delphia the people tore down the "late King's" arms from the State House and burned them in a bonfire on Independence Square. In New York the troops and citizens together, after hearing the Declaration read, proceeded to Bowling Green and dragged down the leaden equestrian statue of George III, which was melted up into bullets for patriot rifles. The citizens of Savannah, after a day of feasting, burned George III in effigy and read a mock funeral service over his grave. Uncertainties, timidities, inconsistencies were removed. The issue was clearly defined and the battle fairly joined. On July 9 George Washington published the Declaration to his army in New York with the following order: "The General hopes that this important event will serve as an incentive to every officer and soldier to act with fidelity and courage, as knowing now that the peace and safety of his country depend, under God, solely on the success of our arms." It is said that the Marseillaise was worth ten thousand men to the Jacobin generals of the French Revolution. Who shall say how many regiments the Declaration of Independence was worth to the great patriot who bore the burden of our tottering cause from Brooklyn Heights to Yorktown! One other service of far-reaching importance the Declaration rendered to the American cause. It was a stroke of diplomacy. So long as we were fighting to reform the British Empire, the secret commit tee on foreign correspondence appointed by Congress on November 29, 1775, could hardly expect any aid from European nations. But when the cause which we submitted to a "candid world" took the form of independence help came. As soon as Louis XVI's government heard that the American colonies had declared themselves free it proposed that France and Spain should begin war against Great Britain. Men and money began to come to us from France. In October our agent in Paris, Silas Deane, could ship to America a large amount of ammunition, thirty thousand muskets, and clothing for twenty thousand soldiers. The commission from the independent United States of America, which superseded Deane's agency in Paris at the close of 1776, made steady progress toward the negotiation of our first treaties of alliance and commerce. Jefferson had been asked to serve on this commission with Franklin and Deane, but another service, which we shall study in our next chapter, appealed to him with a clearer call, and Arthur Lee was substituted in his place. That foreign nations helped us for the destruction of the British Empire rather than for the establishment of the American Republic did not affect the value of their aid. What that value was every student of the American Revolution knows. Whether or not we should have eventually established our independence without the help of France it is impossible to say. So judicious a scholar as Mr. Lecky believes that most of the States would have given up the struggle without this help. Although New England and Virginia might have kept up a valiant but desperate resistance for a time, "the peace party would soon have gained the ascendancy and the colonies have been reunited to the mother country.' The Declaration of Independence was a fitting climax to Jefferson's splendid campaign for political freedom, and would alone suffice to place him high in the honor-roll of the founders of the American state. It was a masterly condensation of the Summary View and the Reply to Lord North, thrown into the form of a stirring manifesto to the American people and the world at large. And its influence on America and the world at large has been beyond calculation. Even England herself, led astray for the moment by false counsels, was helped by its plain and ruthless lesson to regain the path of justice; for the Declaration was an appeal from an England badly governed to an England to be better governed. It was the voice of Milton speaking again. There is no need to introduce Rousseau and the French philosophers of the eighteenth century to explain Jefferson's language. "The natural rights of man" was a doctrine as old as the Roman law, and "government by consent of the governed" was the principle for which the "republicans" of the seventeenth century had fought their battle of four score years against the Stuart kings. It is doubtful whether Jefferson had read a word of Rousseau's Contrat social in 1776, but for a decade he had been a profound student of Coke and Milton, of Harrington and Locke.1 To the end of his long career of varied service to the American Republic Jefferson continued faithful to the doctrine of government by the consent of the governed, of confidence in the people to shape their own political destinies, of liberty as a gift of God and not a grant from monarchs. On the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence the city of Washington invited Jefferson to take part in its celebration. He had entered his eighty-fourth year and was too feeble to accept the invitation. But in his letter of regret written to Mayor Weightman on June 24, 1826— the last letter of his life-he renewed his pledge to the doctrines of the immortal Declaration and summoned his countrymen to "an undiminished devotion" to its principles: "May it be to the world what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind 1 The influence of John Locke's Two Treatises on Government, published at the time of the English revolution of 1688-9, is traceable even to words and phrases in the Declaration. Compare the examples cited from Locke's second Treatise by Professor Channing, in his History of the United States, vol. III, p. 10. |