Rethinking the Declaration at 250: The grievances that started America

"All men are created equal", "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"... We've learned and heard people talk about the preamble of the Declaration of Independence many times over the years, but what about the rest of it? We sit down with Binghamton University professor Robert Parkinson to discuss the 27 grievances, how the Declaration nearly fell apart, and how two little quotation marks change our entire understanding of America's most famous document.

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ROBERT: The bulk of the Declaration of Independence is a list of twenty-seven specific grievances against King George — the part the founders actually agonized over. And yet we almost never talk about it.

DAVID: So we've been reading the wrong part this whole time?

ROBERT: In a sense, yes. If you want to understand why independence happened when it did, you have to read the part everyone skips.

[MUSIC]

DAVID: I'm David Hermanovitch and this is The Aha! Moment presented by Binghamton University. Thank you for joining us today. You may know already that America's 250th birthday is taking place in just a few short weeks on July 4th and today's episode we're going back to where it all began: The Declaration of Independence. It's right up there with documents that changed the course of world history. You think the Magna Carta, the Treaty of Versailles, the Cyrus Cylinder, and certainly one that's of great importance to us here in the United States, along with our Constitution, but are we reading it correctly? I'm joined today by Robert Parkinson, a history professor at Binghamton University, and he's just released a book called "Tyrants & Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence", which is in stores now. His book takes a deep dive into the list of 27 grievances listed against King George in the declaration, and more importantly, how those grievances can help reframe our view of the American Revolution. So thank you, Robert, for joining us today.

ROBERT: Good to be with you.

DAVID: So, this is a very interesting topic because I think when most people think of the declaration, they think of, first of all, the impact, and how it sort of, it was officially, you know, declaring our intent to separate from the crown. And I think a lot of people think of the preamble, and a lot of the language in that, but, you know, we want to focus on a part of the declaration today that you've studied extensively and that a lot of people probably don't really realize when they're either thinking of the declaration or they're watching National Treasure and Nic Cage is talking about stealing it.

ROBERT: Right, right, yes.

DAVID: So first of all, what initially drew you to wanting to look at these grievances through this lens to, you know, to really reexamine how we think about the declaration?

ROBERT: Well, one of the reasons why is no one has done a study like that in more than 100 years. And so it was just in the years after the First World War, actually, when someone did a actual real investigation as to what, what was Jefferson, the Congress on about in these grievances.So I thought it was certainly high time. And in all of our many, many, many, many, many, many studies of the declaration, why is it that this part, the body of the declaration has gotten such short attention? So I thought that it was time to revisit that. And so I started to think about, back when I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia, I worked on a Declaration of Independence exhibit, the permanent exhibit that's still there if you visit the UVA grounds, you can go see it still at the Special Collections library at UVA. And all of those, and one of the things I was working on with that was just a real sort of almost word by word, investigation of the declaration. It's been a part of my research for almost 25 years. And so I thought it was time to revisit the whole Declaration of Independence.

DAVID: So before we get into some of the specific grievances that you discuss in your book and sort of how this impacts our thinking about it, how do you — what was your process in terms of going through the grievances and not only looking at them, but seeing how there might be misconceptions about them? Discuss a little bit more about your process and actually kind of determining that.

ROBERT: Sure. I had, you know, the exercise of just telling readers what 5 or 6 or 9 or 14 actually were referring to, like which acts of Parliament or which sort of tyrannical acts of the King does. It doesn't make for very exciting reading. So what really kind of brought the book together for me was to turn each grievance into a person. And so in "Tyrants and Rogues", each charge begins, mostly begins with an exploration of the person, the faces behind the grievances. The person by which, when colonists in 1776 read the declaration, these were the people they were thinking about. So each chapter, I start, of course, with King George, but then as I move through the grievances, I also move through what I refer to as a "rogues gallery of the revolution", all the villains behind the — so you have Lord North and General Thomas Gage and the Virginia governor Lord Dunmore and some other people you might not know as well, but these are the villains of the story in 1776. And so I talk about them, talk about their careers. I talk about their families and how they got to the positions they got and their wives and children and what happened to them afterwards. So it's a human look into the grievances. Because that was really what they were about in 1776.

