SUSAN DUNN
AND
ROBERT
F.
DALZFLL.JR.
643
States that no simple translation or reinterpretation of Enlightenment
revolutionary symbols could resolve. Ultimately on both sides of the At–
lantic, nationhood would come to be based, not on the acceptance of a
rational social contract, or on notions of civic virtue, but on an entirely
new vision of emotional communion among citizens bound together by
shared suffering and self-sacrifice. For better or worse, too, we live with
that vision still.
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*
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That any of this should have been so in the American case would
have astonished the anxious men who, early in the summer of 1776, set
their signatures to the Declaration of Independence. Most of them
wanted nothing so much as a return to the political system they had
known before Parliament decided to bypass colonial legislatures and tax
Americans directly. As they envisioned their "revolution," it was to be
truly "a circuit around a central axis, ending at the point from whence
the motion began." This was the commonly understood meaning of the
word at the time - before. that is, the French Revolution changed for–
ever its significance. Nor did the achievement of nationhood in the
modem sense rank high on the signers' agenda. What concerned them far
more was the question of who would govern a liberated United States
ofAmerica.
If the Declaration itself is less than clear on some of these points, it
does not totally mask them either. It is in fact a curiously schizophrenic
document. First and last, there are the wonderful phrases that would en–
shrine for all time a breathtaking vision of unalienable rights and sacred
liberties. Yet squarely in the middle of those phrases comes the long sec–
tion on "abuses and usurpations" - the legal brief, documenting the
multiple transgressions committed by George III against his American
subjects. And if the one set of statements stands as a ringing affinnation of
all that free men can do to shape their own destinies, the other seems to
take exactly the opposite tack. For in paragraph after paragraph, item
after item, the King is shown as violating customary practice, disrupting
the proper functioning of long established - and deeply cherished -
political institutions.
Simply put, George Ill's great crime was that he had rendered
government in America impossible on anything like its traditional basis.
So ran the argument in the Declaration, and by extension revolution had
become necessary precisely because it offered the only hope of restoring
the country's legislatures and its courts, its laws and its lawmakers, to
their full and proper authority. The truth was, however, that for men
like the signers - most of whom were accustomed to playing key roles in
those same legislatures and courts - such a "restoration" was hardly a
matter of abstract principle alone. Their own political power was very
