The king did not formally answer to the petition. In July of that year, the Second Continental Congress sent the King a petition for redress and reconciliation, which Dickinson drafted in conspicuously respectful language. The colonists were proud of being British and had no desire to be separated from a mother country with which they were united, as John Dickinson put it in his popular newspaper "letters" from "a Farmer in Pennsylvania" (1767–1768), "by religion, liberty, laws, affections, relation, language and commerce." Not even the outbreak of war at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts on 19 April 1775 produced calls for independence. The original thirteen British colonies of mainland North America moved toward independence slowly and reluctantly. Although it was first drafted as a revolutionary manifesto, Americans of later generations came to honor the Declaration less for its association with independence than for its assertion that "all men are created equal" and "are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights," among which are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," individual rights that went unmentioned in the federal Constitution and Bill of Rights. This document, which the Second Continental Congress adopted on 4 July 1776, proclaimed the original thirteen American colonies independent of Great Britain and provided an explanation and justification of that step.
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