“To Effect Their Safety and Happiness”: The Declaration of Independence and the Creation of a Natural Law Republic

The authors of the Declaration of Independence originally envisioned a natural law republic rather than a natural rights republic. Their idea that all are created equal applied in a state of nature of sovereign individuals with equal entitlement to the earth and its produce, described by John Locke in opposition to Robert Filmer’s claim that God granted absolute power and proprietorship to Adam and succeeding kings. To secure certain unalienable rights, people consented to government and retained a right to revolution to restore “their Safety and Happiness,” but otherwise abandoned equal sovereignty for greater security of life, liberty, and estates. The Declaration thus grounded itself in a Lockean historiography in which people sacrificed elements of their equality via the social contract. Some would sacrifice more than others. The supposed natural dependence of women and circumstantial dependence of poorer men meant neither would be granted civil rights such as suffrage. Furthermore, the “rest of mankind” might be “enemies in war,” as were loyalists, enslaved people, and Native Americans, and as such could lose their lives, liberties, and estates, all in accord with “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” that required the new government to secure the lives, safety and happiness of the Declaration’s “one people.” Hence the iniquities that survived Independence were not so much contradictions of the Declaration as reflections of the contingencies of “the Course of human events” and the complexities of its “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Almost immediately after Independence, however, others challenged this “original” Declaration with the “creedal” reading based on the principles of equality and natural rights that we are familiar with today.