On its own terms, historian Steven Sarson’s The Course of Human Events: The Declaration of Independence and the Historical Origins of the United States is an iconoclastic effort of rereading and retrieval. It aims to recover the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence and, as its subtitle suggests, the historical origins of the United States as expressed in that founding document. Most immediately, he wishes to liberate the text from its current halo: “the Declaration has become sacralized, described by activists, politicians, and historians alike as a ‘creed,’ an ‘American Scripture,’ a ‘revolutionary prophecy,’ and even ‘a kind of prayer.’”
The smoke of incense distorts its object, however. Happily, true historiography can restore measure and perspective. First, though, it must deal with a more misleading form, because in “today’s prevailing historiography … the Declaration is … seen as emerging from late revolutionary writing produced from 1774 onward but largely detached from the longer traditions of colonial and revolutionary protest.”
Sarson counterargues that “there was an essential continuity in the belief, expressed in colonial political literature from the seventeenth century and reiterated in the Declaration of Independence, that natural and sacred law should be the basis of civil law and that natural rights accruing to people as ‘men’ were the basis of colonists’ civil rights as Britons and Americans.” The Declaration is the epitome of normative American political thinking, one cast in two hierarchical pairs.
Thus, despite the guild’s failings, it is still the historian and his research that allow for a more penetrating and discerning reading of the Declaration. “Recognizing the older colonial and revolutionary literature as based on natural law and on natural, English, and American rights allows us to read between the Declaration’s lines and recover its historical content and consciousness.”
The Historian and His Kindred Subject
The last phrase—“historical content and consciousness”—is key. In this study, the learned historian detects a fellow deeply historical mind at work in the Declaration. The title of the study (In the Course of Human Events), taken from the opening sentence, provides the frame and key to the proper reading of the entire document, according to Sarson. In its “preamble,” a “general history of humankind then segues into a particular history of the American colonies.” The text is a palimpsest of history upon history upon history: universal history; “a particular history” of emigration and settlement; and dawning revolutionary-era history. There is even a glimpse of the range of desirable possible futures.
Consequently, Sarson’s study is structured around the three moments of historical consciousness. Part I speaks of “The Past”; part II, “The Past and the Present”; and part III, “The Past, the Present, and the Future.” Part I first rehearses a particular interpretation of Locke’s view of the state of nature, natural rights, and the social compact, which are said to be the predicates of the view of human history implicit in the document. Locke, the founders believed (according to Sarson), knew the origins and basic course of human history. Creation is identified with the state of nature, and human history is largely structured and punctuated in accordance with social contracts being established, violated, and reworked. Sarson calls the ensemble Lockean “natural law historiography.” In view of the topic of the second chapter, he pays special attention to a natural right not always sufficiently appreciated in Locke scholarship: the natural right of immigration.
The second chapter then retraces the “circumstances of [the colonists’] emigration and settlement” in the New World. This “particular history” is important for a number of reasons. It is the predicate of Sarson’s “continuity-thesis,” while it is also the first link in the formation of the “one people” mentioned in the opening of the Declaration. Later revolutionary-era writers will be explicit about their continuity—legal, moral, and even religious—with their forebears. While being somewhat light on the last two dimensions, Sarson lays great stress on the legal and constitutional self-understandings of the colonists. I say “self-understandings” in the plural because there were important differences and debates among the colonists on the exact nature of their relation to the metropole.
Grievances Against the Crown
This becomes especially important in part II, which treats the colonists’ grievances with the Crown and Parliament. Leading up to the Declaration, it was Parliament that was regularly blamed by the colonists, including as late as the Second Continental Congress’s 1775 “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms.” Yet in the indictments listed in the Declaration, the focus is on the king, with Parliament not even mentioned by name, but designated (twice) by circumlocutions. In explaining this conundrum, Sarson advances our understanding of the constitutional conflict between the colonies and Great Britain. Not surprisingly, it involves two differing views of a historical event and its consequences.
For most Britons, the Glorious Revolution established a limited monarchy under the Crown-in-Parliament that they believed was also, in the words of the Declaratory Act of 1766, an “imperial crown and Parliament.” Colonists rejected the idea that constitutional change in Britain applied in the colonies, however, as their charters were effectively social contracts and thus unchangeable without the colonists’ consent.
In this system,
it was the Crown’s role to mediate disputes between his different dominions and to protect the lives, liberty, property, and pursuits of happiness of each of his people from encroachments by any of the others, even by using his veto if needed.
Therefore,
it made sense for the colonists to appeal to the king for protection, as they did before 1776, and to blame him for any calamities resulting from his exercising his independent powers tyrannously or combining with others to do so, as the colonists charged in the Declaration of Independence.
Chapter 4 then focuses directly on the lengthy list of grievances enumerating abuses, usurpations, and injuries that together evinced a “design” of establishing “absolute tyranny” or despotism over the colonists. Here, too, historical research helps to understand the document, with Sarson noting that “while the grievances’ claims may seem obscure to us two and a half centuries later, they were easily recognizable to those who had lived through the Declaration’s events or read about them in the copious pamphlets, newspapers, declarations, and petitions and discussed them in speeches, sermons, and conversations in the streets, coffee houses, and taverns that hosted the vibrant public political culture of the time.” Constitutional debate was far from reserved to a small elite.
The moral consciousness of the makers of revolution is quite complex. But the bottom line is that history is not the norm. Nature under God is.
Part III concludes the exposition of the Declaration’s “historical consciousness” and “explores the influences of the Declaration’s past and present on the future,” insofar “as that could be foreseen in 1776.” Chapter 5 examines the form of government and society “the Declaration forecasted—potentially but not necessarily federal, republican (representative) but not necessarily Republican (nonmonarchical), and based on popular sovereignty but not necessarily democratically inclusive.” The last item leads to chapter 6, where Sarson steps back from the historian’s normal stance and applies critical judgment. There he discusses those excluded from the American social compact in one way or another: Loyalists, Native Americans, enslaved African Americans, and, in different ways, property-less males and women. His critique falls well short of The 1619 Project but is still redolent with contemporary sensibilities.
Within these various categories, he detects “vast inequalities and illiberalities” and “inequalities and iniquities.” While he makes brief attempts to expound the founders’ thinking on these categories of human beings, in light of other scholars’ efforts, one can argue that he falls short in the attempt. For example, his textual discussion, his concluding appendix, nor his bibliography do not mention Thomas G. West’s Vindicating the Founders, where West engages in an honest and equitable discussion of the founders’ views of these classes of human beings. As West makes abundantly clear, there was a good deal more reasoning, reasons, and remorse in the founders’ discriminating practice than Sarson acknowledges. A small indication of his less-than-adequate historical accuracy is that he fails to mention that there were Black citizens in colonial America, including former slaves.
Commendations and Criticisms
What is one to make of this, in many ways, impressive and learned effort? One wishes to do justice to his complex and nuanced argument, and I, for one, cannot but applaud the author’s intention to connect the Declaration with previous colonial history, its events, its debates, and its developments. Text and context are realities whose interconnections need to be studied. I learned a good deal about the debates over the colonies’ status in the empire and their place in the British constitutional order. As a bonus, the discussions over emigrants and settlers have contemporary relevance.
Other high points include Sarson’s deft showing that the Declaration is, in certain respects, “a carefully crafted compromise, broadly appealing enough for a wide range of people to agree to, yet also meaningful and coherent enough to make a powerful case for independence.” He goes so far as to say that the American people, despite a range of opinions, were “a fourth kind of author … [and] intended audience on whom the winning of independence ultimately depended and whose views therefore had to be accommodated.” Too often, historians emphasize the Declaration’s appeal to “mankind” and its purpose to help enlist allies, but fail to take into account its domestic audiences and aims. Sarson is not one of these.
On the other hand, there are reasons to be dissatisfied with some important aspects of this ambitious project.
Most importantly, I was not convinced by the hyper-historical reading of the document, which Sarson himself calls “historicizing the Declaration.” To illustrate the problem, I will juxtapose two passages: one from the Declaration, the other Sarson’s gloss on it. The reader can judge if he or she thinks the latter is a legitimate reading of the letter of the former.
The passage’s words will be familiar to every reader:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
In a nutshell, we appear to have foundational principles of legitimate political order with its threefold purposes (protection of individual rights and the safety and happiness of the sovereign people). In their light, one can judge actual instances of governmental conduct and have something of a blueprint for constructing new Forms.
