4 - Life, Liberty, Property, and Peace

Summary

The Declaration of Independence, with its appeal to “the opinions of mankind,” was clearly intended to gain recognition from other nations, particularly the French monarch, but paradoxically it contained an almost gratuitous anti-monarchist dig that was at best undiplomatic and might even have proven counter-productive. Its egalitarian language implicitly assailed not only the divine rights of George III, but those of all kings, and could not have warmed the heart of Louis XVI. Yet one of its drafters, Benjamin Franklin, departed on his mission to secure that monarch’s assistance only three months after helping to frame the Declaration’s anti-royalist rhetoric. The Declaration expressed the shared perspectives of a particular disgruntled elite, whose emotions were neither harmonious nor egalitarian. The doctrine that all men are created equal was obviously untrue, and had less to do with “harmonizing sentiments of the day,” as Jefferson later called them, than with igniting the emotions of domestic mobs.