Many people might often wonder, how would you define being an “American”? While that is certainly a complex question, I believe that the Declaration of Independence, specifically its Preamble, will help to answer that question. The Preamble is undeniably crucial in its importance to the United States’ history as well as its significance in contemporary American society, as it is the founding document upon which all our political traditions are based. By using accusatory rhetorical techniques, Enlightenment-influenced prose style, and the usage of logically deductive reasoning through argumentative propositions, the Preamble successfully petitions for the rights of humanitarianism and rebellion. Through the Preamble, Thomas Jefferson and other Patriot contributors expertly merged the political attitudes of the Revolutionary Period with the ethical beliefs that continue to define our country today.
Despite its beautifully crafted simplicity, the Preamble is an outstanding example of politically charged rhetoric. From the first sentence alone, one can notice the literary influences of various 18th Century political works such as John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which describes how all men should have the right to protect their own lives, as well as their freedom and possessions. The Preamble seems to concur with this notion in a sequence of “self-evident truths”, the most famous of which being the phrase, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. It’s interesting to note that the Founding Fathers chose the influences of philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau in their rhetoric not only because of their intense devotion to the rights of the individual, but also because the books of these theorists had widespread popularity in Great Britain. This in turn allowed the Patriots to base the reasoning for their current struggle and eventual rebellion with a subject matter that the British people, especially Parliament, were very knowledgeable. This gives the Preamble of the Declaration a far more serious tone and greater impact in the hands of the British authorities. Along with making their intentions known to the British Crown, a secondary reason that the Founding Fathers had relied so heavily on usage of individualist philosophical texts was to sway wealthy, educated colonists who were still partially loyal to England. Even though war had erupted in 1776, the amount of Loyalists in the colonies was nearly equal to that of the Patriots, and it would have been highly advantageous for the Founding Fathers to convince as many of the “Tories” as possible to join the Revolution. Thomas Jefferson’s styles of rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence had influences in the United States’ history of women’s equality as well. At the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, along with other women’s rights activists, penned the Declaration of Sentiments, which happens to mimics the Preamble’s first line and parallels much of the defiant tone seen throughout the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. This was a momentous stepping-stone in the course for women’s rights as it rallied women to a familiar cause against a centuries-long male domination by both a patriarchal society and the U.S. government.
While individualism is touched upon heavily, the Preamble’s rhetoric also has quite a few references to God and divinity’s role in the newly formed Republic. The right to revolt rests upon the denial of certain rights “endowed by their Creator”. This justification has roots in not just Enlightenment thinking, but schools of thought that had existed long before even Christianity. The Preamble’s “unalienable Rights” is in reference to the philosophy known as Natural Law, which first appeared in the 1st Century B.C., and is a mixture of common sense and “laws of nature” that can be explicitly observed and understood. Jefferson’s appeal to Natural Law as a basis for revolt is essential as it gives the Patriot’s cause a validation that goes above any man-made decrees or acts that had been unfairly forced upon them in the past. From John Winthrop to Cotton Mather, literary figures throughout the history of colonial America had employed heavy religious connotations into their works. It is curious as to why Thomas Jefferson and his fellow writers made use of the word “Creator” instead of simply putting “God”. This may have been due to the radical disruption in Christian practices and theology caused by the introduction of Enlightenment concepts. This is also supported by the fact that many of the Founding Fathers identified with a school of religious thought known as Deism, in which the fundamental idea was that God was like a watchmaker, he created the world and subsequently left it to its own will. Although unlikely, Jefferson may have also written “Creator” to appeal to the non-Christian population who may not have explicitly used the Biblical version of “God” in their religion, such as Native Americans. If so, this may have been quite a strategically intelligent move, as the services of Native Americans were widely used by both the Patriots and the British during the Revolutionary War. In the same vein as the Founding Fathers’ Deist method of spirituality, the passage mentions a facet of American culture commonly seen and discussed today, which is the separation of church and state. More specifically, the rejection of the “divine right” of the monarchy. Through uses of the phrase, “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.", Jefferson and the Founding Fathers made it clear that a governing body exists to serve the people of a nation, and survives solely because the people allow it to do so. This ideal can be perfectly summed up by a quote from Jefferson, “When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty” (www.monticello.org).
Keeping with the mannerisms of the 18th Century philosophers, stylistically the Preamble is assembled in an Enlightenment prose style, in which directness, purity, and clarity were highly favored over long, drawn-out sentences. Its construction is one of absolute precision. In other words, the entire paragraph is perfectly pieced together so that even the movement or withdrawal of a single word disrupts the flow of the entire passage. The distinguished and comprehensive tone of the Preamble has its origins in a common 18th Century literary practice known as “Style Periodique”, which is known for its ability to present gravity and solidarity to writing. This can be seen, interestingly enough, by the fact that there are no sentences in the Preamble that end in with a single syllable word. This gives the text a definitive sense of unbreakable unity, which can be seen as a reflection of the authors’ defiant unison as they were writing such a historically transcendental work. The Preamble also appears to have mythic undertones throughout its sentence progression. The passage begins seemingly in a place equivalent to the Garden of Eden, in which “all men are created equal”, and subtlety captures the notion the despotic regime the Patriots are suffering under may be a parallel to humanity’s fall from grace.
The authors of the Preamble understood that in order to transmit their intent to the British Crown, as well as lay out their intentions of revolution, one must use wording that creates a transmission of guilt to the audience and clearly establishes the right to rebel against tyranny. In order to do so, the Preamble contains five distinctive, yet cohesively written propositions that build upon each other as the text progresses. The first being the classic “All men are created equal”, the second, “They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”, as well as the third and fourth propositions, which are “Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and “To secure these rights governments are instituted among men”, respectively. The author’s use of demonstrative pronouns is intended to evoke of sense of inevitability in each of the following propositions. The fifth and final proposition, as well as the most important, “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” This is the climax of the entire Preamble. Through use of the four previous logical deductions, Jefferson offers both an indisputable statement concerning their resolutions and an air tight argument from which the British government could not dispute its meaning or tone. Much like a philosophical argument in which a series of premises ultimately lead to a conclusion, each proposition is layered on top of the previous one. For example, the word “They” in the second proposition refers to “All men” in the previous proposition, while propositions three and four focus on the “unalienable rights” of the second proposition. Each of these four message are meant to create the final decision in the fifth proposition, which is the fundamental right to stage a revolution.
Interestingly enough, the Preamble was an often overlooked section of the Declaration of Independence. Unlike its historical context, which featured drastic changes both politically and culturally, the Preamble’s writing was not seen was radical or revolutionary at all. Its unshakable, politically-charged message made it a literary weapon of absolute perfection for the Patriot cause and officially established the American Revolution in the eyes of both American colonists and the British Crown. Through its adoption of 18th Century rhetoric, Enlightenment prose style, and philosophically-based advocacy for rebellion, the Preamble encapsulates the fundamental principles of the American way of life.