This temperate criticism from an able and a liberal English statesman of the present century may be said to touch the very core of the problem as to the historic justice of our great indictment of the last King of America; and there is deep significance in the fact that this is the very criticism upon the document, which, as John Adams tells us, he himself had in mind when it was first submitted to him in committee, and even, when, shortly afterward, he advocated its adoption by Congress. After mentioning certain things in it with which he was delighted, he adds:
“There were other expressions which I would not have inserted if I had drawn it up—particularly that which called the king tyrant. I thought this too personal; for I never believed George to be a tyrant in disposition and in nature. I always believed him to be deceived by his courtiers on both sides of the Atlantic, and in his official capacity only cruel. I thought the expression too passionate, and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document; but, as Franklin and Sherman were to inspect it afterwards I thought it would not become me to strike it out. I consented to report it.”
A more minute and a more poignant criticism of the Declaration of Independence has been made in recent years by still another English writer of liberal tendencies, who, however, in his capacity as critic, seems here to labor under the disadvantage of having transferred to the document which he undertakes to judge much of the extreme dislike which he has for the man who wrote it, whom, indeed, he regards as a sophist, as a demagogue, as quite capable of inveracity in speech, and as bearing some resemblance to Robespierre “in his feline nature, his malignant egotism, and his intense suspiciousness, as well as in his bloody-minded, yet possibly sincere, philanthropy.” In the opinion of Prof. Goldwin Smith, our great national manifesto is written “in a highly rhetorical strain; it opens with sweeping aphorisms about the natural rights of man, at which political science now smiles, and which ... might seem strange when framed for slave-holding communities by a publicist who himself held slaves”; while, in his specifications of fact, it “is not more scrupulously truthful than are the general utterances” of the statesman who was its scribe. Its charges that the several offensive acts of the king, besides “evincing a design to reduce the colonists under absolute despotism,” “all had as their direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny,” are simply “propositions which history cannot accept.” Moreover, the Declaration “blinks the fact that many of the acts, styled steps of usurpation, were measures of repression, which, however unwise or excessive, had been provoked by popular outrage. No government could allow its officers to be assaulted and their houses sacked, its loyal lieges to be tarred and feathered, or the property of merchants sailing under its flag to be thrown by lawless hands into the sea.” Even “the preposterous violence and the manifest insincerity of the suppressed clause” against slavery and the slave-trade “are enough to create suspicion as to the spirit in which the whole document was framed.”
III
Finally, as has been already intimated, not even among Americans themselves has the Declaration of Independence been permitted to pass on into the enjoyment of its superb renown, without much critical disparagement at the hands of statesmen and historians. No doubt Calhoun had its preamble in mind when he declared that “nothing can be more unfounded and false” than “the prevalent opinion that all men are born free and equal”; for “it rests upon the assumption of a fact which is contrary to universal observation.” Of course, all Americans who have shared to any extent in Calhoun’s doctrines respecting human society could hardly fail to agree with him in regarding as fallacious and worthless those general propositions in the Declaration which seem to constitute its logical starting point, as well as its ultimate defense.
Perhaps, however, the most frequent form of disparagement to which Jefferson’s great state paper has been subjected among us is that which would minimize his merit in composing it, by denying to it the merit of originality. For example, Richard Henry Lee sneered at it as a thing “copied from Locke’s Treatise on Government.” The author of a life of Jefferson, published in the year of Jefferson’s retirement from the presidency, suggests that the credit of having composed the Declaration of Independence “has been perhaps more generally, than truly, given by the public” to that great man. Charles Campbell, the historian of Virginia, intimates that some expressions in the document were taken without acknowledgment from Aphra Behn’s tragi-comedy, “The Widow-Ranter, or the History of Bacon in Virginia.” John Stockton Littell describes the Declaration of Independence as “that enduring monument at once of patriotism, and of genius and skill in the art of appropriation”—asserting that “for the sentiments and much of the language” of it, Jefferson was indebted to Chief Justice Brayton’s charge to the grand jury of Charleston, delivered in April, 1776, as well as to the Declaration of Independence said to have been adopted by some citizens of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in May, 1775. Even the latest and most critical editor of the writings of Jefferson calls attention to the fact that a glance at the Declaration of Rights, as adopted by Virginia on the 12th of June, 1776, “would seem to indicate the source from which Jefferson derived a most important and popular part” of his famous production. By no one, however, has the charge of a lack of originality been pressed with so much decisiveness as by John Adams, who took evident pleasure in speaking of it as a document in which were merely “recapitulated” previous and well-known statements of American rights and wrongs, and who, as late as in the year 1822, deliberately wrote:
“There is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before. The substance of it is contained in the declaration of rights and the violation of those rights, in the Journals of Congress, in 1774. Indeed, the essence of it is contained in a pamphlet, voted and printed by the town of Boston, before the first Congress met, composed by James Otis, as I suppose, in one of his lucid intervals, and pruned and polished by Samuel Adams.”