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DECISION FOR INDEPENDENCE
The
"Committee of Five" assigned to draft the Declaration of
Independence [Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin,
Roger
Sherman, Robert
R. Livingston] |
Reading:
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OVERVIEW:
1776 was a year of decision that transformed thirteen colonies into
a new nation fighting for its independence. As Bailyn essay, 1776
in Britain and America: A Year of Challenge - A World Transformed,
demonstrates it was a year of remarkable events on both sides of the
Atlantic. This passage from the essay serves as a focus for this topic: "A
year of extraordinary, world-transforming challenges in every sphere of
life - in ideology, in politics, in government, in religion, in economics,
in law, in the uses of military force, and in the basic principles of
international relations. In the annals of Western history there is
probably no equivalent annus mirabilis, so far-reaching in its
challenges and in the range of its ultimate consequences. How can it
be explained?" [Bailyn, Faces of Revolution, chap. 4, p. 162]
You have to read the whole essay carefully to
discover his answer. But for this topic the essential point is that 1776
ushered in one of the most creative periods of political and
constitutional thought and experimentation. The Declaration of
Independence was not just the final act of the revolutionary movement that
started in the 1760s; it was also the first step down a long road of
creating a new nation upon new foundations. |
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