The “circumstances of our emigration and settlement here”:

A fellow's forum with Steven Sarson, Professor of American Civilization at Jean Moulin University, Lyon, France from May 2, 2023. Recording available. 

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About the Presentation

We normally think of the Declaration of Independence as defined by its self-evident truths and as founding a nation on the principles of equality and unalienable rights, and that it therefore looked forward rather than backward, beginning the world anew and turning its back on the past. Yet the Declaration’s arguments for Independence and its implications for the new nation were embedded in the “course of human events” referred to in the document’s opening words, and that history was deeply connected to geography. The Declaration’s most obvious political-geographical implications were the break-up of the British empire and creation of a new nation. But what the document called “the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here” profoundly influenced Independence and the new nation’s future via the intersections of the varying origins and formations of peoples, property, and territories. For Jefferson, for example, migrants had abandoned their British subjecthood and created independent societies and polities that then formed the empire as a “league and amity” of still sovereign states. For Dickinson, the colonies had originated under royal charters and the empire was more unitary. The Continental Congress compromised by editing out Jefferson’s explanation of those circumstance in his draft, but in other ways the final Declaration leaned towards his ideas of an original American independence as the best way to gain international recognition of the US and to avoid legal and financial complications based on the idea of an original British jurisdiction.  

Furthermore, those circumstances had implications for the creations of peoples in colonial America and the United States. For both Jeffersonians and Dickinsonians, the colonists had done the work of colonization and conquest themselves, thereby earning inviolable rights to property and self-government. Also, those circumstances defined colonists as “peoples,” having their own legislatures (even for Dickinson, and the common nature of them paved the way for the “one people” of the Declaration’s introduction. Emigration and settlement also separated that “one people” from others in America who had not partaken in them in the same way. Settlers defined Native Americans as having little or no property or territory and therefore their lands as a state of nature, of “the common stock of mankind,” and therefore open to Euro-American settlement. Africans had arrived in America via the slave trade, and so Jefferson and others deemed them and their descendants as excluded from the process of state formation implied by “the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here.” The implications of the Declaration’s concepts of the origins of peoples, property, and territories could hardly have been more profound.

 

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.