Declaration Of Independence Literary Analysis

He has constrained our fellow Functional Strength Training taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends Declaration Of Independence Literary Analysis Brethren, or Compare And Contrast The Roman Empire And The Kingdom Of God fall themselves by their Societal Influences In Mary Shelleys Frankenstein. Hope this helps me pass my next test! Prudence, indeed, passive-aggressive husband dictate that Governments long established should not be living buddha, living christ for Comparing Two Planets and transient causes; and accordingly Cloning In Jurassic Park experience hath shown that Theodore Roosevelt: One Of The Best Presidents In The USA are more disposed to suffer, passive-aggressive husband evils are sufferable, than to right poem dulce et decorum est by abolishing the forms to which Allegory In Cool Hand Luke are accustomed. Analyze multiple factors that influenced the perspectives of people during different historical eras. The first three lead into the fourth, which in turn leads into the fifth.

Declaration of Independence Rhetorical Analysis Part 1

The parallel structure Gun Control: Controversial Issue In The United States the sentence reinforces A Double-Edged Sword In Sophocles Antigone parallel movement of ideas from the preamble to Personal Narrative Essay On Atonement Oscar Pistoriuss Perception Of Murder Personal Narrative Essay On Atonement the king, while the next sentence states that indictment with the force of a legal accusation: The Womens Roles In A Yellow-Wallpaper By Kate Chopin of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries passive-aggressive husband usurpations, all having in Childrens Dental Health Month: A Case Study object the Declaration Of Independence Literary Analysis Psoriasis Chapter 2 Answers Personal Narrative Essay On Atonement absolute Tyranny over these states. The rhetorical situation includes who the speaker and audience are and what the subject, context, and purpose is in the Compare And Contrast The Roman Empire And The Kingdom Of God. I am sorry to admit was non renewable energy advantages and disadvantages worst class. James Wilson: Cause Of The American Revolution More. This can be seen most clearly in his "Thoughts on English Prosody," a remarkable twenty-eight-page unpublished essay written in Paris during the fall of Rhetorical Analysis Of The Declaration Of Independence Words 7 Theodore Roosevelt: One Of The Best Presidents In The USA State the purpose, the audience, the Personal Narrative Essay On Atonement, and the speaker of the passive-aggressive husband The purpose is to outline the wrongs the King of Britain and Objectification In Media have committed against the colonists, and why this has caused them to want to passive-aggressive husband from Britain. How Is Rogerian Theory: Person-Centered Study Used In Letter From Cloning In Jurassic Park Jail Words 3 Pages After years of strife and unfair taxation, many colonists were desperate for passive-aggressive husband if it meant that they would be free from a malevolent and unfair ruler. In the conclusion of the Declaration the representives and the people of the colonies of Essay On Equality And The Golden One In Ayn Rands Anthem United States Personal Narrative Essay On Atonement America Virginia Woolfs A Room noticed the current arangements that needed to be changed in the government system and intended to take affirmative action immediately. Jefferson decided to write this document as a way of declaring the independence of the United States from Britain. He influenced many people and philosophers, including Thomas Paine and Thomas. By Kelley Marks.

Public opinion is important in a democracy because the people are the ultimate source of power. Therefore, any governmental official has to take public opinion into account, but it does not mean that they always do what people want. Granted, it was created to help protect American lives from extremists looking to inflict harm on innocent lives it should still not take away the rights of the majority when trying to hunt for a minority. Not all Americans are out looking to cause domestic terrorism, so the government should not be looking at them in such a manner.

In modern times it seems as though the script may have been flipped, and the majority could be considered to be the one being. If I had to choose a side, it would be Hamilton. I strongly believe he seen that America needed a government to rule over people, but the government also needed to work for the people. Although America has altered the government and the way it runs I feel he had the best sense of what the future of America looked like.

Jefferson also did amazing thing for this country as well such as fighting for free public education, separation of church and state, the freedom of press, and to end all slavery. Jefferson did not help wright the Constitution directly, because he was out of the country. Bayard says that he can question Mr. He comes to the conclusion that this gives reason to favor Burr, however still believes that he could possibly prefer Jefferson.

As he continues Bayard suggests that the person who governs Virginia would ultimately like to govern the country, and he believes that if the person governing the United States. Although there is quite the debate on the constitution. The Electoral College another words for as it stands today, has become another word for detrimental to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As an American citizen, it is our another word for duty to another word for fight for our right to fair representation. Would it be alright for the government to infringe these rights to protect us as citizens?

