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Guest Essayist: Professor Joerg Knipprath, Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress, after months of preparation and weeks of political wrangling, announced that it had adopted an independence declaration. That document was written by Thomas Jefferson and substantially revised (“mangled,” according to Jefferson) by the Congress. Due to his other obligations, Jefferson had little time to spend on this task. Fortunately, he had composed his Summary View of the Rights of British America just two years earlier, from which he could draw much of the substance of the new document.

The Summary View resonates quite differently from the petitions, remonstrances, and declarations of a decade earlier. Read more

Jefferson began his public career in 1769 in the Virginia House of Burgesses, the colonial legislature. British implementation of the Coercive Acts of 1774 (also known as the Intolerable Acts)–passed in response to the Boston Tea Party–prompted the “Summary View,” Jefferson’s first publication. Written for Virginians who were choosing delegates to the First Continental Congress, it laid the groundwork for later appeals by a “free people, claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature.”

July 1774

Resolved, that it be an instruction to the said deputies when assembled in General Congress with the deputies from the other states of British America to propose to the said Congress that an humble and dutiful address be presented to his majesty begging leave to lay before him as chief magistrate of the British empire the united complaints of his majesty’s subjects Read more