![]() ![]() Only after a “long train of abuses and usurpations” reduced the people “under absolute Despotism” did the people have the “right” and “duty, to throw off such Government and to provide new Guards for their future security.” They could “alter or abolish” a tyrannical government, but Jefferson did not consider the British system of government per se to be unjust, only the government of King George III. Moreover, contrary to what the historian Joseph Ellis says, Jefferson never suggested that government was an “alien force.” The government, in Jefferson’s words, should protect the “safety and happiness” of the people. When the French Revolution, of which he was an early proponent, had proven itself to be unmistakably extremist, with the revolutionary government lopping off heads at a rapid pace, Jefferson called for a restoration of the royal family in France. It is true that Jefferson was not a monarchist, but it is equally true that he thought there were worse things than monarchy. Jefferson never declared that all kings were unjust, just George III. Jefferson insisted that the colonists had suffered patiently while the king and Parliament assumed tyrannical rule over the colonies, but only the “present King of Great Britain” deserved the condemnation of the patriot leaders. And, why not? Englishmen were the freest and most prosperous people in the world. Indeed, Americans were proud to be British. Most colonists did not consider themselves to be sole “Americans.” They were British subjects pleading with the king for relief from taxes and laws that violated their “natural” rights as Englishmen. ![]() They were, for instance, part of the Carolina Charter, which Locke may have helped author. These rights were thus common parlance not only in Britain but in America. The idea that Englishmen had a right to “life, liberty, and property” went back at least to John Locke and his Two Treatises on Civil Government in 1689, which itself was meant to couch England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in the rights of English-men, established in 1215 when King John was forced to sign the Magna Charta at Runnymede. Mason had argued, similarly to Jefferson, that “all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights…namely the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and maintaining happiness and safety.” It seems likely that Jefferson simply shortened Mason’s wording. Jefferson himself probably borrowed language from George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Resolves, written a month before Jefferson authored the Declaration. Many historians, including Jefferson’s most important biographer, Dumas Malone, believe Benjamin Franklin changed Jefferson’s draft of “we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” to “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” a much more powerful expression.
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