Planetlines

I am somewhat bewildered by Boyd’s assertion that there was no controversy over this resolution. The first thing I noticed when I looked at the Journal is that the Declaration was debated “by paragraphs.”

It’s interesting to note that this resolution was written by both the author of the Declaration of Independence and by John Dickinson, one of the several delegates who refused to sign it. Jefferson would later claim that his original draft was too strongly worded for Dickinson and that his revisions had weakened the Manifesto. In the mid twentieth century, however, historian Julian P. Boyd examined each man’s draft and found that almost all of Jefferson’s claims were erroneous. Dickinson had, in fact, strengthened the resolution. It was he, not Jefferson, who had penned the harsher, bolder, franker statements in the document. (See “The Disputed Authorship of the Declaration on the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, 1775″ in the _Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography_, January 1950 by Julian P. Boyd who probably wasn’t related to Helen).

Although the resolution may not have been a declaration of war, I think King George saw it as just that. It wasn’t after the passage of the Declaration of Resolves in ‘74 or the Declaration of Independence in ‘76, but just after the Declaration of ‘75 was ratified that he issued the Proclamation of Rebellion on August 23, 1775, declaring the colonies to be in a state of “open and avowed rebellion” and that many of the subjects in the colonies were “traitorously preparing, ordering and levying war against us.”

Dickinson, at one time, had hoped for reconciliation with England but according to J. P. Boyd, the American colonies in 1775 “moved swiftly beyond the point where reconciliation was possible.” It is ironic, I think, that the rhetoric of the man who refused to sign the Declaration of Independence may have been largely responsible for making the fight for independence inevitable.