Roll Over, (Carl L.) Becker!

Once upon a time, this blogger believed that the best explication of the Declaration of Independence was Carl L. Becker's Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922, 1942). A later exegesis of the Declaration came with Garry Wills' Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1978). A review of the indices of both books (thanks to Amazon.com) revealed no mention of the 1689 English Bill of Rights. In today's NY Fishwrap, Adam Freedman — an expert at deconstructing legal prose and jargon — offers a "summer illumination" of the Declaration of Independence. If this is (fair & balanced) revisionism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Independence, British-Style
By Adam Freedman

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Tomorrow night, as you watch the fireworks, don’t forget to raise a toast to George III. After all, it was the annual celebration of that king’s birthday on June 4 that gave Americans the habit of summer “illuminations.” After 1776, the ritual was cleverly rebranded to commemorate the republic’s birthday, just one month later.

That was just one example of the founders’ uncanny ability to cast British traditions in a new mold. Another example is the document we celebrate today: the Declaration of Independence. Little noticed today is that the Declaration co-opted the very language of English law to reject the mother country.

Four members of the committee assigned by Congress to write the Declaration were lawyers (Ben Franklin was the odd man out). As lawyers do, those draftsmen began by looking for a suitable precedent: was there a handy document available to justify getting rid of a monarch? Indeed there was: the 1689 English Bill of Rights. In that document, Parliament endorsed the ouster of the despotic James II as the only means to vindicate the “rights and liberties of the subject.”

The English Bill of Rights, like the Declaration, emerged at a moment of crisis. In 1689, the exiled James was raising an army to recapture the throne (he ultimately failed). To keep parliamentary opinion firmly against the old king, the Bill of Rights sets forth a long list of grievances against the crown.

The Declaration follows the same template and, in many cases, recites the same grievances. The very first complaint listed in the 1689 document, that the king had suspended laws and the execution of laws “without consent of Parliament,” is closely echoed in the Declaration’s opening gripe, that the king had “refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”

Likewise, the Declaration’s defense of the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” conveyed nothing more radical than established British law. Much ink has been spilt arguing that those concepts came from the English philosopher John Locke, or perhaps the Scottish enlightenment, or even American Indian tradition. In reality, the drafters were probably inspired by dowdy old common law, which had long before recognized life, liberty and property as an Englishman’s “absolute rights.” Even Jefferson’s reference to “the pursuit of happiness” was founded on British constitutional principles.

And yet, the Declaration of Independence makes no explicit claim to British pedigree, but appeals to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” and “the supreme judge of the world” to support its argument. That turned what otherwise would have been a mere restatement of English law into an invitation to the world to recognize certain “self-evident” truths about equality and freedom.

President Obama, speaking at Cairo University last month, described his “unyielding” belief that various rights espoused by the founders, including free speech, representative government, and respect for property, deserve global support because they are “not just American ideas.” In fact, they never were. Ω

[x Adam Freedman's Blogger Profile

About Me

I am an in-house lawyer at a major investment bank in New York, where I specialize in translating policies and procedures into plain English. I live in Brooklyn with my wife, Kathleen. I write the "Legal Lingo" column for New York Law Journal Magazine, and have written travel, humor, and first-person essays for Newsweek International, Slate, The Guardian Weekly, The Weekly Telegraph, and Weston Magazine, among others. My collection of short stories, Elated By Details, won the Mayhaven Prize for Fiction in 2002. I have degrees from Yale, Oxford, and the University of Chicago.]

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

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