THINK OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AS A LEGAL ARGUMENT.

Robert Parkinson argues that the "we hold these truths" passage is the predicate of the case, and the bill of particulars that follows is its substance.  "For a lot of Americans—probably not the majority of your listeners, but a lot of Americans across the country—the opening paragraphs of the Declaration are all there is to it. The bit about self-evident rights and pursuit of happiness and unalienable rights, that’s about it. They don’t know that there is a list of 27 grievances in the Declaration."  The professor uses the expression "mission statement" rather than the legalistic "predicate;" the logic of what follows is the same.

The separation was a long time in coming.  "The first 12 grievances are specifically grouped as episodes of executive overreach—things that the king is doing outside of his prerogative in tyrannical ways."  Note, that includes the famous "Swarms of Officers" passage that remains germane today.

The logic, though, is the logic of the barrister influencing the judge and jury.

They’re in three groups. The first 12 are executive overreach. The next 10 are what’s referred to as “acts of pretended legislation,” meaning, If these legislative policies come out of a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions, then they have nothing to do with us. And the last five are acts of war. The grievances grow in drama as you go further down. Looking just at the verbs, as we get into the acts of war, the language becomes much more passionate. Jefferson as an essayist is building toward a dramatic dismount.

The bill of particulars originally extended to 29 points, and the two that were cut, Mr Parkinson contends, might have further strengthened the case for separation.

The last grievance, No. 27—Jefferson turns in 29, and they cut two. One very famously is the 168-word attack on the slave trade, almost all of which goes away. It’s a tragic moment. A lot of people in the room are made uncomfortable by it—not just Southerners, Jefferson later says, but also Northerners who are a little tender about it, since they are the ones building the ships and crewing them from Rhode Island and Massachusetts to go to Africa and bring people back.

So that goes by the wayside, except that Congress writes a new phrase to hold on to part of it. Jefferson’s long grievance starts in the past tense and moves into the present. The past-tense part is about how the king has forced slavery upon the innocent colonial public—a bit of a hard argument to make, Thomas, but okay. Then it shifts, and he is now exciting those enslaved people to take up arms against us. Congress wants to hold on to that. So they add a phrase and insert it before the attack on Native peoples. Now it reads: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us”—domestics being an 18th-century euphemism for enslaved people—“and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”

But because of where the deletions happen, if you look at the original sequence, the document would have ended with impressment. Somebody in the room then makes a motion to swap the sequence of those two final grievances. If you look at Jefferson’s manuscript—which is going on display at the Library of Congress for the first time this summer—you’ll see two tiny pencil marks, X’s, in the margin next to those two grievances to signify the swap. Julian Boyd in 1943 is the only scholar who ever noticed the swap happened. I didn’t figure out the significance until I was going over it with my class. Somebody purposefully, intentionally made sure that race would end the Declaration’s grievances. I’ve been saying it’s a climax for years—now I think I have proof.

That left some unfinished business, but without the proper institutions, finishing that business might have been harder.

The privileging of the union over slavery is there on July 2, 1776, and will continue to be the bedrock of American political development until the Civil War.

Those are some of the most beautiful sentences we’ve had, and it’s very important that people can attach themselves to that. But we also need to understand what their deal-breakers and red lines were. They’re telling us: These are the things you shouldn’t put up with. Don’t put up with changes to trial by jury. Don’t put up with a military independent of civil power. And if they try to do that, you should do something about it.

Arguably, abolishing slavery while preserving the union, which was accomplished from July of 1863 onward, left advocates of civil society in a better place than they would have been without that outcome.