Reflection: Declaration of Independance

I have never really read the Declaration of Independence. I know, it’s pretty bad. I have lived in the United States my whole life, and I have not read the document that our whole country was founded on and the very reason why we, the United States, are the United States, and still not colonies to Great Britain. Now, I assume we would have eventually broken free at one point, but as far as we know, this is the only way it would have happened. I thought that it was going to be long and boring, but it was not too bad. Okay, maybe I did get a little bored toward the middle of the document, but towards the end I got interested again. The main reason very may well be that the voice that they used to read Patrick Henry’s Speech to the Second Virginia Convention and Jonathan Edward’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Whoever reads those two easily keeps the reader interested.

Once I read the part of the Declaration where it starts listing off reasons that they need to separate from England, I started to see how Jefferson could easily overstep the lines of rational argument and start using faulty logic and propaganda techniques to get his point across. Most of the first reasons that Jefferson started to list off seemed pretty logical like

Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us; For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states; for transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses. (Jefferson 123)

I can understand that people in the colonies would be a little mad if the King started to make me house his soldiers and that the soldiers could do anything they wanted and they could just get a rigged trial so they would not get in any trouble. I would also have a problem if I was accused of a fake crime and I had to be shipped all the way back to England to be tried on false charges.

After a while though, he started to get sloppier. He started to say things like

He (the King) has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. (Jefferson 124)

In the above quote, Jefferson starts to go into the field of faulty logic trying to support his argument. He has no proof for the claims that the King waged war on them and destroyed and plundered the colonies. The next pargraph contains even more false logic:

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation. (Jefferson 124)

That quote is just full of claims without proof and more prominent is some very obvious name calling. Jefferson starts calling the British soldiers mercenaries and starts using words like “death”, “desolation”, “tyranny”, “cruelty”, “barbarous”, and “unworthy” to try to demonize the British as to make them seem way worse than they really were so that Jefferson could make it seem like the revolutionists were in the right.


Jefferson, Thomas. "The Declaration of Independence." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 120-124. Print.

"Recognizing Propaganda--Guide to Critical Thinking--Academic Support." 3 June 2011. Web. 27 Sept. 2011. <http://academic.cuesta.edu/acasupp/as/404.htm>.