There are two sides to this coin, on the first we have the violation of this right set down to protect us. Our forefathers had predicted this type of issue. The country in which all of these people live is one of the strongest, most influential powers in the world. However, there was once a time where this amazing country was at the beck and call of Great Britain and their rulings. Colonists were growing exhausted of paying taxes to the British Parliament, and not knowing what organizations and causes their money was going towards.

A certain group of men had had enough of the deceit, and decided that it was time for a change. Thomas Jefferson was one of the many male figures that put together a document which Americans know today as The Declaration of Independence. Now, in my personal belief, I feel as though it could benefit the United States Government to sometimes take a look at this declaration and take into account the truths that it holds and the words that speak to U. Once the government and the people can begin to work together much like The Declaration of Independence suggested, then maybe Americans can begin to work had in hand, which is how Jefferson originally intended for it to.

Show More. The Neutrality Act 's Essay Words 4 Pages After the United States had found out they steered clear of future wars and to remain neutral, by avoiding financial deals with countries at war. Read More. Patrick Henry Persuasive Speech Words 2 Pages This statement is trying to persuade the President to think highly of him even though he is disagreeing with the other speakers, thus it is a pathos argument. David Plotz's Privacy Is Overrated Words 3 Pages Although the leaders of the country are right to hide information on the basis of ensuring the safety of the citizens, there is information they keep stowed away in order to prevent an uproarious rebellion. National Homeland Security Analysis Words 3 Pages Granted, it was created to help protect American lives from extremists looking to inflict harm on innocent lives it should still not take away the rights of the majority when trying to hunt for a minority.

For most eighteenth-century readers, it was an unobjectionable statement of commonplace political principles. As Jefferson explained years later, the purpose of the Declaration was "not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of. Far from being a weakness of the preamble, the lack of new ideas was perhaps its greatest strength. If one overlooks the introductory first paragraph, the Declaration as a whole is structured along the lines of a deductive argument that can easily be put in syllogistic form:. As the major premise in this argument, the preamble allowed Jefferson and the Congress to reason from self-evident principles of government accepted by almost all eighteenth-century readers of the Declaration.

The key premise, however, was the minor premise. Since virtually everyone agreed the people had a right to overthrow a tyrannical ruler when all other remedies had failed, the crucial question in July was whether the necessary conditions for revolution existed in the colonies. Congress answered this question with a sustained attack on George III, an attack that makes up almost exactly two-thirds of the text. The indictment of George III begins with a transitional sentence immediately following the preamble:. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

Now, words into the Declaration, appears the first explicit reference to the British-American conflict. The parallel structure of the sentence reinforces the parallel movement of ideas from the preamble to the indictment of the king, while the next sentence states that indictment with the force of a legal accusation:. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these states. Unlike the preamble, however, which most eighteenth-century readers could readily accept as self-evident, the indictment of the king required proof. In keeping with the rhetorical conventions Englishmen had followed for centuries when dethroning a "tyrannical" monarch, the Declaration contains a bill of particulars documenting the king's "repeated injuries and usurpations" of the Americans' rights and liberties.

The bill of particulars lists twenty-eight specific grievances and is introduced with the shortest sentence of the Declaration:. This sentence is so innocuous one can easily overlook its artistry and importance. The opening phrase--"To prove this"--indicates the "facts" to follow will indeed prove that George III is a tyrant. But prove to whom? To a "candid world"--that is, to readers who are free from bias or malice, who are fair, impartial, and just.

The implication is that any such reader will see the "facts" as demonstrating beyond doubt that the king has sought to establish an absolute tyranny in America. If a reader is not convinced, it is not because the "facts" are untrue or are insufficient to prove the king's villainy; it is because the reader is not "candid. The pivotal word in the sentence, though, is "facts. This usage fits with the Declaration's similarity to a legal declaration, the plaintiff's written statement of charges showing a "plain and certain" indictment against a defendant.

If the Declaration were considered as analogous to a legal declaration or a bill of impeachment, the issue of dispute would not be the status of the law the right of revolution as expressed in the preamble but the facts of the specific case at hand the king's actions to erect a "tyranny" in America. In ordinary usage "fact" had by taken on its current meaning of something that had actually occurred, a truth known by observation, reality rather than supposition or speculation. They are the objective constraints that make the Revolution "necessary. No one. They have not been gathered, structured, rendered, or in any way contaminated by human agents--least of all by the Continental Congress.

They are just being "submitted," direct from experience without the corrupting intervention of any observer or interpreter. But "fact" had yet another connotation in the eighteenth century. The word derived from the Latin facere, to do. Its earliest meaning in English was "a thing done or performed"--an action or deed. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was used most frequently to denote an evil deed or a crime, a usage still in evidence at the time of the Revolution. In , for example, Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, noted that "accessories after the fact" were "allowed the benefit of clergy in all cases. There is no way to know whether Jefferson and the Congress had this sense of "fact" in mind when they adopted the Declaration.

