Review: The Declaration of Independence: Its Many Histories Author(s): David Armitage Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Apr., 2008), pp. 357-362 Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25096792 . Accessed: 19/05/2011 09:01 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=omohundro. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The William and Mary Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org The Declaration of Independence: ItsMany Histories David Armitage a A big book is big evil," quipped the Hellenistic poet Callimachus.1 A little book may be proportionately less nefarious, but it can still tackle large questions. In The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, I found myself moving outward from a close contextualiza tion to a of the Declaration nothing less than genealogy of the modern international order. My initial aim for the book had been more modest. I had wanted to contribute to the nascent movement to American put history into transnational perspective and had hoped that using the Declaration of Independence would be both an effective and a counterintuitive way to do so. Effective because most earlier students of the Declaration had over some more looked of its striking features: its eclectic appeal to different sources of its enumeration of the of states as well as the of law, rights rights the evidence it individuals, and furnished of theAmerican Founders' global vision. And counterintuitive because the meanings of this hallowed docu ment of American nationhood had rarely been considered in an interna tional context. its me to as Tracing reception abroad led collect many other declarations of independence, successful and unsuccessful, as I could find. Taken those documents indicated the together long-drawn-out emergence our of world of states from an earlierworld of empires. Small books can open up wide vistas, and in this respect my models were concise classics such as Felix Gilbert's To theFarewell Address, J. H. Elliott's The Old World and theNew, and Albert O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests.1 But can also their authors into they get big trouble. the to as Fortunately, contributors this forum have been gener ous in their remarks as are acute. on more matters they They touch of substance than I could hope to treat even in another book, let alone in a brief reply.They raise three questions, however, of particular importance. David is the Armitage Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard 1 University. Callimachus, frag. 465, in Rudolf Pfeiffer, ed., Callimachus (Oxford, 1949), 1: 353. 2 Felix To the Farewell Address: Ideas Gilbert, of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J., 1961); J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492-1650 (Cambridge, 1970); Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Its Arguments for Capitalism before Triumph (Princeton, N.J., 1977). William and Volume Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, LXV, Number 2, April 2008 358 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY Who responded to the Declaration? What part did it play in achieving independence? And how did it shape subsequent claims to rights and statehood? The answers to these the from questions again bring story to 1776 the present. a For such brief document, the Declaration made startlingly broad claims about its intended audience: "the Opinions ofMankind" (165), "a candid World" (166), and even, in Congress's final version, "the Supreme Judge of theWorld" (170). Robert A. Ferguson and Daniel J.Hulsebosch us was remind that the Declaration addressed to many "concentric audi a ences," each of which heard slightly different message.3 Congress's pri intentions were to transmute colonies into states and into mary subjects citizens and to inform the other "Powers of the Earth" (165) that it had so. seem to done Loyalists have grasped with particular immediacy the of that transformation for own within new implications their place the United States and the British Empire. They effectively became internal were to exiles who compelled issue counterdeclarations affirming their on dependence the British Crown and their independence from Congress.4 No unilateral declaration by Congress could alter their to birthright allegiance the king, and their status as British subjects would be debated well into the nineteenth century. Only African Americans seem to have taken the Declaration's as up message quite more as rapidly but much lastingly: early as 1776, free black and former minuteman Lemuel a Haynes precociously discerned charter for aboli tion in the Declaration's second Few American women paragraph. pub licly proclaimed the Declaration's liberatory potential before the mid-nineteenth century, and Native Americans?traduced in the docu ment as "merciless Indian Savages" (169)?did not do so until the late twentieth century. The Declaration's domestic audiences have thus expanded in the context of a constitutional order that was founded in 3 Robert A. "'A Global to Ferguson, History' Brought Down Size," William and no. 2 Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 65, (April 2008): 350-51 ("concentric audiences," 351); Daniel J.Hulsebosch, "The Declaration's Domestic International Effects," ibid., 354-56. 4 R. W. G. Vail, "The Loyalist Declaration of Dependence of November 28, New-York Historical no. 2 1776," Society Quarterly 31, (April 1947): 68-71; A Declaration Published the at a of Independence by Congress Philadelphia in 1776. With Counter-Declaration Published at New-York in in 1781, Silas Deane, Paris Papers; Or, Mr. Silas Late to Deane's Intercepted Letters, His Brothers, and Other Intimate Friends in America held at New-York 1-11 (New York, 1782), copy Historical Society, (sepa see rately paginated). On the Loyalists' postindependence status, [Francis Plowden], An theNative Investigation of Rights of British Subjects (London, 1784), 19-20, 24, 119; the Law . [Plowden], Disquisition Concerning ofAlienage and Naturalization (Paris, H. The 1818), 25-26, 34-35; James Kettner, Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1780 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 187-208; Daniel J. Hulsebosch, "A Discrete and The the Atlantic Cosmopolitan Minority: Loyalists, World, and the Origins of Judicial Review," Chicago-Kent Law Review 81, no. 3 (2006): 825-66. REVIEWS OF BOOKS 359 1787-91 with little direct reference to the promises of 1776 and that has sometimes been in conflict with them.5 was also slow in the Declaration's assertion The candid world accepting that the "United Colonies" were "Free and Independent States" (170).What was Lynn Hunt calls "the conundrum posed by declaring statehood" similar to the problem Jean-Jacques Rousseau had posed in 1762: "Man is born free, . come and everywhere he is in chains How did this change about? I do can not know. What can make it legitimate? I solve this question."6 The Continental Congress had been doing many of the "Acts and Things which some Independent States may of rightdo" (171) for months before July 1776; it even been secret aid from France. was it neces had receiving Why, then, a sary to declare independence at all? To render fact legitimate in the opin ions ofmankind, even if it took what Laurent Dubois calls "a curious sleight act of hand" to legitimate this of legitimation, "in the Name, and by at Authority of the good People of these Colonies" (170). The manifesto the heart of theDeclaration?the "History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, an over all having in direct Object the Establishment of absolute Tyranny have some observers that the revolution these States" (166)?may persuaded seizure of was But even that cannot how the ary power justifiable. explain what Hunt calls a "cascade of acts" that Declaration precipitated positive the Franco-American Treaties of overt French secured independence: 1778; aid; recognition by Spain, the Dutch Republic, Morocco, and others; and the British Crown's formal diplomatic acknowledgement in 1783 of "the said United States [as] Free, Sovereign, and Independent States."7 5 American see For early African readings of the Declaration, Lemuel Haynes, . "Liberty Further Extended ," 1776?, inWendell Family Papers, bMS Am 1907 (608), in Houghton Library, Harvard University, printed Ruth Bogin, "'Liberty Further no. 1 Extended': A 1776 Antislavery Manuscript by Lemuel Haynes," WMQ40, (January 1983): 85-105; Mia Bay, "See Your Declaration Americans!!! Abolitionism, Americanism, in and the Revolutionary Tradition Free Black Politics," in Americanism: New on an Perspectives the History of Ideal, ed. Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin to an (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), 25?52. My thanks Prof. Slauter for advance copy of his essay, Eric Slauter, "The Declaration of Independence and the New Nation," in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed.