The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

The leaner, edited result remained a stirring manifesto of republicanism, a radical assertion that power derived not from God or through bloodlines but from the people, and should benefit the many, not just the affluent or well-born. Of the ninety or more declarations and petitions drafted by the colonies in recent months, as counted by the historian Pauline Maier, none surpassed this document in elegance, clarity, or breathtaking vision. That at least a third of the delegates who would sign the Declaration were slave owners—Jefferson alone had two hundred—was a moral catastrophe that could never be reconciled with the avowed principles of equality and “unalienable rights,” at least not in the eighteenth century. But as Edmund S. Morgan would write, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it, invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.”