The Lee Resolution — Our July 2, 1776 Declaration of Independence
Editor’s Note: The resolution declaring independence from Britain was first introduced to the Second Continental Congress by Virginian Richard Henry Lee on June 7, 1776. But it became evident that all the delegates on hand weren’t yet close to supporting it. Those from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and South Carolina were not yet […]
Talbot County, Maryland, Instructions for Independence (June 7, 1776)
Editor’s Note: If ever there was a declaration that shows how sentiments for independence at the most local level can drive its state delegates to do the right thing and join the other colonies in breaking from Britain, this is it. When the Second Continental Congress first considered, on June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee’s […]
Anne Arundel County, MD, Resolves of Independence (June 22, 1776)
Editor’s Note: Describing themselves as ‘Associators’ (which brings to mind the sundry clusters of voluntary associations that banded together in the years preceding the march toward revolution — formed to combat effective the increasingly onerous acts imposed by King and Parliament — this resolve for independence in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, aims in part to generate a […]
Charles County, MD, declaration to declare independence (June 1776)
Editor’s Note: A first glance at the grievances enumerated here, and the language and tone in which they are presented, and you might think that Charles County took its cue from our July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence — yet it was issued about a month before that famous document. Charles County, in the convention […]
Declaration of Independence – Town of Wrentham, Mass. (June 5, 1776)
Editor’s Note: This eloquent declaration was issued by the denizens of Wrentham, MA, who possessed a “zeal for the common rights of mankind,” and were dismayed that the same “spirit of oppression” that prompted them to leave Britain in the first place has now pursued them in their new habitat.” And so they declared themselves “independent […]
Gageborough, MA, Declaration of Independence from Britain (June 7, 1776)
Editor’s Note: Prizing both brevity and independence as virtues in composition, Gageborough, MA, joins the 1776 declaration bandwagon on June, 7, 1776 Gageborough, MA, Declaration of Independence At a meeting of the inhabitants of the town of Gageborough, agreeable to a resolve of the House of Representatives, of June 7, 1776, requesting the several Towns […]
Natick, MA, Declaration of Independence, June 20, 1776
Editor’s Note: Short and sweet, this declaration of independence from Britain, by the town of Natick, Massachusetts, preceded our July 4, 1776 Declaration by a little over two weeks. The concise document packs quite a punch, slamming Britain for “the glaring impropriety, incapacity, and fatal tendency… at the distance of three thousand miles, to legislate […]
Unilateral Declaration of Independence (Rhodesia, 1965)
Editor’s Note: Not all Declarations of Independence are created equal. Some lead to the enfranchisement of the great majority of a society, and others only advance the interests of a relatively small number within a populace. Even our vaunted July 4, 1776 declaration, while overwhelmingly supported by white Americans (especially white male Americans), could be […]
Charles County, Maryland, Declaration of Independence
Editor’s Note: One of the last state and local declarations to be issued before the Second Continential Congress, led by Jefferson, got to work making a declaration of its own — one that history would characterize as the declaration to end all declarations — Maryland was one of the last to come aboard the independence […]
Presentments by the Grand Jury of Cheraws District, in South-Carolina (May 20, 1776)
Editor’s Note: If ever a compelling case can be made that the Declaration of July 4, 1776 was in fact evocative of declarations at the state and local level that preceded it, one need look no further than the opening section of this at-times rather poetic ‘presentment’ issued in May 1776 in the Cheraws District […]
