Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence is the founding statement of American nationhood, adopted by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, formally dissolving the political bonds connecting the thirteen colonies to Great Britain and the Crown of King George III. The resolution of independence itself was moved by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia on June 7, 1776 ("Lee Resolution"), and approved on July 2; the explanatory text was adopted two days later. The principal author was Thomas Jefferson, drafting for a Committee of Five that also included John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. The engrossed parchment was signed beginning August 2, 1776, with John Hancock, President of Congress, affixing the first and largest signature; fifty-six delegates ultimately signed.

The document's intellectual architecture rests on John Locke's social-contract theory, transmuting his "life, liberty, and property" into the famous triad of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Its preamble asserts self-evident truths—that all men are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights, and that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." Crucially, it articulates the right of revolution: that when government becomes destructive of these ends, the people may alter or abolish it. The bulk of the text is a bill of indictment—twenty-seven grievances against George III, ranging from dissolving colonial legislatures to imposing taxation without consent and quartering troops. Jefferson's draft clause condemning the slave trade was struck at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia. Structurally the Declaration moves from philosophical premises, to factual grievances, to the operative conclusion that the colonies "are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States."

The Declaration carried no domestic legal force as governing law—the Articles of Confederation (1781) and later the Constitution (ratified 1788) supplied governance—but it functioned as an act of state, justifying revolution to a "candid world" and courting foreign alliance, notably the decisive Franco-American alliance of 1778. Its egalitarian language later anchored Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863), which dated the nation to "four score and seven years ago," i.e., 1776 rather than 1787, and inspired anti-slavery, suffrage (the 1848 Seneca Falls "Declaration of Sentiments"), and decolonization movements worldwide, including Ho Chi Minh's 1945 Vietnamese declaration. As of 2026 the original engrossed copy is displayed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

For the FSOT, the Declaration is core content in both the US Government and US History sections, where questions test authorship and the Committee of Five, the Lockean origins of natural-rights theory, the distinction between July 2 (independence voted) and July 4 (text adopted), and its non-statutory yet foundational status relative to the Constitution. Candidates should distinguish the Declaration's aspirational principles from the binding legal framework of the Constitution, and be ready to trace its influence on later American reform movements and on global declarations of independence. A frequent exam trap conflates the Declaration with the Constitution or attributes its drafting solely to Jefferson without crediting the committee.