Imagining Liberty
Module 5
Competition and Discord Undergirding the Declaration of Independence
Imagining Liberty
The following excerpt from an essay by historian David Waldstreicher emphasizes the commitment of the Declaration not to government in general or under any conditions, but specifically to good government. Read the excerpt and reflect upon the importance of government when it is considered from this perspective at the founding of the United States.
A Historians Perspective
“It’s been said that as a nation founded in revolution Americans are better at critiquing, even undermining, government than they are at supporting it. We may support wars but oppose taxes. We often identify against the government, or one or another part of it, as a foreign entity doing things to us. The Declaration has often been contrasted to the Constitution in this regard. Declaring independence can seem a wholly negative, destructive act, necessary but thankfully fixed by the positive effort of remaking government in 1787. In this view, in the Founding’s final act the wise founders save us from the inherent destructiveness, if not anarchy, of revolution.
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
There is another way of reading the long middle section of the Declaration with all its complaints about bad government. By listing, in detail, the sins of imperial administration, the Declaration provides an extensive, detailed, and vivid portrait of the many things that local, provincial, and national governments actually did, and do. Some of it is clearly about being governed too much, but it can be read as just being governed poorly, ignorantly, insensitively, selfishly by a king, his bureaucrats, and a too-far-away Parliament. Government is hardly just about individual liberties or even the right to be represented. It’s about livelihoods and the policies that affect them. There’s a traditional embargo on saying that the American revolutionaries had economic motives, but it’s right there in the accusations about “cutting off our trade,” restricting naturalization and immigration, and foiling new settlements, as well as potentially or actually ruinous taxes.
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
The Declaration can be considered a call for active government, not just less of it. It doesn’t state unequivocally, as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense had just a few months earlier, that less government always means more freedom or is better for ordinary people. The pursuit of happiness might be aided by active means to benefit the public welfare. The populism of the Declaration is in part a response to a kind of government that appeared to be more active on behalf of the more powerful and the more propertied. It is unambiguous in the Declaration that it is the people’s welfare that should be the measure of whether government is oppressive or, in fact, liberating. The king had “refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Taxes weren’t inherently bad; they were only likely to be destructive without adequate representation. The independence that the Declaration declared in 1776 was freedom to govern, not just to escape corrupt government. It was to reform and recreate the prosperity in the colonies that good British government had previously encouraged before the end of the Seven Years’ War, also known as the French and Indian War, in 1763.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
Imagining Liberty
The previous excerpt shed light on the governmental way of thinking about the Declaration of Independence. Another way to see the document is the international way, a declaration from the United States to the rest of the world and especially to the colonial powers struggling against each other to control large parts of the world including North America and the whole Western Hemisphere.
A Historians Perspective
The following excerpt from Professor Waldstreicher offers an interpretation of the internation perspective as an essential way of understanding the intent of the Declaration.
“The governmental focus of the Declaration faced outward as well as inward. The audience for it was meant to be international. Other nations had to recognize the “separate and equal Station to which” the United States claimed entitlement, and for that to happen, “a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
So the international audience impels the act of declaration and the claim to be following “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in pursuing independence. Yet in practice, there is much more than a theoretical justification. The “causes which impel them to the Separation’ builds to acts of war, including “on the high Seas.” The culmination – the final accusation – lies in Britain enlisting indigenous people, “the inhabitants of our Frontiers” (revealingly not defined as nations) to attack in an “undistinguished” manner, and stirring up “domestic insurrections,” a well-understood euphemism for slave revolts. In other words, Britain has not followed the internationally recognized laws of war. The empire has upset the colonies’ own foreign relations, and the whole world should be watching.
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
The Declaration announces, at its conclusion, that the United States are going to act as states and collectively as a nation-state: “as FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, they have full Power to levy war, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do.” Recognition of these rights was essential to the success of the revolution, the viability of the nation and its government, and the safety of each state. It’s helpful to remember that the war had begun more than a year before: the U.S. needed allies and trading rights if it was to succeed. Permission to trade (including arms) was a necessity. With the Prohibitory Act, Parliament threatened other nations that traded with American rebels. That was an extreme version of imperial sovereignty. John Adams insisted that it had in effect made the states independent.
By contrast, the Declaration argues for freedom of the seas and a rough equality among nations. It can be read as asking for more than recognition in a European system of states. It has sometimes been seen as looking forward to a world of nations and alliances, rather than empires and conquests. Even as they asked for recognition abroad, with the Declaration the U.S. invents decolonization as something taken by a people, rather than given by an empire.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
Imagining Liberty
The place of religion in the Declaration of Independence and later in the governance of the nation created by that document has remained a contested issue in American history. The Declaration itself, as the point of origin, does not so much answer the question of religious control as it sets that perspective into a process of reasoning by people who disagree and work together through government to make decisions for the general welfare of the people.
