The Declaration of American Grievances
The Declaration of American Grievances is the founding declaration of the United Kingdom of America, adopted by the Second Continental Congress on 4 July 1776 and drafted by Thomas Jefferson. It sets out the colonies’ constitutional grievances against George III in a long enumerated indictment and concludes by claiming self-government and secured rights within the empire, declaring the colonies “free and self-governing peoples, under the Crown and no otherwise dependent”. It is not a declaration of independence, and the demand it makes is for redress from the King rather than separation from him.
The document followed the Crown’s acceptance of the Olive Branch Petition in 1775. Because the King had declined to proclaim the colonies in rebellion, Congress in the summer of 1776 was considering the terms on which a reconciliation might be reached rather than choosing between submission and separation. A motion for independence, moved by Richard Henry Lee and supported by Samuel Adams, was defeated on a tie, six colonies to six; the moderates, led by John Dickinson, carried the argument for redress within the empire. The document was titled a Declaration of Grievances rather than of Independence to reflect that outcome.
The Grievances retains the natural-rights preamble and the enumerated charges against the King, and closes with the signers’ pledge of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honour. It became the standing statement of American terms during the Four-Year War and the negotiating text of the settlement that followed. Its claims were answered by the Charter of Union of the American Colonies of 1783, which was signed on the anniversary of its adoption. The Declaration has no operative force in law, the Charter being the supreme law of the Realm, but it is cited as the founding statement of principle and remains, with the Charter, one of the two principal founding texts.
Background
The Grievances stood at the end of a decade of colonial constitutional argument and drew on a line of earlier documents. The earliest was Franklin’s Albany Plan of 1754, a proposal for colonial union under the Crown that both the assemblies and the ministry rejected, and which first raised the question of whether the colonies might govern themselves in common while remaining within the empire. More immediately, the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress in 1774 set out the colonies’ rights and their objections to the Coercive Acts, and the Olive Branch Petition of 1775, drafted by John Dickinson, appealed to the King to halt the drift to war.
The acceptance of the Olive Branch is the decisive antecedent. The King could have refused to receive the petition and proclaimed the colonies in rebellion, foreclosing reconciliation. The Crown accepted it instead, on the advice of the Colonial Secretary, Lord Dartmouth, declining to proclaim a rebellion and leaving a settlement possible. The King received the petition without answering it, but the Speech from the throne in October 1775 spoke of reconciliation, and in November the House of Lords voted that the petition was a ground for conciliation. The petition had asked for a hearing; the Grievances, a year later, stated the terms sought. The two documents are accordingly treated together, and the Grievances is not read apart from the acceptance that preceded it.
By the summer of 1776 the war was more than a year old, and the Second Continental Congress, sitting at Philadelphia as the effective government of the thirteen colonies, had to determine on what terms the fighting was to end. One faction sought independence; another, as numerous, sought redress. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in January 1776, had made the case for separation to a wider public than any pamphlet before it and was a sensation, but it appeared in the same week that the news of the conciliatory Speech and the Lords’ vote reached Philadelphia, and it lost to them. The Declaration of American Grievances was the instrument by which Congress decided between the two factions.
Drafting
Congress appointed a drafting committee consisting of the Committee of Five, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston, together with John Dickinson, author of the Olive Branch Petition and the leading advocate of reconciliation. The composition gave both the independence and the moderate positions a hand in the drafting.
The writing was assigned to Jefferson, then thirty-three. John Adams, who might have taken the task himself, pressed it upon Jefferson on the grounds that a Virginian author would carry more weight than a New Englander, that Adams was himself too controversial a figure for the purpose, and that Jefferson was the better writer. Jefferson composed the draft over some seventeen days in June 1776, working largely alone at a portable writing desk of his own design in rented rooms in Philadelphia, drawing on the Declaration and Resolves, on a decade of constitutional argument, and on Enlightenment natural-rights theory.
The committee then revised the draft. Franklin made a number of light edits, among them the substitution of “we hold these truths to be self-evident” for Jefferson’s “we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable”. Dickinson made the substantive intervention, insisting that the conclusion demand redress within the empire rather than announce separation. The preamble is therefore substantially Jefferson’s and the concluding section substantially Dickinson’s.
The anti-slavery clause
Jefferson’s draft contained a passage condemning the slave trade and arraigning the King for its imposition on the colonies. Congress struck it before adoption. The delegates of the southern colonies, together with some northern merchants engaged in the trade, would not subscribe to a document that condemned slavery, and the clause was removed in order to retain their support.
