 One of my favorite paragraphs is this next one, nor have we been wanting an attention to our British brethren. This is a reference to the British people. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to an extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our immigration and settlement here. We've appealed to their native justice and magnanimity and we have conjured them by ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They're referring to the fact that the people of the colonies felt that the people of Britain were also suffering under the king and parliament. They pointed to a number of laws that had caused riots or protests in Great Britain. John Wilkes was a dissenter who'd been elected as a member of parliament and who was denied his seat by parliament. There was a great outcry in Britain. And so the people of the colonies felt that the king and parliament were becoming oppressive not just to the colonists in North America but to the people of Britain themselves. And if they made common cause, then parliament and the king would stop it. But the people of Britain didn't rise up the way the colonists expected and make common cause with them. They didn't see themselves as allied. What this paragraph is doing is saying, we've appealed to you to join in our fight against tyranny. But you've ignored us. We must therefore acquiesce in the necessity. Again, this phrase acquiesce in the necessity. We don't wanna do this. We are being forced. Britain's tyranny is making us do this. We acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind enemies and war in peace, friends. It's like a divorce. It's like the breaking of family ties. You are a foreign nation to us now, just like France. When we're at war, you're our enemies. When we're at peace, you'll be our friends. But you are no longer kin to us. This is probably the most heart-wrenching paragraph in the declaration because it is where one people becomes two peoples. The next paragraph says all these things that Congress is gonna do. We're the representatives and we declare that the United Colonies are free and independent states, absolved from allegiance to the crown. This allegiance is dissolved. They have the full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce. But why are they doing this? They're saying we are the people's representatives. So we are now the legitimate governing body of this new entity, the United States of America. We have the people's confidence and we can do all the things that other nation states can do. We can make treaties to levy war. We can have peace negotiations. If Britain wants to deal with us, if France wants to deal with us, use and send your emissaries to us, the Continental Congress, not to the different colonies, not to any splinter groups. We are the legitimate representatives of the colonies. We have the authority of the good people of these colonies and that's in whose name we are declaring independence. And we pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our honor. There were always significant numbers of people in the colonies slash United States who were either neutral about the cause of independence or who supported Britain. But what you have to understand is that the war was long. The process of attaining independence took many years. People changed their positions over time. So when the British army was in your locality, a lot of people turned out to be neutral or loyalist. When the Continental army was in your vicinity, you tended to support the Continentals. The British army made a lot of people who were initially supportive of the crown come over to the American cause. The British government continued to be so intractable. The war dragged on for such a long time. A lot of men were called up to their local militias and were shot at by British. What's independence was declared, the outcome was by no means assured. They could very well have lost the war. The Continental army could have been destroyed. In fact, it was almost destroyed the very summer that the Declaration of Independence was being issued because Washington was fighting in New York and he almost lost his entire army. They created, they signed it, they send it out. It's red, bells are rung, bonfires are lit across the colonies, they're celebrations, but the war was already going on in July of 1776. The Continental army had been created July of 1775. So this really formalized what was already going on. George Washington had been appointed head of the Continental army a year before. He was fighting a very important battle in New York as the Declaration was being passed. On the ground level, it didn't make that much difference. One of the most significant consequences was that it allowed France to start aiding the colonies, sending money, and then eventually entering into a formal treaty that was signed in 1778 that promised money and men and supplies to the United States. And without France's support, the United States would never have been able to win the war, especially the support of their navy. I also think for the people of the United States, the fact that they knew what they were fighting for in very concrete terms was very important. It's important not to overstate the importance of the Declaration of Independence per se at the time. The document was important because it did formally declare the United States a separate nation and new nation, and because it made other countries who might wanna aid the United States know with whom to talk, that is the Continental Congress, and it was a sort of rallying point for the American people to understand that now they were fighting for a separate nation, not just to convince Britain to treat them better. But the Declaration of Independence actually faded from prominence during the American Revolution and in the years immediately after. And for a long time, Thomas Jefferson was not identified as the sole or even most important author of the document. It was thought to be the creation of the Continental Congress, and it symbolized the collective sentiments of the people of the United States. It was only in the 1790s when Thomas Jefferson became the leader of a new political party, the Democratic Republicans, that the Declaration of Independence was revived. His political opponents, the Federalists, deliberately refused to read the Declaration of Independence at 4th of July celebrations because they didn't like the radical implications of it, the idea that all men are created equal, the idea that we should all pursue happiness. The Declaration of Independence is a fantastic way to understand American history because many protest groups throughout American history model their own protests on the Declaration. Frederick Douglass talks about why do black slaves celebrate the 4th of July? Why do black slaves not wanna celebrate it? Why are they left out of the Declaration? Women write the Seneca Falls Declaration. They rewrite the Declaration in terms of men and women. Various labor groups throughout American history write their own declarations of independence saying why they feel oppressed or excluded or marginalized or not equal. I think it's the power of the ideals that have persisted throughout history, but the specific provisions are very much rooted in the historical events that lead up to 1776. Depending on your audience, you could either understand it primarily as a basis for change, radical change, in various times and places, or you could understand it as a specific historical document that was written in response to specific historical problems.