Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms
The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 6, 1775 . It is one of a series of documents in which Congress established in the summer of 1775 why the Thirteen Colonies had taken up arms and triggered the American War of Independence . The statement was written by John Dickinson based on a draft by Thomas Jefferson .
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As in the day before, on July 5th, the Olive Branch petition passed Congress avoided the British King George III. to criticize directly: While the monarch was previously the only link between the motherland and the colonies, the mutual relationship changed with the end of the Seven Years' War and the rise of Great Britain to the world empire: While the role of the king remained the same, "that Parliament for the first time usurped the power of unrestricted legislation over the colonies in America ”. This led to the battles at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. In this situation, Congress hoped that the King would restore the rightful position of the colonies as fully equitable parts of the British Empire, if only he saw that Parliament and its ministers were wrong.
Emergence
On June 23, 1775, Congress appointed a committee of five members ( John Rutledge , William Livingston , Benjamin Franklin , John Jay, and Thomas Johnson ) to draft a statement. This was to be published by General George Washington when he arrived at the Continental Army camp outside Boston. On June 26th, Dickinson and Jefferson joined the committee. Jefferson's draft served as the basis for Dickinson’s final statement, which was adopted by Congress on July 6th. The authorship of the Declaration was the subject of a historians' dispute in the 19th century.
The statement appeared for the first time in print in the Pennsylvania Packet of July 10 and in the Pennsylvania Journal of July 12. A short time later, in Philadelphia, the printers William and Thomas Bradford published a pamphlet with the declaration entitled “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies of North America, Now Met in General Congress, Setting Forth the Causes and Necessity of their Taking Up Arms ”.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Julian P. Boyd, The Disputed Authorship of the Declaration on the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, 1775 . In: Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography . tape 74 , 1950, pp. 51-73 .
- ^ The declaration as adopted by congress [6 July 1775]. In: Founders Online. National Archives, June 13, 2018, accessed November 25, 2018 .
- ^ Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography . In: Merrill D. Peterson (Ed.): Jefferson. Writings. Library of America . Literary Classics of the United States, New York 1984, ISBN 978-0-940450-16-5 , pp. 10-11 .
- ^ Editorial note: Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms. In: Founders Online. National Archives, June 13, 2018, accessed November 25, 2018 .