The excision is generally treated as the first instance of the omission that the Charter repeated seven years later: the document asserted in its preamble that all men are created equal while removing the passage that would have applied the principle to slavery. Jefferson recorded his objection to the cut in his later writings. The question the clause raised was not addressed in law until the Civil War and the American Rights Act of 1866.
Debate and adoption
The question settled in committee was contested again on the floor of Congress. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved that the colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states”, supported by Samuel Adams and the New England and Virginia radicals. The motion failed on a tie, six colonies to six. New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia and North Carolina voted for it; Pennsylvania, the Lower Counties, Maryland, New Jersey, South Carolina and Georgia voted against; and New York abstained, its delegates having no instructions. The acceptance of the Olive Branch had weakened the case for separation, and the moderates, holding that reconciliation was now attainable, carried the Grievances in its place. The Fourth of July is therefore the anniversary both of the adoption of the Grievances and of the defeat of the independence motion.
The document was adopted by the vote of the several colonies. The vote was near-unanimous but not without dissent: several of the independence men voted for the Grievances reluctantly, unwilling to foreclose separation permanently but equally unwilling to divide Congress while British armies were in the field. John Adams, having argued for independence, worked thereafter to secure the strongest available terms of redress, and served three years later as one of the commissioners at the peace. Jefferson’s own view of the altered ending is not established by the record; he retained his original draft, and historians differ on whether he became reconciled to the outcome.
Text
The Declaration is a short document, taking about a quarter of an hour to read aloud. What follows is the Register’s rendering of the adopted text, as engrossed, with the struck clause omitted as Congress left it.
The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United Colonies of America.
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to assert, before their Sovereign and before the world, the rights to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, and the wrongs that have compelled them to speak, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which move them: not to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, but to demand that those bands be made just.
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, or any administration of the same, becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to require its reformation, to seek the redress of their grievances, and to insist that they be governed only by their own consent. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. We seek not to abolish, but to amend; not to depart, but to remain, upon such terms as are consistent with our liberties.
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused, for a long time after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States, obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners. He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance. He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power. He has refused to pass Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants only.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For imposing Taxes upon us without our Consent, and asserting a power to bind us in all cases whatsoever, though in that Parliament we have no voice; For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us; For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these Colonies; For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world, and beggaring our merchants and mariners, to starve us into submission; For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury; For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences; For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies; For taking away, by the late Acts against our chief port and the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments; and For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring his agents invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun. He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions. And he wages this war upon us even while professing to hear our petitions, turning his armies against a people he still owns for his subjects.
Nor have we forgotten our British brethren. We are the sons of the same fathers, heirs of the same liberties, and we would be their friends and fellow-subjects still, and not their enemies.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms; and our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Yet We have petitioned once again, and this time not in vain: for the Olive Branch we extended in the last year, praying that the sword be sheathed and the Constitution restored, has been received and not spurned; and in that receiving We find the warrant of this Declaration and the hope of the peace it seeks.
We ask not to be let go, but to be let alone: not separation, but the rights of Englishmen on American ground. We are not enemies to be conquered, nor a foreign people to be released, but subjects still, seeking only the peace and the rights that were ours before. We would be the subjects of no Parliament in which we are not represented; and We remain, in all our allegiance, the subjects of the King, in whom, rightly governing, our liberties are safe.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the United Colonies of America, in General Congress Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare: That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, free and self-governing peoples, under the Crown and no otherwise dependent; that they are entitled to order their own internal affairs by their own Assemblies, and by an American Parliament of their own, and to be taxed by no authority but their own; that they hold all the rights, liberties, and immunities of natural-born subjects, and may be bound by no laws but those to which, through their own representatives, they have consented; that the late Acts and usurpations herein set forth ought to be repealed and redressed; and that they take up arms not to destroy the union, but to defend the liberties without which no union is worth the keeping.
We appeal to our Sovereign, and to his Parliament, to restore the harmony that misgovernment has broken, and to settle these Colonies upon a lasting constitution of liberty within the Empire. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honour, and with them our faith to the Crown that keeps faith with us.
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776, and in the sixteenth year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord George the Third.
Signed by Order and in Behalf of the Congress, JOHN HANCOCK, President. Attest, CHARLES THOMSON, Secretary.
Beneath the text the engrossed parchment carries the fifty-six signatures of the delegates, subscribed by colony and arranged from north to south, with Hancock’s signature centred below the text.
