AMERICA250 | The men who risked all to declare liberty deserve our thanks
After a 'long train of abuses,' these representatives selected by each colony dedicated their 'Lives, Fortunes, and Sacred Honor' to secure freedom
The Dakota Scout holds these truths to be self-evident: We are all created equal, life, liberty and property remain unalienable rights, and the United States of America is still history’s best example of these virtues being reflected by people through representative government. We celebrated America’s enduring spirit with a June 26 special section focusing on the 56 men who risked life, liberty and treasure 250 years ago in signing OUR Declaration of Independence.
The Scout invited South Dakota State Historian Ben Jones to reflect on the signers’ significance. We’re grateful he found time to write this essay while coordinating statewide America 250 observances.
As we mark the nation’s 250th year, it is important to appreciate those who drafted, debated, amended, voted for and ultimately signed the Declaration of Independence during the stifling hot summer of 1776. We owe them our respect and gratitude.
More content from The Scout’s America250 coverage
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Test your 1776 knowledge about the Founding in our semiquincentennial quiz
While it certainly was their “Lives, Fortunes, and Sacred Honor” on the line, it is also to our great enjoyment that we can reflect on them today. It’s for that reason that Aaron Levisay and The Dakota Scout have helpfully provided portraits of the signers so that we might read, learn about and gain a fuller appreciation for what they did for us.
There is no better expression of our nation’s organizing principles than the Declaration of Independence – specifically, that we are all created equal, that government’s central purpose is the protection of our liberty and that a government is only legitimate if it enjoys the consent of the governed. In fact, few people are more worthy for our admiration and understanding than the signers who risked their lives in order to state the issues in language “so plain and so firm,” as Jefferson later wrote, that this “expression of the American mind” resounds two and a half centuries later.
So who were the signers? They were the elected representatives, empowered to represent their constituents. Each colony chose them from within their colonial legislature, making them all political leaders.
But none of them were full time politicians. Professionally, they were lawyers, plantation owners, farmers, merchants, militia leaders, two ministers and a doctor. A few of them, like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, had many professions. Franklin became wealthy through publishing, but he was also a scientist, inventor and of course a writer. The epitome of the American entrepreneur, he founded many private and public organizations, from the post office, to the fire brigade, to the University of Pennsylvania, to philosophical and abolition societies as well as his businesses.
Also unique was Francis Hopkinson, who was a poet, a composer, and a musician. Contrary to popular belief, Sam Adams was not a brewer, despite the beer label that’s put him back in the minds of Americans today. Many signers owned slaves; as of the time of the signing, slavery was legal in every colony. But the views on slavery began to change in parallel with ideas about independence. Class lines began to be eroded. Marylander Charles Carroll was considered the richest man in America and wore a suit that stated as such, while Sam Adams and Richard Smith were gifted clothes or wore “homespun.”
So why did they sign? What drove them? It’s clear the Declaration’s signers had everything to lose by voting for and then putting their name on the document. Indeed, signing had an economic cost in a loss of income and time away from their homes and business, not to mention what the king and Parliament could do to them once in an open state of rebellion. You’ve probably heard the pithy remark attributed to Benjamin Franklin that accurately captures the risks. Many years afterwards, a chronicler stated John Hancock had said during the drafting that they must all hang together, and had Frankin respond, “Yes, we must indeed all hang together. Or we will assuredly all hang separately.” While there is no direct evidence Hancock and Franklin had such a conversation in the debates, those words had become a common saying by the 1770s. Indeed, all the American people had those words front of mind.
But by mid-June 1776, the “long train of abuses” were so numerous and so intolerable that some towns and colonies had already declared their separation from Britain. What were the offenses? I recommend reading the Declaration itself, for they are helpfully listed for a “candid world” to see.
My favorite is the drama that comes with, “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”
Wow. What more does one need to declare independence? But as the Declaration also states, people are more “disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” In other words, just as it is now, it’s hard to do things differently than the way they’ve always been done, even when you’re suffering through disasters.
We now know that during the Congress mangled one grievance, making it, as the kids say today, “kind of cringe.” When they wrote that the king, “has excited domestic insurrections amongst us” and has fostered “the merciless Indian Savages,” we properly see these words are inherent contradictions to the Declaration’s primary principles, as they are about slavery and wanting land upon which Indians live. Historians learned later when looking at the edited documents that the original Jeffersonian wording emphatically condemned slavery but still elided over the land under tribal control by blaming the frontier’s violence on the king alone, when settlers were also at the heart of the problem.
These two issues are still unwinding today. But we can appreciate the reason they are contended with is a sign the signers got the fundamentals down so remarkably well in the first place.
What the signers all agreed upon was that each of us have equal standing in the eyes of the law, that the purpose of government is to secure, as they wrote so beautifully, our “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” and lastly that the government’s actions must have the consent of the governed.
I’d encourage you to learn about the signers, enjoy your liberties this Independence Day and every day, and help conserve these principles for another 250 years.
Benjamin F. Jones is chairman of the America’s 250th South Dakota Commission and Director of the South Dakota State Historical Society. He hosts the bi-weekly podcast, “History 605.”
