Thomas Jefferson and the American Declaration of Independence: The Power and Natural Rights of a Free People

by Ross Lence

Ross Lence

It is not accidental that the Greek word for history (historia) is a derivative of the verb meaning to narrate what one has learnt, for all history is, in some manner or other, the relating of tales about a people. Now as we all know some stories are more dramatic than others; some are more accurate; and some, dare we say it, are more important. The most important tales for any people are those told about the beginnings of their political society and the forming of the body politic, beginnings which are often blurred with the society's conception of virtue, piety, and the gods. Thus, Plato begins The Laws, his political treatise par excellence, with the old Athenian stranger asking his two interlocutors: "Tell me, gentlemen, to whom do you give the credit for establishing your codes of law? Is it a god, or a man?" Cleinias' response is very determined: "A god, sir, a god—and that's the honest truth."[1]

This apotheosis of the beginnings of political society is universal: all societies shroud their founders and their nascent mores in their respective myths and symbols. America is no exception. Franklin stood in the rain flying a kite. Betsy Ross was at home knitting a flag. George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and would not tell a lie—even about throwing a dollar across the Potomac. And make no mistake about it: How these myths are told and to whom, when, and where are all critical questions, for it is through these myths and symbols that a society transmits its values and beliefs, or in the language of Eric Voegelin, comes to know itself as a people. Propriety dictates, therefore, that we not tell our children that Benjamin Franklin would not recognize lightning if it struck him in the head; that Betsy Ross was really a very simple lady, doing her very best to reproduce the Union Jack; or that George Washington was an unsavory, unstable character at best, having never psychologically adjusted to either his red hair or his wooden teeth. To tell our children these things would be to destroy their creed, to tread on their dreams. In the final analysis failure to transmit the proper myths and symbols will weaken—if not destroy— the moral fibre of any nation.

M.E. Bradford' s Constitutional Theory: A Southern Conservative's Affirmation of The Rule of Law

by Marshall DeRosa

M.E. Bradford

A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution. (La Salle, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Company Publishers, 1979). Cited in the text as Guide.

Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative. (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1985). Cited in the text as Remembering.

A Worthy Company: The Dramatic Story of the Men Who Founded Our Country. (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1988).

The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary & Political. (Peru, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Company Publishers, 1990). Cited in the text as Reactionary.

Against The Barbarians and Other Reflections on Familiar Themes. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1992). Cited in the text as Barbarians.

Original Intentions On The Making Of The United States Constitution. (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1993). Cited in the text as Intentions.

M.E. Bradford's constitutional theory is firmly grounded in the original intent of the Framers. His scholarly links to original intent are twofold; original intent is the only way to legitimately apply the U.S. Constitution to contemporary politics and it is better than any alternative at procuring good government.

Beauty and the Beholder

by John Willson

Beauty, n.  The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.

Ambrose Bierce

My Imprimis arrived today.  It is “The Unity and Beauty of the Declaration and the Constitution,” an interview of Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution.  The full interview can be viewed here.  It is a remarkable interview, prepared carefully by Mr. Robinson, conducted with gravitas, and carried out with wit, charm, and high intelligence by Dr. Arnn.  I wish to reply, hoping to achieve the same.

When asked by Mr. Robinson to put the documents in historical context, Dr. Arnn says (about the Declaration), “First, there had never been anything like it in history,” second, “its signers were being hunted by British troops,” and third, “even more extraordinary, “It opens by speaking of universal principles.”  The problem with saying things this way is that it is not historical.  Nobody at the time thought that Jefferson’s opening represented universal principles or that what they were saying had never been said before (including Jefferson, who went out of his way many times to say that he had expressed only “the common sense of the matter”).  The only members of the Continental Congress who were being “hunted” were New Englanders who had already won their secession, having been fighting the Regulars since April 19, 1775.  The war was over in New England before it began any place else.

Furthermore, there were about ninety other “declarations of independence” around by July of 1776.

Their beauty was indeed universal, and quite soon terrifying to the husbands.  Lovers were needed to go and fight, but husbands had to clean up the messes.  Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams and his cousin John, the trembling Jefferson, the scheming Hamilton, and above all, the imperial Washington had to make order.  The Constitution was not the logical outcome of what they hoped for, nor was it the first constitution.  The Articles of Confederation was the only possibility of keeping very distinct cultures together long enough to celebrate the secession.  And if John Dickinson’s draft had been adopted there would have been no need for the nationalist document that followed.  It was the flawed version of the Articles of Confederation government that passed the Northwest Ordinance, the most complete statement of liberty ever written into American law during the lifetimes of the “founders.”

Dr. Arnn finds “three fundamental arrangements” ( a wonderful phrase, by the way) in the Constitution that he says unify the two major documents.  Before we parse them we should note that the “Organic Law” of the United States as ratified by our first Congress includes not only the Declaration and the Constitution, but the Northwest Ordinance, the Articles of Confederation, and the English Common Law.  The “arrangements” Dr. Arnn offers are representation, separation of powers, and limited government.  I would suggest that the only beauty which unites the documents, the only beauty which unites the concepts, and the only beauty which unites the complex and often hostile cultures of early America is limited government.  Under no other banner could the secession have survived.  The others were old, and worked well sometimes and sometimes not.  They have also largely been abolished in our regime, almost completely by 1945.