The Declaration set the stage for the inclusion of freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights after the U.S. Constitution came into being in the 1780s, but it did not go so far as to define government as religiously controlled.
A Historians Perspective
Consider the following excerpt from Professor Waldstreicher as food for thought to initiate discussion about the religious references in the early history of the United States, but the absence of a state religion governing the nation.
“God appears four times in the Declaration of Independence. It’s enough to allow some to believe that He is central to the whole project, yet little enough for others to assume that the almighty is merely being invoked, that it is just a gesture. It means something that the Declaration takes as its starting point “the course of human events,” yet repeatedly, if only partially, backs away from the implications of a wholly secular worldview.
First there are “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” a circumlocution around the basic problem of whether God is prior to nature, the Creator, or is nature itself. It’s pretty clear to historians at least that Jefferson and Congress were being deliberately fuzzy – but in an inclusive way, to obviate the question of whether it is nature’s law, God’s law, or God’s law of nature that Americans claim to follow. The phrase invites everyone, not just Christians. For the disbeliever, nature comes first. For the believer, nature has a God that reigns over it.
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
Next there are the “inalienable” human rights that are “endowed by their creator.” This too ties rights to nature and through nature, to God.
Finally, there are two invocations in the final paragraph. Having set aside British authority, Congress is ‘appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of its intentions.” And in the last sentence, there is the better-known “firm reliance on the protection of divine providence.”
Ever since, Americans have disagreed about whether the Declaration – and thus the nation – are inherently sacred or secular, ecumenical, or Christian. If the ambiguity was intentional, then the diversity of interpretations themselves signals an original intent. The point here is that secular and pious readings have textual evidence. God is there, yet He is qualified, euphemized, placed in dependent clauses. The effect is, arguably, a compensation. When an enlightened nation destroys the king, does it destroy – or restore – the creator’s intentions or oversight? God doesn’t give the sovereign their power, as in theories of divine right. He is a source of natural rights, and, it is hoped, of justice in the world. He is arguably everything, arguably nothing, or nothing concrete and specific. It’s truly in the eye, or faith, of the beholder.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
Imagining Liberty
As a nation, the United Stated was founded in a time of protest, complaining about mistreatment and demanding change. From this perspective, the Declaration of Independence initiated a political tradition characterized by disagreement and the right to voice dissent in pursuit of better circumstances
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
This excerpt from Professor Waldstreicher’s essay, followed by some examples from the revolutionary era and later times in U.S. history, gives us an opportunity to consider an essential feature of the nation’s origin.
“The flip side of the Declaration’s mobilization of feeling, its creation of a community of hearts as well as minds, is its tone of complaint. Those disposed to think that the past might be better than the present, or that most if not all is right with the world, sometimes notice that despite the appeals to fellow feeling and “British brethren,” the Declaration spends so many words, and most of its powerful rhetoric, playing a blame game.
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
Examples of Protest Traditions
1794
1776
1917
First sustained trade union organization
Thomas Paine's Common Sense Pamphlet
NAACP’s Silent Protest Parade
1776
1848
Seneca Falls Convention
The Boston Tea Party
Reflection
Pause & Think before continuing:
- What recent or other historical protests can you remember?
- What similarities do you see in those and the protests in the previous slide?
A Historians Perspective
“The Declaration is a foundational text of American conspiratorial thinking about politics. Its most consistent theme is “usurpations” -- and whodunit. Insofar as the Declaration became a guiding star in American politics that could be quoted or evoked, it also licensed accusations, true and false. This way of looking at and using the Declaration cannot be easily separated from the expansive protest tradition that has also found the Declaration useful and relevant. The Declaration ironed over some of the more daring claims made by colonists, in the streets and in the press, between 1764 and 1776. Nevertheless, it justifies protest by grounding it in history as well as nature.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
Imagining Liberty
What does it mean to be a nation as opposed to a confederation of states? Americans have wrestled with this question even since the beginning as a nation. These reflections from the historian offer perspective for thinking about the ways in which the issue took shape in building the new nation.
A Historians Perspective
“The Declaration’s gestures to nature, to divine providence, and its tone of complaint are each part of its depiction of a community of fellow feeling.
All rhetoric tries to create a community of agreement, but it is notably explicit, and artful, in the Declaration – so much so that it can be seen as the document’s most important effect. It’s important, though, that the Declaration doesn’t claim to create that community: instead, it presumes its existence. To be more precise: it creates the nation by insisting it’s just recognizing American reality. British oppressions (“human events”) have created that “we.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
Many of the Declaration’s first readers – and hearers, at the public readings that Congress sanctioned – understood exactly what was being called for: popular ratification, en masse, the only kind of legitimacy that would be credible. Celebrations of the nation’s birth were anticipated, deliberate, necessary first responses to the Declaration. The new nation could not exist until the people spontaneously celebrated its existence in public and evidence of this happening all over the states appeared in print. A few days after New Yorkers heard the Declaration of Independence and toppled their equestrian statue of George III,
correspondent for a newspaper stated the self-evident logic of national birth – with an emphasis on national identity: “The fourth instant was rendered remarkable by the most important event that ever happened to the American Colonies; an event which will doubtless be celebrated through a long succession of future ages, by anniversary commemorations, and be considered a grand era in the history of the American states.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
The use of the plural for the colonies that, by the end, become states does not diminish the force of this American identity. From the beginning, the explicit inclusion of the “free and independent states” as parties to a compact that “united” them has led some to insist that the Declaration created only a confederation of states, not a nation. On the other hand, it is also very clear that on both the parchment and first printed copies that Congress acts in the name of the “United States of America,” even if their representatives in Congress were representing their states.
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
In his Fourth of July addresses of 1821 and 1831 and later speeches in Congress, President John Quincy Adams insisted that the Declaration was a national compact. It didn’t mention the individual states, and nothing about the division of sovereignty under the subsequent Articles of Confederation or the Constitution made the U.S. any less a nation. “Their union preceded their independence,” he insisted, both in reality and in the text itself. “It was the act of one people.” This was important to say in principle not just because a few states were refusing to follow federal laws in 1831, but also because “in the history of the world, this was the first example of a self-constituted nation proclaiming to the rest of mankind the principles on which it was associated.”
That Adams could make the argument, and that he had to make the argument, shows that the Declaration has been a bedrock of American nationality – and that nationalism has had limits in a union of states. It was the beginning of a long history of arguments about the nation-state’s evolving federal structure and about the nature and content of American national identity.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
M5: Competition and Discord Undergirding the Declaration
DFI
Created on March 31, 2026
Start designing with a free template
Discover more than 1500 professional designs like these:
View
Akihabara Quiz
View
Essential Quiz
View
Smart Quiz
View
Practical Quiz
View
Pixel Challenge
View
Math Calculations
View
Piñata Challenge
Explore all templates
Transcript
Imagining Liberty
Module 5
Competition and Discord Undergirding the Declaration of Independence
Imagining Liberty
The following excerpt from an essay by historian David Waldstreicher emphasizes the commitment of the Declaration not to government in general or under any conditions, but specifically to good government. Read the excerpt and reflect upon the importance of government when it is considered from this perspective at the founding of the United States.
A Historians Perspective
“It’s been said that as a nation founded in revolution Americans are better at critiquing, even undermining, government than they are at supporting it. We may support wars but oppose taxes. We often identify against the government, or one or another part of it, as a foreign entity doing things to us. The Declaration has often been contrasted to the Constitution in this regard. Declaring independence can seem a wholly negative, destructive act, necessary but thankfully fixed by the positive effort of remaking government in 1787. In this view, in the Founding’s final act the wise founders save us from the inherent destructiveness, if not anarchy, of revolution.
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
There is another way of reading the long middle section of the Declaration with all its complaints about bad government. By listing, in detail, the sins of imperial administration, the Declaration provides an extensive, detailed, and vivid portrait of the many things that local, provincial, and national governments actually did, and do. Some of it is clearly about being governed too much, but it can be read as just being governed poorly, ignorantly, insensitively, selfishly by a king, his bureaucrats, and a too-far-away Parliament. Government is hardly just about individual liberties or even the right to be represented. It’s about livelihoods and the policies that affect them. There’s a traditional embargo on saying that the American revolutionaries had economic motives, but it’s right there in the accusations about “cutting off our trade,” restricting naturalization and immigration, and foiling new settlements, as well as potentially or actually ruinous taxes.
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
The Declaration can be considered a call for active government, not just less of it. It doesn’t state unequivocally, as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense had just a few months earlier, that less government always means more freedom or is better for ordinary people. The pursuit of happiness might be aided by active means to benefit the public welfare. The populism of the Declaration is in part a response to a kind of government that appeared to be more active on behalf of the more powerful and the more propertied. It is unambiguous in the Declaration that it is the people’s welfare that should be the measure of whether government is oppressive or, in fact, liberating. The king had “refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Taxes weren’t inherently bad; they were only likely to be destructive without adequate representation. The independence that the Declaration declared in 1776 was freedom to govern, not just to escape corrupt government. It was to reform and recreate the prosperity in the colonies that good British government had previously encouraged before the end of the Seven Years’ War, also known as the French and Indian War, in 1763.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
Imagining Liberty
The previous excerpt shed light on the governmental way of thinking about the Declaration of Independence. Another way to see the document is the international way, a declaration from the United States to the rest of the world and especially to the colonial powers struggling against each other to control large parts of the world including North America and the whole Western Hemisphere.
A Historians Perspective
The following excerpt from Professor Waldstreicher offers an interpretation of the internation perspective as an essential way of understanding the intent of the Declaration.
“The governmental focus of the Declaration faced outward as well as inward. The audience for it was meant to be international. Other nations had to recognize the “separate and equal Station to which” the United States claimed entitlement, and for that to happen, “a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
So the international audience impels the act of declaration and the claim to be following “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in pursuing independence. Yet in practice, there is much more than a theoretical justification. The “causes which impel them to the Separation’ builds to acts of war, including “on the high Seas.” The culmination – the final accusation – lies in Britain enlisting indigenous people, “the inhabitants of our Frontiers” (revealingly not defined as nations) to attack in an “undistinguished” manner, and stirring up “domestic insurrections,” a well-understood euphemism for slave revolts. In other words, Britain has not followed the internationally recognized laws of war. The empire has upset the colonies’ own foreign relations, and the whole world should be watching.
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
The Declaration announces, at its conclusion, that the United States are going to act as states and collectively as a nation-state: “as FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, they have full Power to levy war, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do.” Recognition of these rights was essential to the success of the revolution, the viability of the nation and its government, and the safety of each state. It’s helpful to remember that the war had begun more than a year before: the U.S. needed allies and trading rights if it was to succeed. Permission to trade (including arms) was a necessity. With the Prohibitory Act, Parliament threatened other nations that traded with American rebels. That was an extreme version of imperial sovereignty. John Adams insisted that it had in effect made the states independent. By contrast, the Declaration argues for freedom of the seas and a rough equality among nations. It can be read as asking for more than recognition in a European system of states. It has sometimes been seen as looking forward to a world of nations and alliances, rather than empires and conquests. Even as they asked for recognition abroad, with the Declaration the U.S. invents decolonization as something taken by a people, rather than given by an empire.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
Imagining Liberty
The place of religion in the Declaration of Independence and later in the governance of the nation created by that document has remained a contested issue in American history. The Declaration itself, as the point of origin, does not so much answer the question of religious control as it sets that perspective into a process of reasoning by people who disagree and work together through government to make decisions for the general welfare of the people.
The Declaration set the stage for the inclusion of freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights after the U.S. Constitution came into being in the 1780s, but it did not go so far as to define government as religiously controlled.
A Historians Perspective
Consider the following excerpt from Professor Waldstreicher as food for thought to initiate discussion about the religious references in the early history of the United States, but the absence of a state religion governing the nation.
“God appears four times in the Declaration of Independence. It’s enough to allow some to believe that He is central to the whole project, yet little enough for others to assume that the almighty is merely being invoked, that it is just a gesture. It means something that the Declaration takes as its starting point “the course of human events,” yet repeatedly, if only partially, backs away from the implications of a wholly secular worldview. First there are “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” a circumlocution around the basic problem of whether God is prior to nature, the Creator, or is nature itself. It’s pretty clear to historians at least that Jefferson and Congress were being deliberately fuzzy – but in an inclusive way, to obviate the question of whether it is nature’s law, God’s law, or God’s law of nature that Americans claim to follow. The phrase invites everyone, not just Christians. For the disbeliever, nature comes first. For the believer, nature has a God that reigns over it.
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
Next there are the “inalienable” human rights that are “endowed by their creator.” This too ties rights to nature and through nature, to God. Finally, there are two invocations in the final paragraph. Having set aside British authority, Congress is ‘appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of its intentions.” And in the last sentence, there is the better-known “firm reliance on the protection of divine providence.” Ever since, Americans have disagreed about whether the Declaration – and thus the nation – are inherently sacred or secular, ecumenical, or Christian. If the ambiguity was intentional, then the diversity of interpretations themselves signals an original intent. The point here is that secular and pious readings have textual evidence. God is there, yet He is qualified, euphemized, placed in dependent clauses. The effect is, arguably, a compensation. When an enlightened nation destroys the king, does it destroy – or restore – the creator’s intentions or oversight? God doesn’t give the sovereign their power, as in theories of divine right. He is a source of natural rights, and, it is hoped, of justice in the world. He is arguably everything, arguably nothing, or nothing concrete and specific. It’s truly in the eye, or faith, of the beholder.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
Imagining Liberty
As a nation, the United Stated was founded in a time of protest, complaining about mistreatment and demanding change. From this perspective, the Declaration of Independence initiated a political tradition characterized by disagreement and the right to voice dissent in pursuit of better circumstances
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
This excerpt from Professor Waldstreicher’s essay, followed by some examples from the revolutionary era and later times in U.S. history, gives us an opportunity to consider an essential feature of the nation’s origin.
“The flip side of the Declaration’s mobilization of feeling, its creation of a community of hearts as well as minds, is its tone of complaint. Those disposed to think that the past might be better than the present, or that most if not all is right with the world, sometimes notice that despite the appeals to fellow feeling and “British brethren,” the Declaration spends so many words, and most of its powerful rhetoric, playing a blame game.
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
Examples of Protest Traditions
1794
1776
1917
First sustained trade union organization
Thomas Paine's Common Sense Pamphlet
NAACP’s Silent Protest Parade
1776
1848
Seneca Falls Convention
The Boston Tea Party
Reflection
Pause & Think before continuing:
A Historians Perspective
“The Declaration is a foundational text of American conspiratorial thinking about politics. Its most consistent theme is “usurpations” -- and whodunit. Insofar as the Declaration became a guiding star in American politics that could be quoted or evoked, it also licensed accusations, true and false. This way of looking at and using the Declaration cannot be easily separated from the expansive protest tradition that has also found the Declaration useful and relevant. The Declaration ironed over some of the more daring claims made by colonists, in the streets and in the press, between 1764 and 1776. Nevertheless, it justifies protest by grounding it in history as well as nature.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
Imagining Liberty
What does it mean to be a nation as opposed to a confederation of states? Americans have wrestled with this question even since the beginning as a nation. These reflections from the historian offer perspective for thinking about the ways in which the issue took shape in building the new nation.
A Historians Perspective
“The Declaration’s gestures to nature, to divine providence, and its tone of complaint are each part of its depiction of a community of fellow feeling.
All rhetoric tries to create a community of agreement, but it is notably explicit, and artful, in the Declaration – so much so that it can be seen as the document’s most important effect. It’s important, though, that the Declaration doesn’t claim to create that community: instead, it presumes its existence. To be more precise: it creates the nation by insisting it’s just recognizing American reality. British oppressions (“human events”) have created that “we.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
Many of the Declaration’s first readers – and hearers, at the public readings that Congress sanctioned – understood exactly what was being called for: popular ratification, en masse, the only kind of legitimacy that would be credible. Celebrations of the nation’s birth were anticipated, deliberate, necessary first responses to the Declaration. The new nation could not exist until the people spontaneously celebrated its existence in public and evidence of this happening all over the states appeared in print. A few days after New Yorkers heard the Declaration of Independence and toppled their equestrian statue of George III,
correspondent for a newspaper stated the self-evident logic of national birth – with an emphasis on national identity: “The fourth instant was rendered remarkable by the most important event that ever happened to the American Colonies; an event which will doubtless be celebrated through a long succession of future ages, by anniversary commemorations, and be considered a grand era in the history of the American states.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
The use of the plural for the colonies that, by the end, become states does not diminish the force of this American identity. From the beginning, the explicit inclusion of the “free and independent states” as parties to a compact that “united” them has led some to insist that the Declaration created only a confederation of states, not a nation. On the other hand, it is also very clear that on both the parchment and first printed copies that Congress acts in the name of the “United States of America,” even if their representatives in Congress were representing their states.
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.
A Historians Perspective
In his Fourth of July addresses of 1821 and 1831 and later speeches in Congress, President John Quincy Adams insisted that the Declaration was a national compact. It didn’t mention the individual states, and nothing about the division of sovereignty under the subsequent Articles of Confederation or the Constitution made the U.S. any less a nation. “Their union preceded their independence,” he insisted, both in reality and in the text itself. “It was the act of one people.” This was important to say in principle not just because a few states were refusing to follow federal laws in 1831, but also because “in the history of the world, this was the first example of a self-constituted nation proclaiming to the rest of mankind the principles on which it was associated.”
That Adams could make the argument, and that he had to make the argument, shows that the Declaration has been a bedrock of American nationality – and that nationalism has had limits in a union of states. It was the beginning of a long history of arguments about the nation-state’s evolving federal structure and about the nature and content of American national identity.”
Audio narration generated via AI synthesis.