Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014

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Part 7, Chapters 36-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 7: “Matters of Fact”

Part 7, Chapter 36 Summary: “Facts?”

While the complaints against the king are perhaps less well known than the Declaration’s early sections, Allen asserts that the evidence here is our best means of evaluating the colonists’ claims. While it may seem that we need deep historical knowledge to do this, Allen argues that the catalog invites us to consider “general ideas” about government and everyday life.

First, she considers the complaint that the king would not pass laws the colonists desired unless they gave up all formal right to Parliamentary representation. While the specific example came from Massachusetts, Allen points out that it is possible to analyze it generally. If a citizen gives up all right to representation in exchange for a particular law, this may get an initial need met—but it leaves people without future recourse if further needs arise. The king, then, is undermining democracy, as subsequent grievances about the dissolution of legislatures and their distance from many citizens attest. His legislative bodies also meet “distant from the depository of their public records” (211). This matters because citizens generally need to “live by the rule of law,” and written repositories make these standards transparent and known to all. In short, the list is meant to prove that “we should live by the rule of law. The people should have a say in their government” (212). In failing to guarantee this, the king establishes himself as a tyrant.

Part 7, Chapter 37 Summary: “Life Histories”

Allen works to make the listed grievances more concrete in imagining real individuals who suffered because of them. She imagines a husband and wife in anxious conversation as the General Assembly meets in distant Salem rather than Boston, as well as a young sailor separated from his wife as he is forced into service in the British Navy because his ship is captured. These tribulations concern the king’s offenses against laws of war since he has not only forced colonists to fight each other but also hired foreign mercenaries to fight them and encouraged Indigenous Americans and enslaved Black Americans to do the same.

Part 7, Chapter 38 Summary: “Plagues”

Allen argues that every grievance in the Declaration is meant to illustrate fundamental human rights and how the king’s behavior has endangered them. To convince their audience, the Declaration’s authors resort to emotional language, referring to the “swarms of officers” in the colonies (219)—in the case of customs officials, this actually amounted to 50 people. Allen points out that the rhetoric here is likely meant to evoke the Bible, specifically the “swarms of locusts” God sends against the Egyptians because the Israelites are still held captive (219). While in the colonial case the plagues are unleashed by the oppressor rather than suffered by him, the story is meant to remind us that “tyranny introduces vulnerability to our lives by overexposing us to state power” (221).

Part 7, Chapter 39 Summary: “Portrait of a Tyrant”

The next set of grievances describes the king’s attacks on the colonial judicial system. Thus, he has harmed all three of the branches of government since he has also blocked legislative work and imposed colonial officialdom and military power where it does not belong. The colonists then complain that the king prevented new immigrants from settling in the colonies. At this juncture, we have an emerging portrait of tyranny: weakening all branches of government, impairing the economy, and threatening individual security, especially through misuse of military force.

Part 7, Chapter 40 Summary: “The Thirteenth Way of Looking at a Tyrant”

While much of the final grievance repeats other claims about the abuse of power—and implies what a functioning government would do instead—some of its claims are unique and require historical background. Allen refers specifically to the claim that the colonists were concerned about the king’s effort to “combine with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution” along with his work to undermine the “free system of English laws in a neighboring province” (225-26). Allen explains that this condemns a new body of customs commissioners that had been set up by Parliament to govern economic life. These boards had virtually limitless powers. When the colonists say that this violates their “constitution,” they mean the traditions of English common law. Similarly, the king’s decision to permit the use of French civil law in Quebec, together with religious toleration, was viewed as a threat to this English legal tradition that the colonists considered their right. Allen points out that only the king is named, not Parliament—the colonists choose to focus their rhetoric on a single individual as the “anti-Constitution.”

Part 7, Chapters 36-40 Analysis

Allen demonstrates her commitment to political and moral judgment, asking the reader to evaluate the nature of the colonists’ case. This is not exactly like weighing evidence in a trial, though, since the body of evidence is deliberately general and sometimes exaggerated. However, Allen suggests that even the Declaration’s hyperbole points to underlying truths, as in her analysis of the reference to “swarms of officers.” Here, a hyperbolic image contains a biblical allusion that underscores the threat of tyranny.

This is not to say that Allen embraces a literal or uncritical reading of the Declaration’s grievances, even as she considers the document a crucial work of political philosophy for all Americans. The colonists cast themselves as defenders of English traditions the king is trying to discard in Quebec; they are “conservative” in the sense of seeking to maintain important traditions. At the time, this would have served a rhetorical purpose by tempering the near-unprecedented nature of their actions, but it also corresponds to historical reality in important ways. For instance, the colonists’ complaints about British attempts to incite resistance among Indigenous and enslaved Americans demonstrate that the revolution was not revolutionary in matters of race.

At the same time, the importance of empathy is an emerging idea here, developing the broader theme of Optimism and Pessimism About Humanity. Allen introduces several hypothetical “life stories” to link the grievances to the struggles of real people to live happy lives with their families. These narratives are based on historical accounts and some primary sources, as Allen’s footnotes show. For her purposes, historical data serves to humanize the colonists, even as she resists writing a straightforward historical narrative of the colonial era. Implicitly, these portraits—coupled with the flatter characterization of the king as a villain—suggest that tyranny is the opposite of what Allen does as a scholar in its lack of care and concern for others.