Here we should turn to what Dr. Arnn apparently thinks of as “beauty,” and what appeals to me about it.  It comes down to the “universal principles” he believes the documents represent, and represent in unity.  I confess to being a terrified husband when it comes to beauty.  The Good, the True, and the Beautiful can be the property of pagans, atheists, or any religious cult, but if they are to have permanent meaning they must be attached to something that is beyond the self, or they have no meaning at all.  It is not enough for the Declaration to call upon “nature’s god,” or upon other abstractions that unitarians like Jefferson and Adams use to appeal to higher law.  I have never thought that they were deists.  They were Stoics, probably, noble pagans attempting to find meaning beyond even the unity that was Greece or Rome. Stoics talked of god, but not God.

John Dickinson: The Pennsylvanian Prophet

By Brittany Baldwin


In 1764, Benjamin Franklin conspired to revoke the Penn's family charter and replace it with a royal charter.John Dickinson, a young Pennsylvania lawyer, feared the corruption of the crown and vigorously opposed Franklin's plan. Dickinson pleaded with the people to keep their proprietary charter, for at least under it, some liberties were protected; whereas, under a royal charter their liberties rested on the whim of the king.

Many colonists had all but forgotten the Proclamation of 1763, limiting land settlement to East of the Appalachians, and had dismissed the Sugar Act of 1764, being loosely enforced. Yet, as Dickinson challenged that clever old man, he blew the sounding trumpet to awaken a latent people.

Dickinson went beyond provoking his little Pennsylvanian plot: after the Stamp Act passed in 1765, suddenly, his warning rang throughout the colony, echoing throughout all thirteen colonies. As he addressed the Stamp Act, John Dickinson produced his most transformative work--Letters from a Pennsylvanian Farmer. His pen bled across the colonies, warning them that the British had neglected common law, tradition, and the organic understanding of rights. The Anglo-Saxon understanding of common law rights, as a particular expression of Divine rights, had come to define the colonists, and the threat of removing them challenged the thousands of settlers who had sacrificed everything to preserve their heritage.

Dickinson's wise eye projected the impending threat, and as a result of his broad outlook and his eloquence with words, he prepared the colonists to resist British tyranny. It was this glimpse into the future that slowly began to strengthen the ties between the Pennsylvanian Quaker and the Massachusetts Puritan, between the Virginia farmer and the Maryland merchant, between the South Carolina slave owner and the New York investor. As the ink seeped throughout the colonies, militias formed in local provinces, and people united to protect their rights. His letter was the most widely read pamphlet until Thomas Paine published Common Sense in 1776.

Protect Our Progress!

by Julie Robison

Liberals have a new slogan (new to me, at least). They say, “Protect Our Progress!”

According to the Organizing for America website, they recently held a phone bank in North Carolina. The informational page read:

We’ve made significant progress together in the last two years. There are those who want to stop our country moving forward to undo the progress we’ve achieved, but our community is looking toward the future. We’ll be meeting at the Charlotte OFA Office to protect our progress- - defending healthcare reform. Your voice is needed, so come out and join us at 6 p.m. to call Republican representatives and remind them that we are holding them accountable.

I have to admit- I like this little blurb! I like holding government officials accountable. I admire their tenacity in defending healthcare reform, which is more like healthcare overhaul and a love letter to special interests groups. My teeny-weeny remark I do have to make is this: the two year mark. I know that is the length of President Obama's presidency to date, but President Obama's passed legislation is not a proper measure of progress.

MLK and The Rule of Law

By John Creech

In acknowledgement of MLK day, I wanted to raise the question, based on Martin Luther King Jr.’s, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” as to when, if ever, as well as to what extent, it is appropriate to defy the rule of law.  

Last week, on this blog, Winston Elliott raised the question “When is a Change in Government a Duty”, asking whether the Declaration of Independence’s statement that society has a right, under certain circumstances, to abolish its form of government, would ever apply, despite the Constitution’s amendment provision.  In response, Stephen Masty appropriately suggested that preserving the rule of law may limit us to using the amendment provision in bringing about any changes in the form of our government.  MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is relevant here because his letter, in part, was meant to allay the fears of his fellow Christian ministers who were concerned about MLK's and his followers willingness to break laws.  Relying on St. Augustine and Aquinas, MLK makes a natural law argument to the effect that there are times when it is appropriate to break the laws.

In his letter, which you can find here, MLK asserts that while one has a legal and moral duty to obey just laws, “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” for, referencing St. Augustine, “an unjust law is no law at all.”  MLK refers to Aquinas for the principle that allows one to distinguish between an unjust law and a just one.  An unjust law is “a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law,” but a just law is a “man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.”  Therefore, to the extent our civil law does not conform to the eternal and natural law, MLK appears to conclude that not only may one disobey the law, but even has a duty to do so.   

If MKL is correct, then it would appear that there are situations in which we may depart from the rule of law.  If so, are we always and forever bound to altering our Constitution through the amendment process itself, or is there a situation in which society may alter or abolish the present form of government in a manner that does not follow the procedures of our Constitution?  After all, it seems we have done this before.  Although the Articles of Confederation had an amendment provision, we did not merely amend the Articles but replaced them with our current Constitution.