witness that Nation is unjust, and will not render what is right.” This is what he calls the “usual Form” of denunciation or declaration.

The aggrieved nation appeals to divine justice because nations, as nations, have no other authoritative judge to whom they can appeal their cause. Vattel writes that a declaration of war presents its catalog of  “miseries and crimes . . . to the king of kings.” Hence, the Americans not only begin by invoking God but also end their Declaration by asserting their right to “full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do” and immediately after that declare their “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” In short, asserting rights of sovereignty, including war, is always done with an eye to moral obligations or responsibilities, and the final arbiter of their fulfillment in the case of nations is God alone.

Responsibilities of Sovereignty and the Betrayal of Sovereignty

Further elaborating the moral and legal responsibilities of sovereignty furnishes much of the rest of the document. The motivation is twofold. First, insofar as the King failed in his responsibilities as a sovereign, war to replace his reign in America was justified. Natural law (including jurisprudential reasoning) understood that sovereigns who abandon their responsibilities are guilty of moral and legal offenses voiding the allegiance owed by citizens. Second, the new sovereign (Congress) must acknowledge its obligations as a sovereign. To see these motivations clearly ought to inhibit the American habit of amputating philosophically pleasing passages of the Declaration and grafting them to circumstances of our choosing. It is more in keeping with the Declaration’s intent to root its political and philosophical claims in the legal and political soil of sovereignty and just warfare.

Such proper rooting is especially important for Jefferson’s claim of rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, however many oceans of ink have been expended to riff on them. Jefferson is merely reflecting the natural law ethicists and the language of sovereignty. Sovereign authority, Vattel writes, exists only for the “preservation and perfection” of the nation and its citizens. The first of these concepts, preservation, is the basis of Jefferson’s appeal to life. Vattel argues that the first object of a nation (and sovereign) is an economic necessity to sustain productivity, including labor and industry, agriculture, foreign and domestic trade, infrastructure, money, and commercial law which all enable and sustain human life. Vattel is not purely laissez faire; he allows for many elements of modern public policy including encouragement of certain professions, tariffs, taxes, monopolies, restrictions on emigration and imports, and creation of public property, for example. But he also emphasizes that liberty to trade is not simply the right of individuals but of nations as well. Both reflect the law of nature. Therefore, when the commercial and property rights of the colonists were not respected by George III, the people had a just case for war. Violations enumerated in the Declaration include restrictions on population (labor) and land use, imposition of unjust taxes and regulations, cutting off trade, and destruction of property. These violations all undermined what Vattel considers the primary goal of being a sovereign nation, the preservation of its people.

Life and liberty aren’t confined by Vattel to purely material or economic purposes, however. Citizens in a sovereign nation pursue perfection as well, which is Vattel’s second function of government. What does perfection mean? The answer is found in the third part of Jefferson’s triad: happiness. Happiness was not a word without clear definition in the eighteenth century. Vattel mentions happiness or felicity dozens of times, especially in his elucidation of perfection. True happiness is enabled, he argues, by education (including free discussion), virtue, piety, and religion (including liberty of conscience). But justice (including distributive justice) and law are especially important for perfection. Knowing that enables better understanding of the significance of the Declaration’s grievances: the king forbade the making of laws, harassed or dissolved colonial legislatures, disabled justice through martial law, prevented establishment of judiciary powers, compromised the integrity of judges, abridged the right to jury trial, and subjected the colonists to legal authority they did not consent to (Parliament) as well as to courts in foreign venues. Perfection was even potentially unjustly abridged by the Quebec Act of 1774 (obliquely referenced as “abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring province”) insofar as this would have established Roman Catholicism along American borders  — something that the overwhelmingly Protestant colonists at that time considered a threat to true religion and to the rule of law.

War as Last Resort

Having seen how the rights and responsibilities of sovereignty account for most of the language of the Declaration, we can now turn to its language about war as a last resort. Such language accounts for the remainder of the text, beginning in the second paragraph (“Whenever any Form of Government…”) and resuming in the second and third-to-last paragraphs (“In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress…”). Defending the recourse to war was an essential part of the existing legal and moral template for declarations of war, and understandably so because of its destructive nature. All nonviolent means had to be exhausted first. As Jefferson says, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.”

