Before it got canceled due to budget cuts, I taught a class at Berkeley in advanced composition. Most of my students were upper div majors in history, sociology, psychology, political science and the like. One semester during a different presidential administration, I decided to assign a persuasive essay in the form of a manifesto, diatribe, or polemic. Thanks to social media rewarding poor rhetorical moves with clicks, contemporary examples of this kind of writing can be absolutely terrible, so fishing around for foundational examples, I landed on a document that, like most Americans, I hadn’t read since elementary school: the Declaration of Independence.
If this were a post on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Bluesky, someone would immediately reply “but the founders held slaves!?1^@&@^@@& they were horrible white men@&@!%!!” You’re not getting any arguments from me on that because, facts (with the possible exception of John Adams, the one who didn’t own slaves, and the one who maybe not so coincidentally does not have a monument in Washington D.C.). Thomas Jefferson in particular, the Declaration’s main author? Total piece of shit. The brilliant work of writer and attorney Anette Gordon-Reed is particularly revealing when it comes to Jefferson’s intellectual brilliance versus his extremely problematic personal life and household practices.
That being said, it turned out some of my students had never read the Declaration, and the ones who had couldn’t remember any of it beyond “all men are created equal” (and YES I KNOW they were talking about slave holding white men; like James Baldwin said, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”). Those are the people who wrote it, but my students and I — straight and queer, immigrants and people born in the U.S.A., leftists and one solitary member of the Berkeley Republicans, male, female and nonbinary — we were the ones reading it and talking about it, and thinking about why it actually worked and led to the overthrowing of British monarchical rule. It is far from a perfect manifesto, and has a particularly racist section about Native Americans, but it actually worked.
So I read Adams’ preamble, and then we went around the room, and each student read one line from the indictment, or “bill of grievances.” Teachers have many stories of moments when the classroom goes quiet and still and how that silence means not that the students have checked out, but that they are thinking, together and separately.
And then we chopped it up and looked at how it worked as a piece of writing, but, today, I’m thinking of the messages it has for all of us, right now.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.