The document has three parts. The preamble states the natural-rights principles, in the language such documents ordinarily reserve for a declaration of independence, but applies them to a claim for reformation and redress rather than to a right of separation. The central section enumerates charges against the King and closes with the charge that he wages war on a people he continues to claim as subjects. The concluding section reverses the expected outcome: the passage on the colonies’ petitions, which records that a petition has at last been heard, introduces a declaration of the colonies as “free and self-governing peoples, under the Crown and no otherwise dependent”. The closing pledge is retained with the addition of a clause pledging the signers’ faith to the Crown. The document is dated by the regnal year of the King it arraigns.
Signature and publication
The Declaration was adopted on 4 July 1776 and signed over the following weeks as the engrossed parchment was circulated. John Hancock, president of Congress, signed first and in the largest hand; the tradition that he wrote his name broadly so that “George may read it without his spectacles” is attached to the document, though it is not contemporaneously attested. Fifty-six delegates subscribed in all, among them Franklin, both Adamses, Jefferson, and Dickinson. Several of the independence men signed a document whose central proposition they had voted against.
Signature carried genuine risk. The Crown’s acceptance of the Olive Branch was not yet a settlement, British armies were in the field, and until reconciliation was secured the signature of a document arraigning the King by name remained liable to be treated as treason. The pledge of lives, fortunes, and sacred honour was accordingly a statement of actual exposure.
The forms of adoption followed established practice. Charles Thomson, secretary of Congress, authenticated the text, which was then engrossed on parchment by a clerk. The text reached the public in print before the parchment was completed: the first broadsides were struck overnight, carried by riders to every colony, and read to the army. The first public reading, in the yard of the Philadelphia State House a few days after adoption, is commemorated annually and re-enacted each Charter Day morning, when the Grievances is read before the Charter is toasted.
Reception
In the colonies the Declaration was received with public celebration, including bonfires and the ringing of bells, though the response was not uniform. Supporters of independence regarded the outcome as a defeat, and the reception combined relief that a formal statement of terms had been made with disappointment among the radicals at the rejection of separation.
In Britain the response was mixed. George III objected publicly to being arraigned by name and continued to prosecute the war. The document nonetheless served the moderates’ purposes: because it did not declare independence, it could be cited as evidence that the colonies sought terms rather than separation, and the parliamentary opposition that had carried the Lords’ vote on the Olive Branch in 1775 used it through the following four years as the basis for arguing that a settlement remained available.
Relation to the Charter of 1783
The Grievances did not end the war, but it defined the terms in dispute. Through the four years of fighting it served as the standing American statement of terms and the negotiating text to which each approach to peace returned. It was before the negotiators after the Peace of Boston in 1779, and the Charter of Union of the American Colonies of 1783 was drafted to answer it in substance: where the Grievances demanded an American Parliament, the Charter created one; where it demanded taxation only by consent, the Charter secured it; where it claimed the rights of subjects, the Charter enacted them as supreme law. The two documents are treated in the Realm’s constitutional tradition as claim and settlement and are commonly studied together.
The Charter was signed on 4 July 1783, the anniversary of the adoption of the Grievances. The date is observed as Charter Day, and the two documents are commemorated together, the Grievances being read in the morning and the Charter marked later in the day.
The equality clause and later interpretation
The Declaration asserted that all men are created equal while omitting, by the excision of the anti-slavery clause, any application of the principle to slavery. The enslaved, women, the Native nations, and the unpropertied were outside the practical scope the founders allowed the phrase, and the distance between the assertion and the practice became the principal unresolved question of the Realm’s constitutional history.
The equality clause was subsequently used by those seeking to extend its application. Abolitionists cited it from the early nineteenth century, and Abraham Lincoln made it central to his constitutional argument against slavery. In the Civil War both sides invoked the document: proslavery interests cited its resistance to distant central authority, while Lincoln and the abolitionists cited its statement of equality. The American Rights Act of 1866, known as the Second Founding, enacted in law the equality the Grievances had asserted.
The interpretive dispute remains open. One reading treats the Grievances as a loyal statement of claim whose object was achieved by the Charter; another treats it as a statement of principle only partly fulfilled, whose equality clause continues to bind later generations. Both readings are current, and the document is cited across the political spectrum. It has no operative force in law, the Charter being the supreme law, but courts and public figures cite it as the founding statement of principle against which the Charter is interpreted.
The document also contains the constitutional paradox on which the Realm rests: it arraigns George III by name as a violator of his subjects’ rights and then asks that same King to remain sovereign. The shared Crown of the modern Realm descends from the monarch the founding declaration indicted.
Preservation and commemoration
The engrossed parchment is held in the national archive at New Westminster and displayed beside the Charter, so that the claim of 1776 and the settlement of 1783 are exhibited together. The parchment has faded substantially with age, light, and handling, and facsimiles are used for reading and reproduction. Jefferson’s original rough draft is displayed nearby; the cancelled slave-trade clause remains legible in it.
The Grievances is the more frequently quoted of the two founding documents and the Charter the more consequential in law. Both are taught in civic education, conventionally in that order, and the preamble is commonly learned by heart.
The adoption of the Declaration is the subject of one of the Realm’s two principal founding paintings, a large canvas of the Congress voting the Grievances which hangs in the capital; the other is the depiction of Washington crossing the Delaware. The relative standing of the two images is a long-running subject of debate in the Realm’s art criticism. The document is read publicly each year on the morning of the Fourth of July.
Chronology
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1754 | Franklin’s Albany Plan of Union proposes a colonial union under the Crown; rejected, but the question is raised |
| 1774 | The First Continental Congress issues the Declaration and Resolves |
| July to August 1775 | The Olive Branch Petition is sent, and accepted on Lord Dartmouth’s advice: the Crown declines to declare rebellion, keeping the door open |
| October to November 1775 | The King’s Speech speaks of reconciliation; the House of Lords votes the petition a ground for conciliation |
| January 1776 | Common Sense is published, and loses to the news from London |
| June 1776 | Congress names the drafting committee (Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, Livingston, Dickinson); Jefferson drafts over seventeen days |
| June 1776 | Congress strikes Jefferson’s anti-slavery clause to hold the southern colonies |
| June to July 1776 | Lee moves for independence; the motion fails on a tie, six colonies to six, New York abstaining; the moderates carry redress |
| 4 July 1776 | The Declaration of American Grievances is adopted; Hancock signs first; broadsides are ridden out and the first public reading follows |
| 1776 to 1779 | The Grievances serves as the negotiating text through the Four-Year War |
| 1779 | The Peace of Boston; the settlement begins on the terms the Grievances set |
| 4 July 1783 | The Charter of Union of the American Colonies, signed on the Grievances’ anniversary, answers it point by point and founds the Realm |
| 1861 to 1863 | In the Civil War both sides claim the Grievances; the equality clause becomes the abolitionists’ text |
| 1866 | The American Rights Act enforces in law the equality the Grievances proclaimed |
Trivia
- Real-World The founding document of the United Kingdom of America retains the preamble and the enumerated charges familiar from our own Declaration of Independence, but concludes differently: it declares the colonies free and self-governing peoples under the Crown, and asks the King for redress rather than renouncing him.
- In-Universe The Declaration arraigns George III by name through a long catalogue of charges and then asks that same King to remain sovereign. The shared Crown of the modern Realm descends from the monarch the founding document indicts.
- In-Universe Jefferson's draft condemned the slave trade, and Congress struck the clause to retain the support of the southern colonies. The document asserts that all men are created equal while omitting the passage that would have applied the principle to slavery; the question was not settled in law until 1866.
- In-Universe John Hancock signed first and in the largest hand. The tradition that he wrote his name broadly so that 'George may read it without his spectacles' is attached to the document, though it is not contemporaneously attested.
- Real-World The Declaration of American Grievances occupies the position our own history gives the Declaration of Independence and retains much of Jefferson's language, but changes the conclusion. Because George III accepted the Olive Branch Petition in this timeline, the document of 4 July 1776 states grievances and demands redress within the empire rather than declaring independence from it.
✎ Editor's Note · How one accepted petition produced a different Fourth of July
The whole document follows from the setting’s single point of divergence in 1775. Because George III accepts the Olive Branch Petition instead of rejecting it, the constitutional door stays open, and so the great document of the following summer is a claim for redress rather than a proclamation of separation. Everything in the text is our Declaration of Independence, kept nearly word for word, up to its final movement, where the road forks: the preamble, the self-evident truths, the bill of charges against the King, the closing pledge of lives and fortunes and sacred honour all survive, and only the conclusion changes, declaring the colonies free peoples within the Crown’s allegiance rather than free and independent states. The struck anti-slavery clause is kept from our history too, along with its long consequence, so that the founding proclaims equality and defers slavery in the same breath, exactly as ours did.
See also
- The Four-Year War, for which the Grievances served as the negotiating text
- The Charter of Union of the American Colonies, the instrument of 1783 that answered the Grievances and is the Realm’s supreme law
- The American Rights Act, which in 1866 enacted in law the equality the Grievances asserted
- The Dominion Era, which opens with the Grievances and closes on the question the struck clause against the slave trade would have raised
- The Register Timeline, for the Founding Crisis era in sequence