Sarson’s gloss goes in a quite different direction and invokes stark binaries. “The purpose of the first part of the preamble [the passage cited above] was not therefore to invent ideals for an imagined future but to present a general history of humankind as a context and model for a particular history of colonial and revolutionary America.” Leaning heavily on the phrase “in the course of human events,” he argues: “in light of this introduction, the preamble looks less like abstract theory and more like a general depiction of the ages and stages of human history.” In either formulation, we have the procrustean bed of an exclusive binary, with no tertium datur.
This requires him to read a key phrase a particular way. “The idea that ‘all men are created equal’”—my [Sarson’s] emphasis—“and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights’ takes the reader back to the beginning of time and the state of nature.” Really? Were the founders really trying to cast their minds back to the beginning of time and a Lockean state of nature, or is this, as most readers have assumed, an ontological claim, embracing a certain view of “all men” and of human nature as such? It seems far more natural to suppose that the Declaration wished to claim that all human beings are equal in some fundamental and decisive respect, most likely connected with their species-unique endowment of “unalienable Rights” from their common Creator. The term “unalienable” itself implies a fixed human nature of which they are essential features or properties.
Sarson’s alternatives do not entertain, or allow, this reading. Rather, he takes “creation” to refer solely to the origin of mankind as a species—which he then links to a particular understanding of Locke’s state-of-nature teaching. But the text itself speaks of “creation” in the ongoing present tense (“are created equal”), which is applied to “all men,” not the first human beings. In short, I find his reading overdetermined and missing the plain or obvious sense of the passage. To be sure, that plain sense contains mysteries and raises many questions! But it is not a condensed history of humanity, and the claims it makes about human beings and government should be seen as philosophical and political in nature.
Where’s Protestantism?
Sarson’s appeal to Lockean “natural law historiography” has further problems, especially when presented as the founders’ way of viewing history. Rather remarkably, the Garden of Eden does not figure in Sarson’s interpretation of the colonial understanding of human history. Though that might be true of Locke, many of the founding generation and before had more-or-less biblical views of the human adventure. Sarson’s interpretation tends, if not to read Protestantism out of the founding, then at least to minimize it. Many contemporary scholars, Daniel Dreisbach and Mark David Hall among them, would have some pointed questions in this regard.
In general, Sarson has difficulty dealing with the divine, and what he above called “sacred law,” in the Declaration. For him, “sacred law” does not mean the Bible’s commands, as it did for many colonists, starting with John Winthrop. Thomas Jefferson did have a decidedly naturalistic understanding, one that Sarson reiterates, even after acknowledging that one should not take Jefferson’s private views as dispositive for interpreting the document intended to express “the American mind.” The relation between the Bible and natural law (whether Thomistic or Lockean) is ignored as a problem.
Tellingly, he never brings the document’s four references to the divine together in a synthetic concept, one that would inform and complete one’s interpretation of the minds and motives of the revolutionary agents. The last two designations of God, as Sovereign Judge and as Providence or providential, both added by the Continental Congress, are merely reproduced, and discussion of the culminating motive of “sacred honor” is not to be found. Instead, Sarson underscores what he rightly deems the first dictate of Lockean natural law, self-defense or self-preservation. Other higher motives, such as love of liberty understood as self-government, personal and collective, under God, are not given anything approaching their due in the economy of motives expressed in the Declaration.
It is clear, however, that the signers understood themselves to be doing the Lord’s work, fulfilling His design for humankind and trusting in His providential support. To be sure, this does not exempt them from His sovereign Judgment, a judgment that penetrates the hidden “intentions” of the agent. The moral consciousness of the makers of revolution is quite complex. But the bottom line is that history is not the norm. Nature under God is.
A Parting Passage
One of the major pleasures of this book is to look up the texts to which Sarson refers during the course of his thematic expositions. I will end with one such text and (for me) discovery. It is a passage from a near-contemporary official document from the same Congress that produced the Declaration. It makes clear the strands of thought, and commitments, that Sarson’s “lower ceiling” way of approaching the American experience tends to insufficiently appreciate. In the Second Continental Congress’s “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms” (July 6, 1775), which is a synthesis of otherwise opposing delegates, Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson, its members declare:
We gratefully acknowledge, as signal instances of the Divine favour towards us, that his Providence would not permit us to be called into this severe controversy, until we were grown up to our present strength, had been previously exercised in warlike operation, and possessed of the means of defending ourselves. With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare, that exerting the utmost energy of those powers, which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance, employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live slaves.
I would make this very much a part of the historical context in which one reads the Declaration.
