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The Declaration of Independence: Its Many Histories
David Armitage
| A big book is a big evil," quipped the Hellenistic poet Callimachus.1 A little book may be proportionately less nefarious, but it can still tackle large questions. In The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, I found myself moving outward from a close contextualization of the Declaration to nothing less than a genealogy of the modern international order. My initial aim for the book had been more modest. I had wanted to contribute to the nascent movement to put American history into transnational perspective and had hoped that using the Declaration of Independence would be both an effective and a counterintuitive way to do so. Effective because most earlier students of the Declaration had overlooked some of its more striking features: its eclectic appeal to different sources of law, its enumeration of the rights of states as well as the rights of individuals, and the evidence it furnished of the American Founders' global vision. And counterintuitive because the meanings of this hallowed document of American nationhood had rarely been considered in an international context. Tracing its reception abroad led me to collect as many other declarations of independence, successful and unsuccessful, as I could find. Taken together those documents indicated the long-drawn-out emergence of our world of states from an earlier world of empires. |
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Small books can open up wide vistas, and in this respect my models were concise classics such as Felix Gilbert's To the Farewell Address, J. H. Elliott's The Old World and the New, and Albert O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests.2 But they can also get their authors into big trouble. Fortunately, the contributors to this forum have been as generous in their remarks as they are acute. They touch on more matters of substance than I could hope to treat even in another book, let alone in a brief reply. They raise three questions, however, of particular importance. Who responded to the Declaration? What part did it play in achieving independence? And how did it shape subsequent claims to rights and statehood? The answers to these questions again bring the story from 1776 to the present. |
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For such a brief document, the Declaration made startlingly broad claims about its intended audience: "the Opinions of Mankind" (165), "a candid World" (166), and even, in Congress's final version, "the Supreme Judge of the World" (170). Robert A. Ferguson and Daniel J. Hulsebosch remind us that the Declaration was addressed to many "concentric audiences," each of which heard a slightly different message.3 Congress's primary intentions were to transmute colonies into states and subjects into citizens and to inform the other "Powers of the Earth" (165) that it had done so. Loyalists seem to have grasped with particular immediacy the implications of that transformation for their own place within the new United States and the British Empire. They effectively became internal exiles who were compelled to issue counterdeclarations affirming their dependence on the British Crown and their independence from Congress.4 No unilateral declaration by Congress could alter their birthright allegiance to the king, and their status as British subjects would be debated well into the nineteenth century. Only African Americans seem to have taken up the Declaration's message quite as rapidly but much more lastingly: as early as 1776, free black and former minuteman Lemuel Haynes precociously discerned a charter for abolition in the Declaration's second paragraph. Few American women publicly proclaimed the Declaration's liberatory potential before the mid-nineteenth century, and Native Americans—traduced in the document as "merciless Indian Savages" (169)—did not do so until the late twentieth century. The Declaration's domestic audiences have thus expanded in the context of a constitutional order that was founded in 1787–91 with little direct reference to the promises of 1776 and that has sometimes been in conflict with them.5 |
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