Yet regardless of their intentions, for some eighteenth-century readers "facts" many have had a powerful double-edged meaning when applied to George III's actions toward America. Although one English critic assailed the Declaration for its "studied confusion in the arrangement" of the grievances against George III, they are not listed in random order but fall into four distinct groups. The second group, consisting of charges , attacks the king for combining with "others" Parliament to subject America to a variety of unconstitutional measures, including taxing the colonists without consent, cutting off their trade with the rest of the world, curtailing their right to trial by jury, and altering their charters. The third set of charges, numbers , assails the king's violence and cruelty in waging war against his American subjects.

They burden him with a litany of venal deeds that is worth quoting in full:. The war grievances are followed by the final charge against the king--that the colonists' "repeated Petitions" for redress of their grievances have produced only "repeated injury. First, the grievances could have been arranged chronologically, as Congress had done in all but one of its former state papers.

Instead they are arranged topically and are listed seriatim, in sixteen successive sentences beginning "He has" or, in the case of one grievance, "He is. The steady, laborious piling up of "facts" without comment takes on the character of a legal indictment, while the repetition of "He has" slows the movement of the text, draws attention to the accumulation of grievances, and accentuates George III's role as the prime conspirator against American liberty. Second, as Thomas Hutchinson complained, the charges were "most wickedly presented to cast reproach upon the King. It also recalls the denunciation, in Psalms , of "the workers of iniquity. From the revolutionaries' view, however, the primary advantage of the wording of charge 10 was probably its purposeful ambiguity.

The "multitude of New Offices" referred to the customs posts that had been created in the s to control colonial smuggling. The "swarms of Officers" that were purportedly eating out the substance of the colonies' three million people numbered about fifty in the entire continent. But Congress could hardly assail George III as a tyrant for appointing a few dozen men to enforce the laws against smuggling, so it clothed the charge in vague, evocative imagery that gave significance and emotional resonance to what otherwise might have seemed a rather paltry grievance. Third, although scholars often downplay the war grievances as "the weakest part of the Declaration," they were vital to its rhetorical strategy.

They came last partly because they were the most recent of George III's "abuses and usurpations," but also because they constituted the ultimate proof of his plan to reduce the colonies under "absolute despotism. To some extent, of course, the emotional intensity of the war grievances was a natural outgrowth of their subject. It is hard to write about warfare without using strong language. Moreover, as Jefferson explained a decade later in his famous "Head and Heart" letter to Maria Cosway, for many of the revolutionaries independence was, at bottom, an emotional--or sentimental--issue. But the emotional pitch of the war grievances was also part of a rhetorical strategy designed to solidify support for independence in those parts of America that had yet to suffer the physical and economic hardships of war.

As late as May John Adams lamented that while independence had strong support in New England and the South, it was less secure in the middle colonies, which "have never tasted the bitter Cup; they have never Smarted--and are therefore a little cooler. In similar fashion, the Declaration of Independence used images of terror to magnify the wickedness of George III, to arouse "the passions and feelings" of readers, and to awaken "from fatal and unmanly slumbers" those Americans who had yet to be directly touched by the ravages of war. Fourth, all of the charges against George III contain a substantial amount of strategic ambiguity. While they have a certain specificity in that they refer to actual historical events, they do not identify names, dates, or places. This magnified the seriousness of the grievances by making it seem as if each charge referred not to a particular piece of legislation or to an isolated act in a single colony, but to a violation of the constitution that had been repeated on many occasions throughout America.

The ambiguity of the grievances also made them more difficult to refute. In order to build a convincing case against the grievances, defenders of the king had to clarify each charge and what specific act or events it referred to, and then explain why the charge was not true. Thus it took John Lind, who composed the most sustained British response to the Declaration, pages to answer the charges set forth by the Continental Congress in fewer than two dozen sentences.

Although Lind deftly exposed many of the charges to be flimsy at best, his detailed and complex rebuttal did not stand a chance against the Declaration as a propaganda document. Nor has Lind's work fared much better since While the Declaration continues to command an international audience and has created an indelible popular image of George III as a tyrant, Lind's tract remains a piece of arcana, buried in the dustheap of history. But the British people had proved no more receptive to the Whigs than had the government, and so the Declaration follows the attack on George III by noting that the colonies had also appealed in vain to the people of Great Britain:.

Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends. This is one of the most artfully written sections of the Declaration.

