So, researchers believe they found an authentic, second copy of the Declaration of Independence in Chichester, England. Reporters claim the only other copy is the original kept at the National Archives in Washington, DC. Well, this got me to thinking (dangerous, I know)…
Did King George even read the dang thing? And, if so, why would the King have been so kind as to return it to the US to have as a memento? Wouldn’t King George have torn up or burned the document in a fit of rage? Maybe the small print said making stray marks, mutilating, and/or not returning this copy in 20 days would be considered an act of war?
Googling did not help answer this…only the same old, same old we’ve heard since elementary school. I sure hope dear old John Hancock’s efforts were not in vain! What’s the SD on this?
The one they’ve just found is written on parchment, which would make it quite difficult to tear up. More to the point, it dates from the 1780s, by which time printed versions of the declaration were in wide circulation, so it didn’t contain any news. It’s original in the sense that it bears original signatures of the signers (but not grouped by state, as they were the first time round) but it seems to have been created as a souvenir piece. And we don’t know when it came to England; it may have been long after George III’s time.
Did George III ever read the Declaration of Independence? He would certainly have been briefed about it, and he could have read it - a print version - if he cared to. If his reaction on hearing about it was “a fit of rage”, I don’t know that anybody bothered to record the fact. I don’t think the founding fathers sent him an original Declaration; they simply publicised the fact that they had made the Declaration. Surely the act of sending him an original Declaration would have been to symbolically acknowledge the very authority/jurisdiction that they were repudiating?
Obviously, it’s not the only copy. What it is, according to the article in The New York Times about it, “is the only other 18th-century handwritten parchment Declaration known to exist besides the one from 1776 now displayed at the National Archives in Washington. It isn’t an official government document, like the 1776 parchment, but a display copy created in the mid-1780s, the researchers argue, by someone who wanted to influence debate over the Constitution.”
And those aren’t “original signatures” on the bottom of this document. Here’s a paper about it.
I seriously doubt that old George went into a fit of rage.
One thing we Americans don’t get in our over-simplified and patriotically themed grade school history lessons is just how unimportant the U.S. colonies were at the time.
To put it in perspective, imagine that we’re having trouble in Alaska, Hawaii, and Texas, and we’ve got bad economic troubles everywhere, and we end up losing Guam due to strong interference from Russia and a bit of help from other folks like China. With big states on the line, most folks would be like meh, we can live without Guam. No biggie.
That’s kinda how it was. France and Britain had been tussling all through the 1700s. Britain had economic issues, and had issues with its territories all over the world (Canada, India, Australia, territories elsewhere in the Americas that had much more valuable cash crops at the time, all kinds of troubles in Europe, etc)… Britain and France were the big guys on the block, like the U.S. and Russia are today. And the U.S. was just a little pawn in a big game, no more important to the future of Britain than Guam is to us today.
Even with France’s interference at the time, Britain still could have squashed our revolution like a bug. But doing so would have required pulling large amounts of troops away from territories that were considered to be significantly more important. George wasn’t willing to risk those other territories, so those troops stayed put.
I’m sure George wasn’t exactly happy to lose the colonies, but I can’t see him going into a fit of rage over them. They just weren’t all that important in the grand scheme of things. He was probably more pissed off at France for meddling.
Well, your quote shows that they considered themselves to be dissolving their connection not with the king, but with the British people. And, yes, while they wanted to declare their reasons for this, they didn’t want to declare them to the king in particular; rather, to the world. Which they do by making and publicising the Declaration (there’s a clue in th name) of Independence. But nothing in this project requires that the they deliver the Declaration of Independence to the King, or even address it to the King (it is not so addressed, significantly).
One of the things it took me a while to realize is that the colonists were big supporters of the monarchy at first. Their real beef was with Parliament, which was the organization creating all these taxes and refusing to allow any colonial representation. There were several years where the colonists kept looking to the King to save them from the tyrannical Parliament.
It was only after they realized that King George didn’t give a shit about their plight, and if anything was on Parliament’s side in demanding more taxes and revenues from the colonies, that they exasperatingly declared independence. And they addressed the Declaration to King George, not Parliament, because the King was the sovereign who had let them down in not reining in the excesses of the democratically elected “mob”.
It gives a better perspective to the way our Constitution was drafted, where originally no part of government but the House of Representatives was democratically elected. It makes it more understandable why some “patriots” would ask George Washington if he wanted to be King. For the most part, the Founding Fathers really weren’t fans of democracy, because democracy is what created Parliament, and Parliament was their real enemy, not the King.
Of course, the “Founding Fathers” were a lot of different people with varied ideas and motivations, but the “Parliament sucks, too bad the King didn’t have any balls” perspective is one that is under reported in today’s history classes, I think.
King George III would have already been pissed off at the Colonies … the war actually started on April 19, 1775 with the battles of Lexington and Concord … over a year before the Declaration of Independence was issued …
A sentiment very much in tune with our modern times. Lots of people thought they were voting for Emperor Donald the First. And were happy to do so. :eek:
But the Declaration is not addressed to King George. The text makes it very clear that it is a message to the world at large (If nothing else, note that it refers to ‘the present King of Great Britain’ and then uses the third person (‘He’) to describe his actions; it would be the second person (‘you’) if it were written to the King).
And, the Declaration is hardly a complaint that the King didn’t do enough to save them from the horrible Parliament; much more the opposite (one complaint is that “He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”)
Now, I’d agree that this could be in large part the result of tactical decisions about messaging, but it’s certainly not evidence that ‘the colonists’ as a whole supported King George over Parliament. Some certainly did, but others certainly didn’t, and I’m no historian, but I’d bet overall there was certainly a preference for an actually representative Legislature over a King (after all, that’s what the United States ended up with…)
Speaking to Parliament after he received the Declaration, he said:
George III was dead set against reigning over the breakup of the British Empire. The colonies may not have had giant military significance in European conflicts, but George was intent that the rebellion be stopped. He had earlier asked Parliament for troops to send against the colonists, warning that a domino effect might be the result of leaving the colonies alone.
