Jefferson’s Reply.
In a short paper like this it is impossible to examine each of these criticisms in detail. The teacher who is interested can easily find in Friedenwald and in Tyler and in the other authorities mentioned above full and adequate discussion of each of these charges. Here it must suffice to say in answer to the first charge that Jefferson himself in a letter to Madison, dated August 30, 1823, declared, “I did not consider it any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether, and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.... I thought it a duty to be, on that occasion, a passive auditor of the opinions of others, more impartial judges than I could be of its merits and demerits.” In other words, Jefferson’s task was not to invent, as French publicists were prone to do on such occasions, new theories of government, but simply to express the ideas which were the product of the political discussion which was going on about him, and which would be familiar and acceptable to the men in America and in Europe to whom the Declaration was addressed.
That the document is partisan is of course true; but this is scarcely a valid criticism. Neither Jefferson nor any of his colleagues claimed to sit as judges between the colonies and the mother country. They were bound merely to put their claims as strongly as they could, and then leave the judgment of the case to “a candid world.”
Third, as long at the Declaration be studied merely as an historical document, it matters not whether its theories be false or true; it matters only that the student understand how completely its principles dominated the minds of the men who had a share in drawing up the document and the minds of men both in America and in Europe to whom it was addressed.