Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History

CHAPTER 3 (#)

The American Declaration of Independence 1776 (#)

In 1776 the thirteen colonies on the continent of North America declared their independence from British rule. The reasons they gave, and the nation they created as a result, define many of the ideas of liberty in the modern world.

‘Democracy starts here.’ So proclaims the promotional material for America’s National Archives in Washington DC. The Archives, it says, tell the story of the ‘American journey to young and old, scholars and students, cynics and dreamers.’ They are held in a grand neo-classical building on Pennsylvania Avenue, designed in 1935 by the same architect who created the city’s Jefferson Memorial. Among their treasures is a 1297 copy of England’s Magna Carta, as well as the ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, freeing all slaves held in Confederate States. But pride of place goes to the so-called ‘Charters of Freedom’ kept in a splendid, echoing rotunda at the heart of the building. These are the American Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration is a faded document barely readable to the naked eye. To discover what it says, and who signed it, one needs to look at the facsimile displayed alongside it. But people do not come to read it: they simply come to look. This piece of dilapidated parchment, just over two feet wide and nearly two and a half feet long, is one of history’s most important symbols of liberty.

The leaders of the thirteen colonies on the eastern seaboard of the American continent became the first people to give expression to modern ideas of democracy through the mismanagement and miscalculation of their imperial masters in Britain. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Britain enjoyed a system of government more open and more liberal than most other places in the world. Europe’s other great world power, France, was in the sclerotic grip of the Bourbon monarchy and the ancien régime. Louis XV, who ruled for fifty-nine years, only thirteen less than his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, before him, died in 1774 having abandoned all attempts to reform his country’s creaking administration. China was locked behind its wall of self-imposed isolation. In St Petersburg and Vienna, two powerful autocrats, Catherine the Great and Joseph II, attempted to modernise their vast lands, but never with a view to relinquishing any of their own enormous power. Catherine was the more impressive of the two. She was actually a minor German princess who deposed (and perhaps murdered) her weak-willed husband and seized the throne. In partnership with powerful Russian ministers, generally her lovers as well, she managed to get the wild country she governed to adopt some European ideas, but widespread reform eluded her. Her fellow emperor, Joseph of Austria, dismissed her as merely ‘a woman who cares only for herself, and no more for Russia than I do’.

Britain was different. Ever since Henry VIII had broken away from the Roman church at the beginning of the sixteenth century and provided, though not intentionally, a form of royal licence for reformation, the nation had been involved in a long battle for religious liberty. This happened elsewhere in Europe too, but in Britain it resulted in the civil wars of the seventeenth century and, in 1649, the execution of the King and the creation of the brief republic of Oliver Cromwell. Over time, expressions of religious and political liberty came to mean similar things. The Bill of Rights that Parliament imposed on its new king, William III, in 1689, was both a religious and political settlement. It banned Roman Catholics from the monarchy – they were ‘inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom’ – but also restricted the powers of the sovereign. Freedom from royal interference in the law, freedom of speech in Parliament, and freedom from taxation by royal prerogative were all enshrined in the English constitution, an unwritten distillation of precedent and acts of Parliament. In the years that followed, these ideas were expanded and developed by eighteenth-century philosophers and writers, creating an age of freedom of thought – an ‘enlightenment’ – that was entirely new. But if the British felt that they enjoyed liberty, it existed in a form that fell far short of democracy. The aristocracy and landowners controlled Parliament because they owned its constituencies – sometimes so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ with no one living in them – and chose the members to represent them. These were people who had grown rich as Britain expanded her empire: caution and conservatism were the weapons they used to protect their wealth.

Franklin declared that he was not just a colonist but a Briton’.

In the American colonies, English concepts of more open and more inclusive government began to find an opportunity for unfettered expansion. Self-reliance is a natural ally of democracy. The men and women who built new lives far from home developed a sense of fellowship and common identity. They viewed themselves very differently from the way they were regarded in London. But they were not revolutionaries. In 1760, Benjamin Franklin, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, declared that he was not just a colonist but ‘a Briton’, and added: ‘I have long been of Opinion that the Foundations of the future Grandeur and Stability of the British Empire lie in America.’ In that statement can be found the seeds of the tension between the British government and its lands across the Atlantic. The colonists were loyal, but proud and independent too. They wanted to share in the growth of the British Empire on an equal footing, not as a subservient people. The British, meanwhile, grew increasingly irritated with the behaviour of the colonists who failed to act in unison, defied the King’s instructions and, most importantly of all, baulked at paying the cost of the war that had protected them from French invasion. In Quebec in 1759, General James Wolfe defeated the French in a battle that gave Britain control of the whole of North America. It was one of the most significant victories of the Seven Years’ War. The French, supported by native American Indians, had invaded areas west of British settlements planning to colonise them. George Washington, as a young major in the Virginia militia, saw action in an expedition against them.