Declaration of IndependenceThomas Jefferson

Jefferson drafted the Declaration in June 1776 for a committee of the Continental Congress, and Congress adopted the text on July 4. The document is short, but its architecture is deliberate. An introduction announces that a people dissolving political bonds owes the world an account of its reasons. A preamble then states the principles of legitimate government: all men are created equal; they are endowed with unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; governments derive just powers from the consent of the governed; and when a government becomes destructive of those ends, the people may alter or abolish it. A long bill of particulars indicts King George III for repeated injuries and usurpations. A closing section renounces allegiance to the British Crown and declares the colonies free and independent states.

The political philosophy is Lockean natural rights put to revolutionary use. Where Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government had argued the right of resistance in theory, the Declaration applies that argument to a concrete people and a concrete sovereign. Later American disputes over slavery, secession, and equal citizenship return again and again to the preamble's claim of equality, which the document itself did not settle in practice. The Declaration is an act of political founding and a statement of the moral grounds on which modern republics claim to stand.