DAVID: So when — because the grievances were truly the crux of what the declaration was about. I mean, obviously the preamble is very important and it has a lot of good language into it. At what point in your research did you feel confident the founders themselves saw these grievances as the main event? And how do you — you mentioned a little bit framing these grievances as people — but how do you, while the ways that you have in your book to really drive home the fact that, "Hey, this is what we should be paying attention to when looking at the declaration."

ROBERT: Well, I think the answer is as simple as that was what they paid most attention to on the second and third of July. If we look at — so the declaration is broken up into three parts. There's the two-paragraph introduction where all the stuff that you might have learned as a kid is. That's where all the words about self-evident truths and inalienable rights and pursuits of happiness are. So there's a two-paragraph opening and then the body of 27 grievances. And then the two-paragraph conclusion that sums up what we get to do now that we are independent. We get to do all the things that free and independent states do, like levy war and make peace and trade, etc., etc. When we look at what Congress spent their time working on, editing Jefferson's rough draft on the second and third of July, the bulk of their attention is on the grievances. Those first opening paragraphs are pretty much Jefferson. There are just a few little tweaks here and there in those opening paragraphs, because I think Congress felt like what he was conveying there was fine. But the real thing they wanted to absolutely get right was, make sure the group — so you see a tremendous amount of cutting. Whole grievances at the end get deleted. Two of them get deleted. They're spending a lot of time focusing, especially on the very last four or five grievances. That's where they felt like — and I think that's the climax of the declaration — and that's what they wanted to make sure they got that part right. The whole declaration is about making sure the world understands we don't do this for light and transient causes, that this is a justified and principled revolution. This is not a hot-headed, impassioned temper tantrum by the American colonies. And so getting the reasons why, presenting to the candid world the exact reasons why we are taking this step, was an incredibly important burden of proof for Congress to get, to achieve. And that's where in the body — that's where that work gets done.

DAVID: Why was there so much back and forth? Did it have to do with, like, different interests — for instance, northern states versus southern states? Did it have a lot to do with different interests of where the different congressmen came from?

ROBERT: Yeah. Absolutely. The word that is floating around the entire process of declaring independence is the word "union". Union and unity is the essential thing. They understood that they had to get everyone on board with what they were doing here, and frankly, I'm teaching a class that's walking through the process of declaring independence in real time, and walking through those last nine weeks of colonial America, you see just how much contingency there is. And in fact, Maryland only gets permission to vote for independence — their delegates have to have instructions in order to vote yes or no — and they get that the morning of the vote. And Delaware — their delegation is locked, one for and against, and a man who's dying of cancer has to ride through the night through a fort. He says through thunder and rain to get to Philadelphia to break the tie. If we think about how wet the paint is for getting permission to declare independence, you can't touch the paint. It's so wet. We're talking about minutes, not days or weeks, that everybody kind of gets on board and they actually get across the line. I mean, New York actually doesn't. New York never gets instructions, so they abstain. So the vote is actually 12 yes, zero nay, and one abstention, because New York is going to sign on after the fact. But this is how fragile this whole project is.

DAVID: So how easily could it have fallen apart? I mean, it was very close.

ROBERT: Oh, you want to take — I mean, it was very close. Oh, my gosh. I mean, you want to take — I say to my students all the time, the safe bet is to take all of your money and go to a casino and bet against the 13 colonies staying together. There's no reason why. I mean, and that's what the British are banking on — they're banking on the idea that there's no way there can be any kind of real sense of a continental union. The Continental Army or the Continental Congress is really a facade. That's what they're, that's the premise that they're acting upon, that this is a Massachusetts-only problem. And the fact that it does, that the 13 stay together — and even the most optimistic people like John Adams, who's the biggest optimist for the union came together on the second of July — he's saying "we're not all going to get along." Right? And this is a little bit of a spoiler alert for American history, but there is going to be a civil war between states. Right? So, the idea of a union being durable and lasting is not there on the fourth of July, 1776, and it's going to be this ever-long project going all the way through the middle of the 19th century.

