declaration of independence analytical essay

The Declaration of Independence

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Analysis: “The Declaration of Independence”

The Declaration of Independence is both a legal document and a philosophical treatise. It has the structure of a government document but uses philosophy to underpin its political purpose. It is organized around two premises: that a government derives its power from the people and that the people can, therefore, dissolve the government and form a new one if it fails to protect the people’s rights. Jefferson first argues the undeniability of the first premise and then goes into extensive detail to prove the second. With both premises proven, the document reaches its conclusion: The people of the colonies are forming a new government. The three sections of the text (preamble, list of grievances, and conclusion) each use slightly different devices and ideas that are worth looking at closely.

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Lesson 1: The Declaration of Independence and the Promise of Liberty and Equality for All: Founding Principles and the Problem of Slavery

Students will be int

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Guiding Question: How did the principles of the Declaration of Independence contribute to the quest to end slavery?

Objectives:

• Analyzing Founding ideas and actions on slavery in primary source documents.
• Examining the Preamble and clauses relevant to slavery contained in the U.S. Constitution of 1787.
• Students will reflect on the ideas, institutions, and individuals in the Founding Era to determine how we might apply the lessons gleaned from this period to today.

Expand Materials Materials

• Introductory Essay: The Declaration of Independence and the Promise of Liberty 
• Graphic Organizer, Primary Sources in Lesson 1 
• Concluding Analysis, Lesson 1 
• Answer Key, Lesson 1

Expand More Information More Information

The following lesson asks students to consider how the Declaration of Independence sets forth principles or ideals that serve as the backbone or foundation for the United States. At times in U.S. history, these principles have not always been faithfully applied, most clearly seen in the existence of slavery. Students will look at primary source documents as they consider the following question:  How did the principles of the Declaration of Independence contribute to the quest to end slavery?

The main activity in this lesson requires students to conduct primary source analysis. Two sets of primary sources are included with this lesson: a longer set and an abbreviated set. The abbreviated documents have been selected for learners with lower reading levels or for classes wishing to explore the guiding questions for this lesson that cannot dedicate as much time to it. Questions have been provided for each primary source. Teachers may choose to use the provided questions as scaffolds for students or remove them as best suits their teaching situation. Graphic organizers have been provided to use as an additional tool alongside the questions accompanying each document or in place of them. 

For primary source analysis, students may work individually, in pairs, or in small groups as best fits your classroom. Additionally, primary sources can serve as the basis for a stations or jigsaw activity.

Expand Prework Prework

Have students complete the Introductory Essay and accompanying questions.

Expand Warmup Warmup

Have students do a quick-write or discuss with a partner/as a class the following prompt:

The Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

• What is the meaning of equality, liberty, and justice in the Declaration of Independence?
• Are these ideas of equality, liberty, and justice attainable?
• If you think these rights are attainable, explain how – what sorts of constitutional/political arrangements and institutions are necessary to attain them? If you are skeptical that these things are attainable, explain why. What are the major obstacles (such as aspects of human nature or political impediments) to their achievement?

Expand Activities Activities

Students will analyze the primary sources using the questions provided. Students can work individually, in pairs or small groups, or by visiting stations for each source as a full set and an abbreviated set . The abbreviated documents have been selected for learners with lower reading levels or for classes wishing to explore the guiding questions for this lesson that cannot dedicate as much time to it.

A graphic organizer has been provided to use to use as an additional tool alongside the questions accompanying each document.  This organizer can also be used in place of the questions for students that are adept at primary source analysis.

Once students have completed the primary sources, distribute the Concluding Analysis . Sorting the documents into the three groups of laws and policy, the courts, and “We the People” (individuals and groups) can be done as a class, individually, in pairs, or small groups as best fits your classroom. Note that students may place a document in more than one category. If this happens, encourage students to explain their reasoning to generate discussion—the portrait of Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman has been completed as an as an example that could be placed into two groups because she made the choice to sue for her freedom but she used the court system to achieve it.

Allow students time to complete the final conclusion and analysis questions individually. These questions are meant to generate discussion and will appear across the curriculum. Debrief with a class discussion if time permits and your classroom culture is well suited to dialogue. Students may also wish to share their responses in small groups or with you privately by collecting responses/posting to a class website.

Expand Wrap Up Wrap Up

Have students reflect on and answer the following question:

Identify a historical moment in this lesson that resonated with you, or a person in the lesson whose words or actions did so. Why is this moment or person meaningful to you? What lessons did this moment or person teach you? How might we apply that to the present day?

Expand Extensions Extensions

Have students research the story of Ona Judge, an enslaved woman who successfully escaped from George Washington. What does her story reveal about the reality of life for enslaved men and women? What does it reveal about the complexity of slavery during the Founding era?

• Ona Judge’s story on George Washington’s Mount Vernon website
• Ona Judge’s story on Blackpast.org

Have students research the lives of free African Americans in the Founding era (several suggested individuals are listed below). What do their stories reveal about the complexity of the African American experience in this time period?

