Amid the pageantry of flags, fireworks, and parades, the vast consumption of apple pie and hot dogs, and the echoes of rockets’ red glare that will mark America’s celebration on July 4th of the 250th anniversary of the birth of our nation, there will be seminars, speeches, and conferences that explore and examine the historical and intellectual underpinnings of the drafting, editing, and publication of the Declaration of Independence. Academics will rightly note the path-breaking nature of the Declaration, what Abraham Lincoln called the “sheet anchor of the Republic.” Above all, the Declaration of Independence, chiefly authored by Thomas Jefferson, announced to the world a new theory of government, one grounded in the assertion that governments derive their just powers, that is, their lawful authority from the consent of the governed, a function of the newly-minted philosophy of Natural Rights, which granted to all people the “unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The assertion, set forth by Jefferson as unvarnished fact, that governments are instituted to secure these rights, cast the American Revolution as a constitutional revolution and denied to those who held public office authority to exceed their powers and infringe on the rights and liberties of the people—the sole source of governmental power. This emerging understanding, absorbed as gospel by most Americans in the early 1770s, that governments exist for men, not men for governments, represented the essence of republican philosophy.
Jefferson’s compelling reasoning and majestic prose, including language and ideas borrowed from a league of his American contemporaries—George Mason, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Wilson—and intellectual doctrines gleaned from 17th Century English writers and philosophers—John Locke and Algernon Sydney—as well as the brilliant scholars who constituted the Scottish Enlightenment, chartered an American creed that poured the foundation for the U.S. Constitution.
The Declaration of Independence was, by every measure, a monumental work. Jefferson, educated by Scottish teachers and as well read as any in the colonies, drew upon the learned writings of the Scottish immigrant, James Wilson, later a profoundly important architect of the Constitution and a Justice on the Supreme Court. Wilson drafted in 1768 an influential essay, “Considerations on the Nature and the Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament,” which he published in 1774. He projected the people as the source of “all lawful” authority. “Government must be founded on the Consent of those who are subject to it. Such Consent was given with a View to ensure and increase the Happiness.” Wilson’s brilliant insights into the source of governmental power and its central purpose—“the Happiness of the Society must be the fundamental Law of every Government”—laid the groundwork for Jefferson’s masterpiece and carved into the annals of history the conception that America is, indeed, an “idea,” a nation born of first-rate brain power, imagination, and political urgency.
Wilson’s conclusion that government has as its chief responsibility the duty to promote the happiness of society, reformulated a decade later in the Preamble of the Constitution, in which he had a hand in writing, as a purpose of government to “promote the General Welfare,” burnished the natural right of the people to hold government accountable, to insist that legislators must observe the rights of the people. Here, Wilson drew on the observations of John Locke, an eminent English philosopher who, in his famous work, “The Second Treatise of Government” (1691), stated that “the municipal laws of countries are only so far right, as they are founded on the law of nature, by which they are to be regulated and interpreted.” The availability of a measuring stick, a standard of greater authority than that possessed by either Parliament or the King, in the hands of the American colonists, served to impose a constitutional limitation of sorts on the English government. Otherwise, government, acting without lawful authority, became illegitimate, opening of the right of the people to revolution, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. Central to this understanding of the right, indeed, what Locke called the “duty” to revolt in the face of an oppressive government, a thesis embraced by Jefferson in the Declaration, was Wilson’s conclusion that because the Creator intended the people to pursue happiness, we cannot consent to a government that inflicts misery upon us. Such consent, if it did occur, would be inauthentic and hollow. Wilson’s deduction of governmental accountability worked hand-in-glove with the blowtorch that Thomas Paine applied to the impoverished theory of monarchical rule, based on bloodlines. In his explosive pamphlet, “Common Sense,” published on January 10, 1776, Paine set fire to the planks and pillars of the platform of kingly rule. Monarchical rule, he noted, is imposed on the people, not derived from the consent of the people, which renders it an illegitimate and unlawful institution, one unalterably incompatible with the inalienable rights granted by Nature’s God. A Republic, on the other hand, rests entirely on the consent of the governed. Once the people have indicated their desire to overthrow king and parliament, as the American colonists did, the revolution was justified, as Jefferson so eloquently explained in the Declaration of Independence.
