What are the main arguments against British rule included in the Declaration of Independence?

Americans could not easily break ties with Britain. Despite their recent hardships, the majority of colonists were raised to love England and respect its monarch.

Fear was another factor. Most colonists were familiar with the harsh abuses the British used on rebels in Ireland. A revolution could bring mob rule, and no one, not even the most rebellious Americans, wanted that. Furthermore, despite their many taxes, times were good in the colonies. In some ways, Americans were even better off than the average Briton.

Yet, there were some terrible injustices the colonists would never forget. Americans were divided about their relationship to England. Arguments for independence were growing. Thomas Paine provided the extra push. His publication Common Sense was an instant best seller. Published in January 1776 in Philadelphia, nearly 120,000 copies were in circulation by April. Paine's arguments were brilliant and straightforward. He argued two main points: 1) America should have independence from England, and 2) the new government should be a democratic republic.

Paine avoided flowery language. He wrote like the people spoke, often quoting the Bible in his arguments. Most people in America had a working knowledge of the Bible, so his arguments rang true. Paine was not religious, but he knew his readers were. He called King George "the Pharaoh of England" and "the Royal Brute of Great Britain." He was even popular in the most rural parts of the American countryside.

Common Sense grew the patriot cause. Paine attacked the rule of George III, and he called for the establishment of a new republic. It made no difference to the readers that Paine was new to America. His writing was actually published anonymously, so many readers didn't know who the author was. Some even attributed it to John Adams, who denied any involvement.

In the end, Paine's prose was common sense. Why should tiny England rule an entire vast continent? How could colonists expect to gain foreign support while being loyal to the British king? How much longer could Americans stand repeated abuse? All of these questions led many readers to one answer as the summer of 1776 drew near.

Thomas Paine is calling King George names: "The Pharaoh of England" and "The Royal Brute of Great Britain." Using these names made it easier for the citizens to identify with Paine's point of view. Think up your own two nicknames for King George that also reflect Paine's opinion of him.

The Declaration of Independence was the first formal statement by a nation’s people asserting their right to choose their own government.

When armed conflict between bands of American colonists and British soldiers began in April 1775, the Americans were ostensibly fighting only for their rights as subjects of the British crown. By the following summer, with the Revolutionary War in full swing, the movement for independence from Britain had grown, and delegates of the Continental Congress were faced with a vote on the issue. In mid-June 1776, a five-man committee including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin was tasked with drafting a formal statement of the colonies’ intentions. The Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence—written largely by Jefferson—in Philadelphia on July 4, a date now celebrated as the birth of American independence.

America Before the Declaration of Independence

Even after the initial battles in the Revolutionary War broke out, few colonists desired complete independence from Great Britain, and those who did–like John Adams– were considered radical. Things changed over the course of the next year, however, as Britain attempted to crush the rebels with all the force of its great army. In his message to Parliament in October 1775, King George III railed against the rebellious colonies and ordered the enlargement of the royal army and navy. News of his words reached America in January 1776, strengthening the radicals’ cause and leading many conservatives to abandon their hopes of reconciliation. That same month, the recent British immigrant Thomas Paine published “Common Sense,” in which he argued that independence was a “natural right” and the only possible course for the colonies; the pamphlet sold more than 150,000 copies in its first few weeks in publication.

Did you know? Most Americans did not know Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence until the 1790s; before that, the document was seen as a collective effort by the entire Continental Congress.

In March 1776, North Carolina’s revolutionary convention became the first to vote in favor of independence; seven other colonies had followed suit by mid-May. On June 7, the Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee introduced a motion calling for the colonies’ independence before the Continental Congress when it met at the Pennsylvania State House (later Independence Hall) in Philadelphia. Amid heated debate, Congress postponed the vote on Lee’s resolution and called a recess for several weeks. Before departing, however, the delegates also appointed a five-man committee–including Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania and Robert R. Livingston of New York–to draft a formal statement justifying the break with Great Britain. That document would become known as the Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson Writes the Declaration of Independence

Jefferson had earned a reputation as an eloquent voice for the patriotic cause after his 1774 publication of “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” and he was given the task of producing a draft of what would become the Declaration of Independence. As he wrote in 1823, the other members of the committee “unanimously pressed on myself alone to undertake the draught [sic]. I consented; I drew it; but before I reported it to the committee I communicated it separately to Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams requesting their corrections….I then wrote a fair copy, reported it to the committee, and from them, unaltered to the Congress.”

As Jefferson drafted it, the Declaration of Independence was divided into five sections, including an introduction, a preamble, a body (divided into two sections) and a conclusion. In general terms, the introduction effectively stated that seeking independence from Britain had become “necessary” for the colonies. While the body of the document outlined a list of grievances against the British crown, the preamble includes its most famous passage: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The Continental Congress Votes for Independence

The Continental Congress reconvened on July 1, and the following day 12 of the 13 colonies adopted Lee’s resolution for independence. The process of consideration and revision of Jefferson’s declaration (including Adams’ and Franklin’s corrections) continued on July 3 and into the late morning of July 4, during which Congress deleted and revised some one-fifth of its text. The delegates made no changes to that key preamble, however, and the basic document remained Jefferson’s words. Congress officially adopted the Declaration of Independence later on the Fourth of July (though most historians now accept that the document was not signed until August 2).

The Declaration of Independence became a significant landmark in the history of democracy. In addition to its importance in the fate of the fledgling American nation, it also exerted a tremendous influence outside the United States, most memorably in France during the French Revolution. Together with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence can be counted as one of the three essential founding documents of the United States government.

READ MORE: Why Was the Declaration of Independence Written?

For many Americans, the entirety of the Declaration of Independence can be summed up by Thomas Jefferson’s stirring preamble: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But in fact, the main purpose of the Declaration of Independence was to present a compelling case that King George III and the British Parliament had broken their own laws, leaving the American colonists no choice but to cut ties and “throw off” British rule. To accomplish that, Jefferson and the Continental Congress compiled a laundry list of grievances—27 in total—meant to prove to the world that King George was a “tyrant” and a lawbreaker.

Drafted Like a Prosecutor's Opening Statement

That “legalistic” motivation is clear from the language of the Declaration itself, which sounds like a prosecutor’s opening statement: “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.”

English law included provisions for dethroning a monarch who had breached the law, says Don Hagist, editor of the Journal of the American Revolution, so the Declaration served as a kind of “impeachment” proceeding, laying out the charges against the chief executive.

“These grievances were a list of charges and accusations, a legal argument for why the king was not following the laws of England that were in place at the time,” says Hagist.

The Declaration Was Not the First List of Colonial Grievances

Sheet of penny revenue stamps printed by Britain for the American colonies, after the Stamp Act of 1765.

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A full decade before the Declaration of Independence, American colonists were infuriated by the Stamp Act of 1765, which imposed a direct tax on newspapers, pamphlets, legal documents, dice and playing cards in an effort to raise money for Britain. In protest of “taxation without representation,” nine of the 13 colonies convened the Stamp Act Congress in New York City and issued a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances.”

In that 1765 declaration, the Stamp Act Congress appealed to King George “with the warmest sentiments of affection” and reserved its ire for Parliament. The Americans asserted that the Stamp Act and earlier laws like the Sugar Act and Quartering Act “have a manifest destiny to subvert the rights and liberties of the colonists” and would be “extremely burdensome and grievous.”

READ MORE: 7 Events That Enraged Colonists and Led to the American Revolution

Then in 1774, Jefferson penned a document called “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” a lengthy and sometimes acid-penned list of grievances that was published as an anonymous pamphlet. Like other colonial leaders, Jefferson was furious that Parliament had dissolved several colonial legislatures (including Jefferson’s own House of Burgesses in Virginia) in response to the Boston Tea Party.

