No American document has had a bigger global impact than the Declaration of Independence.
In February 2008, the majority Albanian population of Kosovo declared their independence of Serbia in a document designed to reassure the world that their cause offered no precedent for any similar separatist or secessionist movements. Above, Albanians celebrate in Vienna, Austria, after Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci read out the draft of the declaration of independence.
European Pressphoto AgencyThe Declaration of Independence is the birth certificate of the American nation—the first public document ever to use the name "the United States of America"—and has been fundamental to American history longer than any other text. It enshrined what came to be seen as the most succinct and memorable statement of the ideals on which the U.S. was founded: the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; the consent of the governed; and resistance to tyranny.
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The Declaration of Independence is one of the most important documents in the history of the United States. It marked an official step taken by the American colonies toward independence from British rule.
Many colonists were unhappy with laws that collected taxes but did not give them a say in government. The Stamp Act of 1765, for example, collected taxes on items made of paper such as legal documents, newspapers, and even playing cards. The Townshend Acts of 1767 were a series of acts that involved taxing the colonies to raise revenue for Great Britain. The Boston Tea Party in 1773, when men boarded a ship full of British tea and dumped it into Boston Harbor, was a protest against taxation without representation. The discontent of the colonists, such as the colonial lack of participation in government, led to war with Great Britain.
During the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), delegates to the Second Continental Congress met in the summer of 1776 to discuss independence from Great Britain. On June 7, Richard Henry Lee, a statesman from Virginia, appointed a committee to investigate how the colonies could become independent. Lee called for the drafting of an official statement of independence. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman were instructed to draft a resolution. On July 2, 1776, the Congress voted to declare independence from England. After two days of debate and some changes to the document, the Congress voted to accept the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This action represented a formal separation of the American colonies from Great Britain.
Benjamin Franklin and John Adams meeting with Thomas Jefferson, standing, to study a draft of the Declaration of Independence.
When the first skirmishes of the Revolutionary War broke out in Massachusetts in April 1775, few people in the American colonies wanted to separate from Great Britain entirely. But as the war continued, and Britain called out massive armed forces to enforce its will, more and more colonists came to accept that asserting independence was the only way forward.
And the Declaration of Independence would play a critical role in unifying the colonies for the bloody struggle they now faced.
The Road to Revolution Was Paved with Taxes
Over the decade following passage of the Stamp Act in 1765, a series of unpopular British laws met with stiff opposition in the colonies, fueling a bitter struggle over whether Parliament had the right to tax the colonists without the consent of the representative colonial governments. This struggle erupted into violence in 1770 when British troops killed five colonists in the Boston Massacre.
Three years later, outrage over the Tea Act of 1773 prompted colonists to board an East India Company ship in Boston Harbor and dump its cargo into the sea in the now-infamous Boston Tea Party.
In response, Britain cracked down further with the Coercive Acts, going so far as to revoke the colonial charter of Massachusetts and close the port of Boston. Resistance to the Intolerable Acts, as they became known, led to the formation of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774, which denounced “taxation without representation” - but stopped short of demanding independence from Britain.
Would Colonists Reconcile or Separate?
Then the first shots rang out between colonial and British forces at Lexington and Concord, and the Battle of Bunker Hill cost hundreds of American lives, along with 1,000 killed on the British side.
Some 20,000 troops under General George Washington faced off against a British garrison in the Boston Siege, which ended when the British evacuated in March 1776. Washington then moved his Continental Army to New York, where he assumed (correctly) that a major British invasion would soon take place.
Meanwhile, many in the Continental Congress still clung to the assumption that reconciliation with Britain was the ultimate goal. This would soon change, thanks in part to the actions of King George III, who in October 1775 denounced the colonies in front of Parliament and began building up his army and navy to crush their rebellion.
In order to have any hope of defeating Britain, the colonists would need support from foreign powers (especially France), which Congress knew they could only get by declaring themselves a separate nation.
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Thomas Paine Disavowed the Monarchy
In his bestselling pamphlet, “Common Sense,” a recent English immigrant named Thomas Paine also helped push the colonists along on their path toward independence.
“His argument was that we had to break from Britain because the system of the British constitution was hopelessly flawed,” the late Pauline Maier, professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a 2013 lecture on “The Making of the Declaration of Independence.”
“[Britain] had hereditary rule, it had kings—you could never have freedom so long as you had hereditary rule.”
After Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee introduced a motion to declare independence on June 7, 1776, Congress formed a committee to draft a statement justifying the break with Great Britain.
READ MORE: How Thomas Paine's 'Common Sense' Helped Inspire the American Revolution
The initial draft of the Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson and was presented to the entire Congress on June 28 for debate and revision.
In addition to Jefferson’s eloquent preamble, the document included a long list of grievances against King George III, who was accused of committing many “injuries and usurpations” in his quest to establish “an absolute tyranny over these States.”
The Declaration of Independence United the Colonists
After two days of editing and debate, the Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, even as a large British fleet and more than 34,000 troops prepared to invade New York. By the time it was formally signed on August 2, printed copies of the document were spreading around the country, being reprinted in newspapers and publicly read aloud.
While the road to independence had been long and twisted, the effect of its declaration made an impact right away.
“It changed the whole character of the war,” Maier said. “These were people who for a year had been making war against a king with whom they were trying to effect a reconciliation, to whom they were publicly professing loyalty. Now heart and hand, as one person said, could move together. They had a cause to fight for.”