Unsurprisingly, CalMeacham beat me to this quote (and the entire discussion) by three years.
Then what were that revolutionary war and that treaty all about?
It’s a political manifesto, not a legal document.
Just filing the divorce papers. Finally England got tired of the court case and paying for the lawyers and said “Take the house, don’t use our last name anymore, there’s plenty of other countries we can fuck.”
Well yeah, that was my point. Of course enforcing the legal status of the Articles was a problem because of the concept of maintaining so much sovereignty in the individual states leaving them to decide what rights the central government had. The Constitution tried to switch that around but still held the Union together with weak glue in order to get everyone to agree to it. Then after that… well, you know… history and stuff happened.
Yeah, well, if it hadn’t been for us, they’d all be speaking German. So there.
The Declaration of Independence is an apology in the original technical sense of the word. An explanation of why, in the colonies’ opinion, the Crown* had forfeited the loyalty of the colonial subjects. *Yes, by this time Parliament was for all practical purposes the sovereign; but the framers of the DoI followed the practice of pretending the King was still the ultimate authority.
I made an effort awhile back to paraphrase the DoI in modern language to try to get across better just what the colonials were bitching about:
Getting Britain to recognize that America was independent and no longer under their jurisdiction. The Treaty of Paris didn’t create our independence; it acknowledged it.
If we had written the DoI in German, maybe King George would have actually read it!
“Du bist eine scheissekopf, du bist eine scheissekopf, du bist eine scheissekopf, du kuhl, und du bist eine scheissekopf, ich ausfahrt.”
Oh, wait. That’s Half Baked.
George I or George II maybe. But George III considered himself to be English not German.