“Shall these governments be dissolved, their property annihilated, and their people reduced to a state of nature, at the imperious breath of a body of men, whom they never saw, in whom they never confided?” wrote Jefferson. “Can any one reason be assigned why 160,000 electors in the island of Great Britain should give law to four millions in the states of America, every individual of whom is equal to every individual of them, in virtue, in understanding, and in bodily strength?”

Continental Congress Gathers to Draft Colonial Response

The committee which drafted the Declaration of Independence (L-R): Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R Livingston and John Adams.

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Months later, in September of 1774, the First Continental Congress brought together delegates from 12 of the colonies (Georgia was absent) in Philadelphia to draft a coordinated colonial response to Parliament’s latest punitive laws, collectively known as the Intolerable Acts.

“The whole purpose of the First Continental Congress was to say, we all have to work together to formalize what our objections are to what the British government is doing,” says Hagist.

The document they signed on October 14, 1774 was also known as the “Declaration of Rights and Grievances,” similar to the one produced by the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, and included a list of “infringements and violations” by Parliament and the Crown that, in the Congress’s words, “demonstrate a system formed to enslave America.”

Grievances in the Declaration of Independence

Thomas Jefferson drafting the Declaration of Independence.

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The Declaration of Independence was drafted by the Second Continental Congress, which met under very different circumstances. War broke out between the British and the Colonies in 1775, so several of the 27 grievances in the Declaration referred to “crimes” committed by the Crown during the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.

“[King George III] is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries,” wrote Jefferson in the Declaration, “to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages.”

That grievance referred to King George’s use of Hessian “mercenaries” from modern-day Germany to fight on behalf of the British during the Revolutionary War, a move that incensed the colonists.

Another grievance accused the king of having “plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.” That was a reference to the bombardment of Falmouth (modern-day Portland), Maine, in 1775. On that occasion, a British naval commander, exacting revenge for an earlier insult, gave the 3,800 citizens of Falmouth two hours to flee the port city before razing it to the ground with a barrage of cannon fire.

Other grievances, like “cutting off our trade with all parts of the World,” were longstanding colonial beefs with the British. Merchants and traders were the lifeblood of the colonial economy, but starting with the Navigation Acts of the 1650s, Parliament sought to control colonial maritime trade. First, goods could only be shipped on British ships. Then, they could only be traded with England. And finally, in 1775, all American trade was barred with the outbreak of war.

Colonists Sought Allies to Fight England

The Declaration of Independence wasn’t really written for King George III or Parliament. The Revolutionary War was well underway by the summer of 1776, so England certainly knew where the Americans stood on their claims of independence. Instead, the Declaration and its 27 grievances were intended to prove “to a candid World”—specifically France and Spain—that “these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.”

For that reason, says Hagist, it was really important that the text of the Declaration of Independence be published abroad. “Of course it would be highly publicized to try to get support from anywhere in the world that support could be gotten.”

One of the first places that the Founders wanted to publish the Declaration of Independence was in France, England’s traditional enemy which had just lost the Seven Years’ War (known as the French and Indian War in the United States). The Americans even created a “Committee on Secret Correspondence,” headed by Benjamin Franklin, to send agents to France and other European countries to try to win support for the Revolution.

On July 8, 1776, less than a week after signing the Declaration, Franklin and his secret committee sent a copy of the document to Silas Deane, an American agent in France, with instructions to translate the Declaration and share it with the royal courts of both France and Spain. But the package to Deane never arrived.

Instead, the first foreign newspapers to print the Declaration of Independence were two London papers on August 16, 1776—“That was very quick by the standards of the day,” says Hagist—followed by papers in Scotland, Germany and Ireland. By August 30, a French-language newspaper in the Netherlands was the first to print the Declaration of Independence in French.

France proved instrumental to American victory in the Revolutionary War, providing an estimated 12,000 soldiers and 32,000 sailors. France was the first to recognize the United States as an independent nation and the two countries formed an official alliance in 1778.