The Declaration of Independence is most famous for the section commencing "We hold these truths to be self-evident," but the bulk of the document is a list of offenses introduced by
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
And there then follows what would be, but for the lack of a decent word-processing application, 27 bullet points, including complaints both high and low, abstract and concrete, some that appear to admit of no defense and others that have about them the whiff of having been included mainly to elongate the list. A sampling:
- He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good
- 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 made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries
- [He has imposed] Taxes on us without our Consent
- He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people [Editorial comment: if true, why the need for 26 other complaints?]
He-he-he—he's done this, he's done that—is a rhetorical ploy determined to establish a bully, a tyrant, and a villain. An amusing sidelight concerns how NPR, after tweeting out the Declaration's text in 113 consecutive installments on the morning of July 4, 2017, received complaints from MAGA types who, scanning the string, imagined the "liberal media" to be spreading anti-Trump propaganda. Yes, the king is a villain!
There is some cognitive dissonance associated with the task of imagining today's self-styled conservatives being champions of the Revolution of 1776. I can just see George Will loosening his bow tie, the task of tossing tea into the harbor being so physically demanding. Does anyone seriously think that Donald Trump, had he been living in NYC 250 years ago, would have supported the revolution? At best, he would have been neutral, keeping his head down while calculating his own self-interest in the event that this side or that one should in the end prevail. As might be imagined, conservative intellectuals across the pond had no sympathy for the complaining colonists in America. I've been reading Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, and it happened by chance that on Independence Day I came to the section, from the year 1767, that Boswell introduces:
In February there happened one of the most remarkable incidents of Johnson's life, which gratified his monarchical enthusiasm, and which he loved to relate with all its circumstances, when requested by his friends. This was his being honoured by a private conversation with his Majesty, in the library at the Queen's house.
Boswell devotes the next six pages—approximately a half of one percent of the book's immense bulk—to a transcript of their conversation that February afternoon. The length and detail convey the importance Boswell assigns to the event, and he was likely correct in assuming Johnson would approve the reverential treatment, but, for those not afflicted with "monarchical enthusiasm," it's possible to detect a countervailing effect. For George III, despite Boswell's intent, comes off as a cipher. As the long interview unwinds, the charitable explanations for the king's woodenness recede, and it's evident that Johnson has to bear the whole conversational burden. Of course he's able to do that, even if his more usual interlocuters—which included Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Boswell himself—did not have to be carried along, and could, by testing him, elicit gems of Johnson's intelligence and wit. No chance of that with George III. "I found his Majesty wished I should talk and I made it my business to talk," Boswell records Johnson as commenting, so I guess the charitable interpretation had not receded beyond the reach of one determined to venerate his king.
Though it seems odd, considering his indolence and usual literary bailiwick, Johnson in 1775 undertook the composition of a pamphlet, "Taxation No Tyranny," in which he gave free reign to his contempt for the revolting colonists. "Why is it," he asks, in the pamphlet's most quoted line, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negro slaves?"
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