A Spatial Analysis of the Declaration of Independence’s Grievances

Jack Rakove’s comment on the different sorts of grievances in the Declaration of Independence, quoted yesterday, led me to explore more deeply into their lack of parallel grammatical structure, also discussed yesterday.

I took a closer look at every jot of the Declaration, exercising the “punctuation is a moral issue” attitude of a former book editor.

To start with, though the grievances in the official text are all formatted to start with the same indentation, the punctuation at the ends of the lines is different. Instead of ending with a period, all the “For…” items end with a colon. (As first printed by John Dunlap, that is. Timothy Matlack apparently left out a colon after one line on the handwritten parchment.)

We no longer use a colon that way, but it eighteenth-century style it signaled a pause of less weight than a period but more than a semi-colon. In other words, while the other grievances were full sentences in their own right, those “For…” grievances were all parts of a single sentence.

I then looked at earlier drafts, starting with the text that Thomas Jefferson shared with his colleagues on the Continental Congress’s Declaration-drafting committee, as shown here by the Library of Congress. Jefferson had some idiosyncratic style preferences, such as the possessive “it’s” and much less fondness for capital letters than his contemporaries. He ended the grievances with colons and semi-colons instead of periods and colons.

What’s important to this discussion is that Jefferson didn’t start a new line for his first “for…” clause. Rather, that phrase was a continuation after a comma of the preceding “He has…” clause. Jefferson also indented the following “for…” lines more than the “he has…” lines, and he ended them with semi-colons instead of colons.

Then there’s John Adams’s early copy from June 1776, at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Adams copied all the “for…” items as part of the “He has…” clause that preceded them in one long paragraph at the bottom of page 2, as shown above.

Jefferson also made a copy of the committee’s draft, now at the Massachusetts Historical Society. In this version the “he has…” lines end with periods. It’s ambiguous whether the first “for…” item is part of the preceding clause or not. But there’s no question that Jefferson put a larger indent before all the other “for…” lines before returning to “he has…”

The full Congress adopted different punctuation and capitalization, and it wasn’t careful about keeping Jefferson’s original spatial formatting. The officially adopted text made no typographical distinction between “He has…” sentences and “For…” sentence fragments. They all start flush left with a capital letter.

But the earlier drafts let us see what we might call the committee’s original meaning of those lines. The “For…” items were all subordinate parts of the preceding “He has…” clause, serving to spell out the “Acts of pretended Legislation”—i.e., laws enacted by Parliament despite the colonists having no representation in that body.

For logical clarity in the outline form, the published Declaration should have been formatted the way Jefferson wrote those lines, with two levels of indentation:

• . . . He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences[:]

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

• He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. . . .

Those laws start before the Coercive Acts with Britain’s imperial trade laws, Quartering Act, and the new taxes of the 1760s. Only the last five “For…” items relate directly to the laws of 1774. The grammatical outliers thus don’t map exactly onto one of Rakove’s three categories of grievances, though it’s still useful to look on them all as basically chronological.

So if the nine “For…” lines in the Declaration are actually part of the preceding “He has…” clause, does that mean the Declaration has only eighteen grievances?