Fundamentally, it is building to an argument for the validity of independence in four consecutive points. Notably, whereas today, national independence movements often take it as a granted principle that a people ought to be free to make its own government, ought to be free of the domination of another people (the principle of self-determination), the Declaration assumes its reader thinks the opposite. It assumes a reader who accepts that monarchy and empire are both just and natural, for whom the idea of self-determination is at best dangerous nonsense. And that makes sense – almost none of the peoples in the world the framers knew were self governing (notable exceptions for the Dutch and Swiss). Instead, even when a people had their own country, they were ruled, rather than self-governing – by a king or a closed oligarchy (often a hereditary aristocracy), which often felt little if any cultural commonality with their own commoners.

That system was normal and indeed had been normal since antiquity: self-governing polities are very rare in the pre-modern period. It was not only normal, but normalized: centuries of literature and tradition supported the idea that the right and normal way to organize a society was through authority rather than self-governance. So the Declaration has to go to exceptional lengths to show why this monarchy and this empire have ceded any just claim to govern the colonies. In the process, however, it lays down the argument that leads to that modern assumption of self-determination.

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We should also note that what the Declaration asserts are not collective rights, but rather individual rights, an important component of liberalism, but an enormous break with most pre-modern social assumptions, which tend to be communal, rather than individual. Compare for instance the ancient Greek notions of autonomia and eleutheria – autonomy and freedom – which in a political sense were really collective rights, possessed by the polis. An individual Athenian did not really have any rights that the Athenian demos – the people at large – were bound to respect. By contrast, the Declaration is asserting that all men individually possess key rights, including the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ which is rather an expansion of Locke’s original “life, liberty and property” formulation – to me it includes not just a right to property but also a right to make one’s own decisions, to pursue one’s own goals, to not be a tool of the community. Again, this is a really radical rejection of the way most societies had been organized – as Patrician Crone notes, in pre-industrial societies, “the individual existed for the benefit of the overall group, not the other way around.” The Declaration asserts the opposite: the group (governments) exist for the individual.

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The Declaration was recognized as an incendiary, radical, dangerous document at the time. It was banned or suppressed in some European monarchies – not appearing in translation, for instance, in Russia until 1863 or in Spain until 1868; it was outright banned in Spain’s overseas colonies. And it isn’t hard to see why – the language and ideas of the Declaration, building on European political philosophy that had been ‘in the air,’ so to speak, for some time clearly played a role in the cultural foment that culminated in the French Revolution. A European monarch who worried that the publication of the Declaration might endanger their crown was right to worry.

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Which at last brings us to the bill of grievances. Given the above build-up, you can see why the list of grievances are necessary: the Declaration has tried to establish that if a government is sufficiently injurious to the natural rights of its people, it becomes permissible – even required by duty – for those people to abolish and replace it. But of course then they have to show that the government of King George III was, in fact, so injurious. It is an interesting and clearly deliberate choice to frame the grievances as an indictment against George III in particular, even though the framers knew as well as anyone that many of these injuries were the product of policy set by Parliament. On the one hand, George III could stand in for his government symbolically here, but at the same time, I suspect that part of what the authors of the Declaration are trying to summon rhetorically is the notion of ancient tyranny (thus their use of the word). Of course a tyranny could be of Thirty Men as easily as just one, but the designation of a singular tyrant-king lends the whole list a rhetorical punch. “He has…” is just a lot clearer and more effective than, “the King in consultation with his government and the full support of Parliament has…”

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So I provide below an annotated copy of the bill of grievances, with links to note where our current government is doing many of the very things for which we declared, 250 years ago, that it was not merely right, but a duty to throw off British governance. Of course today we have no need of revolution, because we have elections and so may freely change our leaders or even alter the form of our government without violence.

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It is also, importantly, a day to reflect on the United States, a country of ideas and values – not a nation of blood and soil. It is a day to think about what those ideals are and what we owe them, not in the fuzzy, gauzy, vague sense of flag waving and patriotic music (though those are fun), but in the hard, specific way of articulating what our country is for. And it can be hard: it is obvious to anyone studying American history that the United States did not at its inception live up to the notion that all men were created equal – the founders kept slaves and often behaved cruelly towards Native Americans. Their ideals were better than they were. And where the men failed, the ideals succeeded: the framers failed to abolish slavery, but their ideals eventually – fitfully, with too much delay and bloodshed – succeeded. Their ideals animated the movement for women’s suffrage – even when the Declaration was new, Abigail Adams could note that its principles must logically extend to all women, as well as all men – and the movement for civil rights.