Join us Tuesday, 30 April 2024, from 4-5 p.m. ET for a Fellow's Forum with Steven Sarson, Professor of American Civilization at Jean Moulin University, Lyon, France.
Held in the Berkeley Conference Room of the Jefferson Library this research forum will consist of a presentation by Professor Sarson, followed by an opportunity to ask questions and discuss with the group.
Preregistration is not required to attend.
About the Presentation
The Declaration of Independence has never been taken seriously by historians as an account of the causes of the American Revolution. That is perhaps partly due to its apparent concern with self-evident truths of equality and unalienable rights to be implemented in the future rather than with the temporal and historical doings of flawed men, but also because of the supposed flaws in its arguments—its blaming of the king rather than parliament and the supposed opacity of the grievances. Yet the Declaration’s authors claimed to be declaring “the causes which impel them to the separation” and they offered “Facts” to “prove” to “a candid world” their fundamental argument that “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” This presentation does not argue that the Declaration provides the only possible account of the causes of the Revolution, but it does argue that the revolutionaries’ official account of their own actions ought to be taken seriously for what it purported to be.
The paper shows that Declaration’s moral-philosophical analysis (its theory and methods) was based on “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” (international law in the eighteenth century) that entitled Americans to a place among the powers of the earth, and which (according to Locke and others) were guides for and measures of human actions and institutions. Its historical analysis was based on “the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here,” wherein colonists brought English rights with them and established new rights by founding property and government in America. Those circumstances (as frequently elaborated in revolutionary pamphlets, petitions etc) established the king—not parliament—as the only British authority in the colonies and as the protector of colonists’ rights, and it was thus appropriate that the Declaration blamed him for the colonists’ grievances. Those grievances were not opaque to those who had lived through and read copious contemporary literature about the events alluded to, and, moreover, presenting the grievances in general terms allowed them to be read historically—as violations of colonists’ natural rights as “men,” inherited rights as Englishmen, and acquired rights as Americans. The final five grievances, concerning the king’s abdication and war against his colonial subjects, combined with proof of intent via his rejection of petitions, marked the moment, described in the preamble, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism” and so it became “their right” and indeed “duty, to throw off such Government” in accord with the first law of nature and God—self-preservation. This was thus the “When” it was in “the course of human events” that separation became “necessary.” The Declaration thus presented a highly sophisticated and, in contemporary terms, convincing argument for Revolution.
About Professor Sarson
Steven Sarson was born and raised in the Midlands of England, did his BA at the University of East Anglia, his PhD at Johns Hopkins University under Jack Greene and Ron Walters, and has taught at Towson State University in Baltimore, Swansea University in Wales, and is now Professor of American Civilization at Jean Moulin University, Lyon, France. He has published three books: The Tobacco Plantation South and the Early American Atlantic World;British America: Creating Colonies, Imagining an Empire; and Barack Obama: American Historian; plus numerous book chapters and journal articles, including in the Journal of Economic History, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the William and Mary Quarterly. He also co-edited with Jack P. Greene an eight-volume documents collection on The American Colonies and the British Empire. His current book project, from which the paper derives, is ‘When in the Course of human events’: History and Historical Consciousness in the US Declaration of Independence and is due to be published by the University of Virginia Press in 2025. He is currently working on that project as a Peter Nicolaison Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello.