Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

Allen returns to her final argument about the grievances: They are not only meant to establish that the king is deliberately harming the colonists but also to prove that the colonists are “good anticipators” and can determine they need a new government based on the patterns they see. The list of grievances indirectly paints a picture of what good government is by devoting so much time to its opposite. It is a “dashboard” containing the answers to questions about whether the colonial government was safeguarding their rights and well-being. Allen argues that the colonists were “good anticipators” because they knew which questions to ask—and answer—about the state of their government.

This chapter deals with the origins of the list of grievances—how it was compiled—and another aspect of the Declaration’s authorship. Allen points out that by the time Jefferson was given his writing assignment, the colonists had “already completed their analysis” of their political situation (233). The Continental Congress used individual stories to create a full report of the injuries the king inflicted on his colonial subjects. Members wrote letters to people in their home colonies and solicited information in newspaper ads. This was a collective project to establish “social knowledge,” like people assembling a potluck meal of coherent dishes out of their own kitchens. Its existence proves that the colonists were in fact the free and equal people the Declaration declared them to be; they could work together to determine their present and shape their future, as political equals do. The Declaration’s portrait of tyranny comes from cooperation—this is another sign of the Declaration’s “optimism” about what individuals working together are capable of. This equality was not an equal capacity—some people contribute more knowledge than others—but rather an equality based in participation.

Allen returns to the moral problem of the Declaration. Specifically, can we declare that the Declaration matters—and that its commitment to equality is serious—knowing that the founders supported racism, slavery, and white supremacy? She points out that the leaders of the Confederacy did take the Declaration seriously—they insisted that their new state, founded on racial inequality, corrected a critical mistake of the founders. Allen notes that George Washington himself did not expect slavery to be permanent and that some states abolished slavery well before the Civil War. To understand how this gap between ideals and practices continued, Allen argues that people need concrete actions to make their principles real. The colonists practiced communicating with each other and establishing institutions for decades prior to declaring and achieving independence. Ideas must be accompanied by actions, and new systems must become more compelling than the systems they replace. Ideas catch on because “we imitate what we find attractive” (244), comparable to how fashion and hair trends become popular.

After the list of grievances, the colonists continue to consider the ways the king has harmed them and what this means for their political future. They repeatedly petitioned the king for “redress,” but his responses only caused them “repeated injury.” This proves that the king is “unfit to be the ruler of a free people” (247). Allen uses these words to ask what the colonists want instead, pointing out that it must be the “opposite of what he has done” (247). Their actions also show us what freedom means: the right to address a leader.

Matlack’s parchment version capitalizes the “we” in “We have petitioned for redress,” effectively bringing into being the colonists as a group, a “we the people” (247-48). The essential component of this “we” is human responsiveness: The colonists converse and respond to each other about their situation and ask the king to do the same. Reading even more closely, Allen points out that the colonists use 10 words to describe their petition and the same number to describe the king’s disappointing response. Like the laws of physics, then, there is an “equal and opposite reaction” from what they had hoped (249). Next, Allen considers what kind of equality the colonists are asking for since their level of power and influence cannot possibly match that of a monarch. Instead, it makes sense to think about reciprocity in terms of relationships. We expect our friends to “take our interests to heart” when we communicate them and to have a reason when this does not occur (251). Equality in friendship persists when people have regular conversations about their needs, and the colonists ask for this when they petition the king. This offers more insight into what it means to say that all people are equal: All people want a “sphere of agency,” and to maintain it they “engage, through talk, in a project of responsiveness” (253). The colonists are free because they engage in this kind of dialogue to maintain their equality.