Declaring independence was not the singular act of a revolutionary republic in July 1776. Instead, in the era of the American Revolution, independence, or the suppression of it, was the objective of many different peoples in the British Atlantic world. This roundtable will consider the many and varied ways that conceptions of independence motivated people to act in the interests of their communities, challenge local and imperial authorities, and deny it to others.

For some, like the Indigenous Nations of the Susquehanna River Valley in Pennsylvania, who had already suffered from dispossession, disease, and community loss over the course of the eighteenth century, independence entailed the preservation of their sovereignty and survival in the face of aggressive white settlers in the early 1770s. Chris Pearl’s contribution will explore how the Susquehanna Nations, a confederation of nearly a dozen refugee Indigenous Nations that came together in the 1750s, confronted the Fair Play Squatter Republic in the years just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. This so-called republic, comprised of illegal settlements on the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, challenged both native claims to the land and the colonial authorities who presumed to control them. Pearl’s talk will highlight the complicated racial violence that suffused the Revolutionary Age and the centrality of Indigenous peoples to the founding of the United States.

The liberty and freedom to which both the Susquehanna Nations and the Fair Play Squatters aspired as independent peoples were historically contested terms at the very heart of the Declaration of Independence. In his talk, Steven Sarson will discuss how the historical consciousness invoked in the Declaration explains how the founders could accommodate their views on equality and liberty with the inequities and iniquities of the time. Sarson argues that the Declaration was actually defined by the opening words of its introduction: “When in the Course of human events.” By beginning with Creation, tracking the origins of government and society, and then the establishment of colonies and empire, this founding document provided a context for understanding the present that justified and even necessitated independence. The Declaration even looked to a “Free and Independent” future but qualified that freedom in several paragraphs as not applying to Loyalists, Indigenous Americans, and enslaved Africans based on their past transgressions.

Creating an inclusive or exclusionary republic required altering others to its birth. In our final talk, Emily Sneff will examine the process of declaring independence and the many people involved in the work of spreading the news of the United States' independence nearly 250 years ago. The Continental Congress knew that they needed foreign powers to acknowledge the independence and sovereignty of the United States, yet they failed in their effort to send the Declaration of Independence to their most hoped-for ally, France, in a timely manner. Sneff will highlight the dissemination of the Declaration through the popular press in Europe, and contrast the reluctance of European powers to acknowledge the United States' independence with President Thomas Jefferson's refusal to acknowledge Haitian independence.