• Prince Hall – abolitionist and community leader
• Crispus Attucks – formerly enslaved instigator of the Boston Massacre
• Benjamin Banneker – almanac author and surveyor
• James Forten – successful business owner and abolitionist
• Phyllis Whitley – published author and poet
• Fort Mose – the first free Black town

Have students poll family, friends, and classmates on the role of compromise by considering the following questions and have them share their results with the class:

• To what extent is compromise necessary in politics?
• How do you know when to compromise?
• Are there good and bad compromises? How can you tell the difference between a good and a bad compromise?
• What are you willing to sacrifice to achieve compromise?

Student Handouts

Introductory essay: the declaration of independence and the promise of liberty and equality for all: founding principles and the problem of slavery, the declaration of independence as approved by the continental congress, 1776, petition to the massachusetts legislature, january 13, 1777, constitution of massachusetts, 1780 and constitution of kentucky, 1792, elizabeth (mumbet) freeman portrait, 1811 and legal notes by chief justice william cushing about the quock walker case, 1783, the northwest ordinance, 1787 and the southwest ordinance, 1790, excerpts from the u.s. constitution, ratified 1788, petition from the pennsylvania society for the abolition of slavery, 1790, graphic organizer: primary sources in lesson 1, plainest demands of justice, concluding analysis: lesson 1, plainest demands of justice.

Next Lesson

Lesson 2: Slavery and the Struggle for Abolition from the Colonial Period to the Civil War

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Rhetoric of The Declaration of Independence Essay

The ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, prescribed three modes of rhetorical persuasion – ethos, pathos, and logos. An outstanding rhetoric persuasion should have an ethical appeal, an emotional appeal, as well as a logical appeal. In the Declaration of Independence document, and Thomas Jefferson’s account, the founding fathers not only aired grievances, truths, and the denial of liberty, but they also artistically embroidered all the elements of rhetoric persuasion in their assertions. The Declaration of Independence appeals to ethics, emotions, and logic – the three fundamental elements of rhetoric.

The Declaration of Independence’s appeal to ethics is undisputable. In the opening paragraphs of the declaration, there is an ethical appeal for why the colonists needed separation from the colonizer. The first paragraph of the declaration read,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth […] decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation (“The Declaration of Independence”).

In the statement above, Jefferson and the founding fathers were appealing to ethics. It was necessary and essential to have an ethical explanation for that desire to gain support for their need to be independent. The founding fathers needed to explain why they needed to separate as decent respect to the opinions of humankind. In the second paragraph, the declaration continued on the ethical appeal stating that humans bore equal and unalienable rights – “to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (“The Declaration of Independence”).

These statements are moral, ethical, and legal overtones that the audience can associate themselves with. If someone were to ask, “Why is this separation necessary?” The answer would come right from the second paragraph. Jefferson and the founding fathers were more than aware that such a move as declaring independence required an ethical appeal with salient and concrete causes in place of light and transient causes, and they appealed to ethics right at the beginning of the declaration.

Other than appealing to ethics, Jefferson and the founding fathers required the audience to have an emotional attachment to the Declaration of Independence. The audience had to feel the same way as the founding fathers did. In the second paragraph of the declaration document, the drafters appealed that the people had a right to change and abolish a government that had become destructive of the equal and inalienable rights of all humankind. “Humankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to the right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed” (“The Declaration of Independence”).

However, if there is “a long train of abuses and usurpations” (“The Declaration of Independence”), there was a need to reduce the adversities under absolute Despotism, as the people’s right and duty. At the beginning of paragraph 30, the drafters of the declaration called their preceding assertions oppressions. An oppressed person is not a happy person. By making the audience – the colonists – remember their suffering and how patient they had been with the colonizers, Jefferson and the drafters appealed to the audience’s emotions.

The other rhetorical appeal in the Declaration of Independence is that of logic – logos. Other than bearing ethical and emotional overtones, the declaration equally bore logical sentiments. At the end of paragraph two, The Declaration of Independence reads, “To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world” (“The Declaration of Independence”), after which follows a string of grievances against the King of England and the colonizers. The entire draft bears logical appeal and the rationale behind the call for independence. How the founding fathers interwove the causes for independence in the declaration is a representation of logic.

There is evidence of inductive reasoning showing what the colonists required – independence from England – and why that was the only resort. The declaration is also logically appealing because it is not that the colonists have not sought the colonizer’s ear for the grievances they had; they had “In every stage of these Oppressions Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms, but their repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury” (“The Declaration of Independence”). Reason would only dictate that the colonists resort to other measures such as declaring themselves independent from a tyrannical system.

A rhetorical analysis of the Declaration for Independence shows the employment of ethical (ethos), emotional (pathos), and logical (logos) appeals by the drafters. In the statement of their reasons for calling to be independent of the crown, the founding fathers elucidated an ethical appeal. In the statement of their grievances against the King of England, the drafters appealed emotionally to their audience. Lastly, the drafters of the declaration interwove logic into every argument they presented by employing inductive reasoning in the description of the relationship between the colonies and the colonizer and why they formerly needed emancipation from the latter.

“ The Declaration of Independence: The Want, Will, and Hopes of the People . “ Ushistory.org , 2018. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, November 2). Rhetoric of The Declaration of Independence. https://ivypanda.com/essays/rhetoric-of-the-declaration-of-independence/

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Daniel P. Jordan, Monticello Leader in Changing Times, