The Declaration of Independence announced to the world the intention of the American people to “assume among the powers of the Earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them.” Self-government was an undertaking for which Americans were uniquely equipped.
By the time they declared their independence, some of the original 13 colonies had been governing themselves for more than 150 years. An elected legislature first met to govern on behalf of the people of Virginia in 1619 in Jamestown. I traveled there with my family this summer, where you can still see the foundations of the church in which they met.
A year later, colonists aboard the Mayflower would sign what they called the Plymouth Combination — later known as the Mayflower Compact — to forge for themselves an agreement under which they would live in their new home in the wilderness. In 1630, the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts Bay colony inaugurated a tradition of democratic self-government that Alexis de Tocqueville, writing 200 years later, would call the true point of departure for American democracy.
The American colonies even wrote constitutions for themselves, including the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut and William Penn’s constitution for the colony of Pennsylvania. These were the rule rather than the exception.
Throughout the 1600s, with the Crown distracted by civil war at home and conflicts in Europe, the mother country largely left the colonies to fend for themselves. It was self-government born of benign neglect.
This is what makes the grievances in the Declaration so important. Assertions by Parliament and the king to govern the colonies directly, displacing colonial legislatures, was a disruption of local autonomy that had persisted for a century and a half.
Mature forms of self-government in the colonies were one of the reasons that the American Revolution was so successful. Revolutions are disruptive, violent and destabilizing. They often result in worse forms of government than they sought to overthrow.
The fundamental question for any responsible statesman considering whether to undertake a political revolution is what happens the morning after. The Declaration famously makes this point. After asserting the right of the people to alter or abolish their governments when they become destructive of their rights, the Declaration asserts a responsibility to “institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
The Declaration, then, is centrally concerned not just with a theoretical freedom but with an actual enjoyment of freedom and the pursuit of happiness under well-framed institutions that flow from the consent of the people and govern them competently.
Americans since the Founding have nurtured the inherited tradition of self-government through prolific constitution-making in the states, successfully navigating and ratifying at least 235 constitutions at the state level (taking into account the 50 original state constitutions and revisions made through state-level constitutional conventions).
In the 20th century, ambitious new utopian projects emerged in the form of Soviet communism and German national socialism. These totalitarian forms of government directly challenged the ideas of the Declaration of Independence. These visionary projects failed spectacularly. Their fruit was world war, poverty and genocide.
Through a decades-long struggle, the American founders’ experiment in self-government directed toward the modest aim of freedom won out over these tyrannies. Yet we should not rest on our laurels. Threats to the survival of free government are perennial. Utopian and theocratic projects, socialism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and plain-old demagoguery based on fear and envy all threaten to jettison freedom in political, religious and economic affairs and undermine the world’s remaining constitutional republics, including our own.
It is therefore essential to understand that this New World experiment was not simply a matter of ideas but a hard-won tradition of self-government. Americans learned how to frame constitutions and govern themselves together under the rule of law and ordered liberty over decades and centuries. That is a precious inheritance.
Our celebration of the 250th year of American independence is an opportune time to remember that the preservation and improvement of these inherited institutions and principles is the responsibility of every generation. Check out the resources the Center for Constitutional Studies and America250 Utah have compiled to mark this milestone.
Have a happy Fourth of July.