DAVID: So what are some of the — and you can kind of list as many as you like — what are some of the grievances that you include in your book that you think either, maybe not took you by surprise as a scholar, but might for someone reading it? They might be like, "Oh, I wasn't quite aware of that," or it might help them — basically, any of these grievances that might actually kind of help reframe how a person might think about the American Revolution.

ROBERT: Well, you see, what's interesting in the declaration is how taxation just comes by the by. It is — I think it's grievance 14 or 15. It's in the list of the pretended legislations that were not allowed to be — that we are not supposed to be taxed without our representation, which is basically the unofficial motto of the American Revolution, but it comes kind of right in the very middle, and it just gets, passes you by. What reading the grievances shows you is just how concerned the patriots are about how to get justice in the empire. So there are multiple grievances about fighting for the right to jury, the right to having a venue, of being tried by your peers in your community — that's a really important thing for them. Representation, kind of as a broad thing, about representation in an assembly is something that they are very concerned about, not just for the prince. I mean, taxation is kind of the worst thing that you can do if you're not represented, but they're worried about being able to have purchase in and participation in their — the people that govern them. That is a very, very bedrock principle for them. And, you know, there are really fascinating stories, like the 12th grievance is about the military operating independent of the civil power. And the most egregious example of that is what happens in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island when the HMS Gaspée, which is a British warship, is impounding vessels that are leaving Rhode Island, either from Newport or Providence. They're impounding everything whatsoever. And the Rhode Island government is squawking about this. They're saying, "You can't intercept every single ship that we have." And the Royal Navy says, "Forget it. We're not going to listen to you at all. We're going to do this this way." And it turns into the HMS Gaspée at one point, and in 1772, runs aground. And a bunch of very angry vigilantes get in a boat and they ride after the Gaspée and burn it to the ground. And that turns into a whole investigation. They're trying to find who were the burners of the Gaspée. They're going to try those guys in England. So all these kind of — if they catch them, which they don't — and so all of these issues come together. But those kinds of thinking about what relationship does the military have to civil authority or control is also something that these are things that we are all very concerned about today.

DAVID: Now looking at these grievances and going through your studies, and then you fast forward to today and you hear how a lot of people talk about the American Revolution — politicians of both sides very much like to hearken back to that and especially the declaration and why, you know, certain rights and they try to relate it to today. But where do you think the gap is for a lot of people in how they talk about the American Revolution and how they try to compare it to things that are going on today, but they may not be, you know, accessing that information correctly or drawing that parallel directly?

ROBERT: I mean, the language in the declaration — actually just the look of the declaration, the one that we are associated with, the one that's under glass at the National Archives, looks like an ancient text, right? It looks like it's 200 years old, but it could be 2000 years old. It's all this scribbled kind of, this block of print and these wide, looping signatures at the bottom. That could be something that almost looks like it could be as much from the Middle Ages as it could be from today. And so there is this disconnect, I think, with the language. I was just at a conference a couple of weeks ago — it was a panel on how to teach the declaration. And one of the people said that they ran the text of it through one of these things that tells you what grade level the language is at. And it's the 30th grade, or you need a 30th-grade education. Now, I don't know what that says about us, about what was a pretty public document in 1776 and now you have to go through grade 30 to understand it. So maybe our grades have fallen to a significant degree, but that language, I think, lends itself to that disconnect. But they are very much things we are worried about today. How do you — what are the people that we elect beholden to us? Are — what role do the people have in government? Well, how do we get justice if infractions happen? Is the military under civil control? And what happens? What do we do if — I mean, in many ways what the grievances are showing us is these were their red line. These were their deal breakers. And in many ways, those are warnings to us that these should probably be yours too. Right? These are the things that we've inherited. And I don't exactly know what to do about that because the idea of — I mean, what the implications are is there should be some sort of overturning of a government. And at that point, that becomes this incredibly fraught and very, very violent situation — violent in 1776, but ever much more so with our ways of lethality. It's a scary prospect. But these are things that they identified as what were the ideas that we should hold most dear.

