The Declaration of Independence served three primary purposes. This formal Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. The conclusion stated that there was a dissolution of any political connection between the states and Britain. Jefferson then discussed that the colonists had unsuccessfully tried to appeal the laws and taxes that the King had imposed on the colonies. Next Jefferson listed the grievances that the colonists had against the King. (The Preamble also has become the most quoted part of the Declaration.) The Preamble states the principles that everyone believed were inalienable rights.
The introduction gives the reasons why it was necessary to seek independence. The Declaration of Independence features five distinct parts. Five men were appointed to a committee to draft the Declaration of Independence, but Thomas Jefferson of Virginia was the primary writer. The colony of New York abstained from the vote. On July 2, 1776, representatives from 12 of the 13 colonies accepted the Lee resolution.
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduced a resolution calling for independence to the Second Continental Congress. Thomas Paine wrote “Common Sense” in response to this news and the discussion of whether the colonies should fight for their independence from Britain intensified. In January 1776, the colonists learned about the King’s decision to send more troops. In October 1775, King George III ordered that more units of the British Navy and Army should be sent to the colonies. At first, many believed that Parliament would listen to their grievances and that their differences could be resolved. The first armed conflict between colonists and British soldiers was in April that year. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.In 1775, colonists in North America felt that they were overtaxed and needed to fight for their rights as subjects of the British Crown. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.
Jefferson’s original passage on slavery appears below. It was replaced with a more ambiguous passage about King George’s incitement of “domestic insurrections among us.” Decades later Jefferson blamed the removal of the passage on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia and Northern delegates who represented merchants who were at the time actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Jefferson’s passage on slavery was the most important section removed from the final document. When Thomas Jefferson included a passage attacking slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence it initiated the most intense debate among the delegates gathered at Philadelphia in the spring and early summer of 1776. THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE DEBATE OVER SLAVERY