This is correct, and it is very important to understand the Declaration’s purpose.
Yes and no; You are correct in assaessing the Declaration as it stands, but it’s not exactly true in the greater sense of why it produced in the first place. IN essence, the Colonials already had governments, which, they felt, had certain political and legal rights within the larger British Empire - which did not give Parliament power over them. They did not specifically have too many problems with the usual royal officials, as long as they stayed within the traditional role and weren’t too corrupt.
The problem leading into the Revolution was that, first, Parliament asserted direct authority over the colonies, and second, they were incredibly bad at it. Note that none of the colonies were chartered by Parliament, nor did any of them accept Parliamentary control, especially as it was basically a mass of badly-designed policies which inflicted real damage for no gain.
Well, you’re mixing theory with practice. Colonials would have been extremely eager to back a monarch who played the role formally described and protected their rights. George III was an exceptionally weak king who did neither, at least as far as the colonial assemblies were concerned. It wasn’t that they would be happy to obey the King; it was that they already had representative governments and a chief executive.
A direct comparison isn’t easy, but imagine that Canada was a U.S. territory, but with its own legislature that happened to share the same President. Canadians would be pissed if Congress started arbitrarily making policy for them. Same idea, except there were specific charters involved that Parliament was deliberately trying to suborn, not realizing that without these the British government had no legal authority anyhow and doing so was highly destructive to their own legitimacy. Parliament, for its side, had virtually no understanding of the colonies whatsoever, even to the bare minimums of “stuff you need to know” like populations, borders, and etc. In addition, its policies were almost entirely self-defeating, as even contemporaries pointed out. One of the serious downsides of Parliament in that day is that was by no means really representative, but instead served an extremely narrow class of gentry with some highly dubious sympathies and often limited understanding of the world. It would take another generation and the shocks of the Industrial Revolution, a free and independent America, and the Napoleonic Wars to completely break the old system.
This is… not true. There are many people who think it is true, but there are a number of facts this view ignores. For colonies by this time held something like a quarter of British manpower, so losing it was more akin to the United States losing an entire region of the country. For another, it follows the fatally flawed misunderstanding that too many in Britain followed. Some people in England probably believed it, but it wasn’t true. If anything, just the opposite; the colonies were bursting over with wealth, but had a near-permanent lack of coin. But the colonies, and no the Caribbean or Bengal, were by far the richest jewels in the British Empire, except the British paid them no mind. In terms of agricultural output and real productivity, the colonies were leaping ahead and desperate to take advantage of their immense trove of technical and scientific talent. The British government, however, tended only to see the commodities trade and the taxes that resulted.
I don’t mean this figuratively; the British government structure was deeply broken and heavily taxed commodities. We often think of the Boston Tea Party, but almost every trade-able good was being taxed forspecie, which was a problem because Americans, lacking specie, needed to trade in physical goods. However, the system was strained to the breaking point even in Great Britain, where smuggling was universal, and tax increases repeatedly ended up destroying the very system they relied on, by making goods so expensive they were no longer consumed. At the same time being so insular that virtually none of the political class ever visited the New World at all, let alone attempted to understand how colonials lived.
Why would you assume that ? The whole point of a declaration is to declare. That is to say, say some shit. And you don’t say some shit to nobody, you need an audience to say some shit to. Or at, in this case.
The Declaration was meant to be heard by all colonists, sure ; but it was also intended for the Old Country, to essentially tell it “we think y’all fucked up, here’s why and how”. That goes to the people who made up the Old Country, but the King too.
You can’t say that your argument is true and at the same time say that ecg was wrong for claiming that the British considered the other colonies more important. Whatever some farthinking people in Britain argued at the time, the economic realities were that the America colonies were a, ahem, royal pain that cost more money than they were immediately worth. Most British leaders saw their worldwide empire as the country’s greatest asset in their perpetual conflicts with continental Europe, the only outsiders worth paying any attention to. America’s future value is far more apparent in hindsight than it possibly could have been in 1776.
The point on which I would disagree with ecg is this:
At the beginning of 1781, we had no government, no money, no trade, and no hopes of gaining any. Our largest cities were under British control, farmers were deserting to tend to their homes, crops, and families, and Benedict Arnold, one of our top generals, had just gone over to other side. There were 6000 French troops in Newport doing absolutely nothing at all. If France hadn’t decided to commit a huge last minute thrust of fresh troops, money, and supplies into Virginia, public opinion would very likely have swung against the revolution.
Could the British have still squashed us like a bug after France fully committed? It would have taken a huge effort and huge amounts of time. It would have precipitated a full-scale European proxy war. It would have devastated America. And almost certainly it would have destroyed the revolution even if Britain lost, because France would undoubtedly demanded the colonies become French dependents for all the money it had cost them - just like the British thought after all the money they spent on protecting us during the French and Indian War.
I dislike counterfactuals; you can say almost anything without being gainsaid. The American revolution itself is one of the most amazing oddities in world history. I’m just saying I read the situation differently from either of you.
It doesn’t have forged signatures. It doesn’t have signatures period. It just has the names of the signers written by the same person who wrote out the rest of the document. From the academic paper recently presented about it, “At 24” x 30.5” this parchment is on the same ornamental scale as the Matlack Declaration housed in the National Archives. The only other known parchment manuscript of the Declaration, the Matlack Declaration, was signed by the delegates to Continental Congress. In contrast, the Sussex Declaration includes the list of signatories, but with all the names written in the hand of a single clerk.”