DAVID: Now that we're coming up on America's 250th birthday, I know there's a lot of feelings of patriotism, pride in the country. And I'm not saying those are bad things, but what are some things that people should keep in mind to sort of keep us in check, to make sure we're not venturing too far into the territory of blind praise? No matter what our government, regardless of who's in charge, does.

ROBERT: Right. Well, I mean — so the last five grievances of the declaration, so the 27 are broken up into three groups. The first 12 are acts that the king — they're acts of executive overreach. So things that the executive order, the crown, the king and his ministers have done wrong. The next ten after that are about acts of Parliament — so things that the legislature has done, the acts of their pretended legislation, quote unquote. And the last five are about the war. And so, but the last — they were supposed to be seven in the last group. Jefferson actually turned in a list of 29 grievances, not 27. And I think what I'm about to say answers your question, but also leads into my "aha!" moment, which happened in the classroom over on Binghamton's campus right after Thanksgiving of last year. And I ran it last fall in a scholar's class with a bunch of honors students, none of them who were history majors, so a lot of this happened against their will. But I think we learned some things. And what I'm about to say, I learned — so again, as I said at the top, I've been teaching the declaration for more than 20 years, and yet there are things to learn about it. And I've spent a good time — I've written two books that feature the 27th grievance of the declaration very, very heavily in my work. I'm a historian of the revolution and how race-making really was at the core of how the union actually — how that glue of unity actually stuck together and how race was really at the heart of that. And so I've talked about the 27th grievance, and the 27th grievance actually says, "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us and his endeavor to bring on the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." And the word "domestic" is a 1770s euphemism for enslaved people — that slave owners would often talk about their "domestics" as a way of talking about their enslaved people. It was very, very prominent at the time. So it's a double shot against the Crown: he has used enslaved people and native peoples to try to put down the rebellion. It's the last grievance. And I think it's the climax, so race lives — if that is the climax — lives at the very heart of the Declaration of Independence. And that's something we've understood for a long time, but when I was going through very, very minutely, with a fine-tooth comb, about how that happens, I noticed something I'd never seen before when I was doing this with students in the fall. Jefferson — the draft that Jefferson turned in — there are two grievances that were deleted. There was a long 168-word screed against the Atlantic slave trade that made a lot of people — and Jefferson later on says not just southerners, but northerners too — uncomfortable, because it was calling them out for participating in the Atlantic slave trade, of which Rhode Island and Massachusetts provided the ships and the crews for those slave ships, too. So they were also kind of on the hook for this. And at the end of that grievance, Jefferson pivots to say — and now the people who have been — and there's some fantastic language in that: he calls the slave trade "execrable commerce", "an assemblage of horrors". He refers to it as "piratical warfare". He is really, as the kids say, "in his feels" about the slave trade. And Congress cuts almost all of that out, but leaves in the end of that grievance, which is about how he is now exciting those people to take up arms against us. And when they cut that out, they also cut out the one above it, which is about this — he has tried to encourage treasonable insurrections, but by that he means kind of loyalists, by promising them fortune and property or something like that, and that grievance gets cut too. We don't exactly know why. It's a little bit wonky as to who he's referring to. When they make those cuts, Congress actually adds the five words "he has excited domestic insurrections amongst us." And they insert it right before — they create this double shot. Jefferson doesn't do it. But where it would have happened would have been the second to last grievance, if you're following me here. So the last one would have been — what would have been 27 would have been this argument about impressment and exciting — what does he say? — encouraging people to fight against, become executioners of their friends and brethren and fight against them on the high seas. That in the declaration now is the second to last grievance, because they swap the order, and there are tiny little pencil marks on Jefferson's manuscript that suggest the order was swapped. So that means — this is why I was stunned. I couldn't believe that I had not noticed this before, because none of the other sequences, none of the other things have been changed to this degree. So what they did — this is what I figured out in real time in front of the classroom. I was like, "Oh my God, guys, look at this! They swap the order!" So I've been arguing for 20 years that race is at the climax of the declaration. And those two little pencil marks are the proof. And I was stunned. I couldn't believe it. The kids were like, "Yeah, whatever, Parkinson." But I couldn't believe it — I couldn't believe it, that they actually — so they didn't want to end it with impressment, but when they added that one, they had to swap the order. And no one has — only one scholar in 1943 has noticed that they did that. And all he said was "Congress swapped the sequence." He doesn't say why or so what? So I feel vindicated that race is at the climax of the Declaration of Independence, and those two little pencil marks on the Library of Congress manuscript that Jefferson gave them is the proof.