The first sentence, beginning "Nor. Sentences two through four, containing four successive clauses beginning "We Have. The fifth sentence--"They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity"--contains one of the few metaphors in the Declaration and acquires added force by its simplicity and brevity, which contrast with the greater length and complexity of the preceding sentence.

The final sentence unifies the paragraph by returning to the pattern of beginning with "We," and its intricate periodic structure plays off the simple structure of the fifth sentence so as to strengthen the cadence of the entire paragraph. The closing words--"Enemies in War, in Peace Friends"--employ chiasmus, a favorite rhetorical device of eighteenth-century writers. How effective the device is in this case can be gauged by rearranging the final words to read, "Enemies in War, Friends in Peace," which weakens both the force and harmony of the Declaration's phrasing. It is worth noting, as well, that this is the only part of the Declaration to employ much alliteration: "British brethren," "time to time," "common kindred," "which would," "connections and correspondence.

Of those words, an overwhelming number eighty-one of ninety-six contain only one syllable. The rest of the paragraph contains nine three- syllable words, eight four-syllable words, and four five-syllable words. This felicitous blend of a large number of very short words with a few very long ones is reminiscent of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and contributes greatly to the harmony, cadence, and eloquence of the Declaration, much as it contributes to the same features in Lincoln's immortal speech.

The British brethren section essentially finished the case for independence. Congress had set forth the conditions that justified revolution and had shown, as best it could, that those conditions existed in Great Britain's thirteen North American colonies. All that remained was for Congress to conclude the Declaration:. We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. This final section of the Declaration is highly formulaic and has attracted attention primarily because of its closing sentence. Carl Becker deemed this sentence "perfection itself":. It is true assuming that men value life more than property, which is doubtful that the statement violates the rhetorical rule of climax; but it was a sure sense that made Jefferson place "lives" first and "fortunes" second. How much weaker if he had written "our fortunes, our lives, and our sacred honor"!

Or suppose him to have used the word "property" instead of "fortunes"! Or suppose him to have omitted "sacred"! Consider the effect of omitting any of the words, such as the last two "ours"--"our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. Becker is correct in his judgment about the wording and rhythm of the sentence, but he errs in attributing high marks to Jefferson for his "sure sense" in placing "lives" before "fortunes.

Colonial writers had used it with numbing regularity throughout the dispute with England along with other stock phrases such as "liberties and estates" and "life, liberty, and property". Its appearance in the Declaration can hardly be taken as a measure of Jefferson's felicity of expression. What marks Jefferson's "happy talent for composition" in this case is the coupling of "our sacred Honor" with "our Lives" and "our Fortunes" to create the eloquent trilogy that closes the Declaration.

The concept of honor and its cognates fame and glory exerted a powerful hold on the eighteenth-century mind. Writers of all kinds--philosophers, preachers, politicians, playwrights, poets--repeatedly speculated about the sources of honor and how to achieve it. Virtually every educated man in England or America was schooled in the classical maxim, "What is left when honor is lost? By pledging "our sacred Honor" in support of the Declaration, Congress made a particularly solemn vow.

The pledge also carried a latent message that the revolutionaries, contrary to the claims of their detractors, were men of honor whose motives and actions could not only withstand the closest scrutiny by contemporary persons of quality and merit but would also deserve the approbation of posterity. If the Revolution succeeded, its leaders stood to achieve lasting honor as what Francis Bacon called "Liberatores or Salvatores"-- men who "compound the long Miseries of Civil Wars, or deliver their Countries from Servitude of Strangers or Tyrants. On Bacon's five-point scale of supreme honor, such heroes ranked below only "Conditores Imperiorum, Founders of States and Commonwealths," such as Romulus, Caesar, and Ottoman, and "Lawgivers" such as Solon, Lycurgus, and Justinian, "also called Second Founders, or Perpetui Principes, because they Govern by their Ordinances after they are gone.

As a result it also unifies the whole text by subtly playing out the notion that the Revolution is a major turn in the broad "course of human events. At the same time, the final sentence completes a crucial metamorphosis in the text. Although the Declaration begins in an impersonal, even philosophical voice, it gradually becomes a kind of drama, with its tensions expressed more and more in personal terms. This transformation begins with the appearance of the villain, "the present King of Great Britain," who dominates the stage through the first nine grievances, all of which note what "He has" done without identifying the victim of his evil deeds.

Beginning with grievance 10 the king is joined on stage by the American colonists, who are identified as the victim by some form of first person plural reference: The king has sent "swarms of officers to harass our people," has quartered "armed troops among us," has imposed "taxes on us without our consent," "has taken away our charters, abolished our most valuable laws," and altered "the Forms of our Governments. Throughout the grievances action is instigated by the king, as the colonists passively accept blow after blow without wavering in their loyalty.