Of course, public safety is a very “just and weighty reason” for warfare (as Vattel calls it), and Jefferson clearly indicts the king for direct attacks on life and property; but tyranny threatens the civil order just as much as war, and Jefferson indicts it even before he condemns the physical destruction. The definition of tyranny for early modern natural law theorists was still quite classical: tyranny is the use of sovereign power and abuse of fundamental laws for any purpose other than the “happiness of all the people,” By fundamental laws, Vattel means the nation’s constitution, which he calls the “foundation of public tranquility.” Constitutional arguments made by the Americans since the Stamp Act Crisis therefore made a decade-long case that they were the victims of tyranny and prepared a decade-long legal brief for war.

When a previously legal sovereign becomes a tyrant (as Philip II did in the Netherlands, Vattel argues), he then “commands without right” and the nation is not only free to disobey him, but to resist him. Under conditions of extreme necessity, the tyrant even becomes a public enemy who may be killed. Self-defense is thus extended beyond the defense of one’s life (preservation) to the preservation of rights (perfection). Tyranny releases the citizens from their responsibilities. “This truth,” Vattel says, “is acknowledged by every sensible writer.” Absolute rule is so dangerous that it may even eclipse the danger of civil war. And after all, Vattel argues, (in one of several passages informing Jefferson’s own “laws of nature and nature’s God,”) blind obedience to any sovereign would violate the “laws of nature” and “sacred law.”

Of course, the determination of tyranny and subsequent assertion of right against it are no small matter and require great care. First, the designation of a public enemy is a judgment that Vattel says “can only be passed by the nation, or by a body which represents it.” This, of course,was Congress in the American case. Second, one cannot make war before every other recourse is explored first. As Vattel writes, “Force is a wretched and melancholy expedient against those who spurn at justice and refuse to listen to the remonstrances of reason.” These remonstrances are essential because a sovereign’s refusal to address them makes self-defense imperative. Such application for justice, what Vattel called “a conditional declaration of war,” was already provided in 1775 and reflected many prior “just causes of complaint.”

By 1776, however, it had become apparent, as Jefferson wrote, that a “long train of abuses” was the answer to their appeals instead. War becomes necessary, Vattel says, when “the people can no longer view” a sovereign “but as an usurper who would load them with oppression.” Under such conditions, Vattel says (in a passage preceding Jefferson’s own almost verbatim) self-defense is “not only the right but the duty of a nation.” Vattel even calls it a “sacred duty.” Those who “do not stretch out their necks to the yoke of slavery . . . to crouch under the rod of arbitrary power” may be called rebels by their (unjust sovereign), but the integrity of an opposing faction creates a civil war rather than a mere rebellion. Reiterating the theme of divine justice, Vattel argues that civil war is like a contest between two nations: on earth they have no common superior and must appeal to God.

Recommitting Ourselves

To acknowledge the Declaration’s dependence on an existing legal framework should in no way diminish our appreciation for its eloquence and brilliance. But to presume that its eloquence or brilliance built something wholly new is to forget that America is subject to the ethical obligations owed by all sovereign nations. The men who signed the Declaration knew and acknowledged those obligations, and in this anniversary year of their great achievement signed more with blood than with ink, we should renew our own commitment to America’s preservation and perfection.

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The Pamphlet Debate on the American Question in Great Britain, 1764-1776, selected by Jack Greene, makes available in modern digitized form a trove of eighteenth-century books and pamphlets that directly addressed what became known in metropolitan Britain as the American Question.

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William Anthony Hay

Among the Powers of the Earth

What light do British perspectives shed on America’s turn to independence? They show that hopes for reconciliation persisted alongside the general commitment to parliamentary sovereignty, but also the distance that had emerged between the colonies and the mother country.

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Pamphlets at the Online Library of Liberty

Anonymous Pamphleteer, 1776

The Constitutional Advocate: By Which, from the Evidence of History and of Records, and from the Principles of the British Government, Every Reader May Form His Own Judgment Concerning the Justice and Policy of the Present War with America

Anonymous Pamphleteer, 1776

Reflections On the Rise, Progress, and Probable Consequences, Of the Contentions with the Colonies

Anonymous Pamphleteer, 1776

The Critical Moment, on which the Salvation or Destruction of the British Empire Depends containing the Rise, Progress, Present State, and Natural Consequences of Our American Disputes

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