DAVID: That's wild.

ROBERT: It is wild. And I'm calling it "the swap not heard around the world", because no one has noticed this. But I think that is it — just focusing on, so what that means, David, is somebody had to raise their hand and say we should swap the — somebody had to intentionally say, "Oh, let's swap these two." I don't know who it was. Maybe it was Jefferson, I don't know, but somebody had to say, "All right, let's — when we were doing this..." And whenever Jefferson makes copies of his rough draft, he makes the swap silently, without telling anybody that he does that, even though it wasn't his idea. So this is fascinating to see the moves that they make and the care that they take at this particular point in this text.

DAVID: Of all the people who have studied the Declaration of Independence over the years, do you think it's — the reason why it went unnoticed — because it truly is almost like so subtle, those two little pencil marks, that it kind of slipped under the radar? Like, "Oh, this is kind of like some notations."

ROBERT: I mean, I think, I think it's a function of people don't really spend a lot of time thinking about the grievances. And it's very, very tiny. It's very subtle, but I think there's a huge amount of power and consequences in it, because what that's saying is all African Americans and native peoples are on the side of the king. There are no asterisks that say, "Well, except for the ones that are on our side," of which there were incredible amounts. I mean, the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War is the most integrated army the United States is going to field until the Vietnam War — almost ten percent of the Army, by the time we get to Yorktown, somewhere between nine and ten percent, we know are people of color. There are — more native people side with the crown, but not all of them do. The Oneida and the Catawba and the Tuscarora and the Stockbridge and the Mohican and some of the Delaware — and I could go on and on here — are on the American side. But they're all in this document: all "merciless Indian savages," or they're all "domestic insurrectionists." And I think that idea suggests they're also not Americans. They're not part of the "we" who hold these truths to be self-evident.

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DAVID: So if there's one thing that I take away from this research and this book, it's not only are there things that people sort of kind of gloss over and don't really realize about the Declaration of Independence, but also just how much of a process it was, and how possibly our view of everybody being unified against the crown right off the bat — no questions asked — might not be entirely true. How it was very much a process to sort of get everybody on the same page. I'm going to give you the final word. What do you want people to take away from your book?

ROBERT: Well, that's a great one. I mean, the idea of contingency in May, June and early July is at an absolute premium — that there are all sorts of ways in which this could go very, very differently than it did. That's an important one too, but also what I enjoyed most about writing this book was talking about the people who are behind these things. So introducing Governor Francis Bernard and his wife and prodigious amounts of children that are going to keep him on the edge of poverty and make him do some things in Massachusetts in the 1760s that he probably doesn't want to do. So thinking about the human side, and remembering the people that we've kind of castigated as villains, but thinking about kind of fleshing out their portrait — I think that was a lot of fun and I think the readers will like it.

DAVID: Well, thank you. That was Binghamton University History Professor Robert Parkinson. I'm David Hermanovitch, and this has been The Aha! Moment presented by Binghamton University. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back next month.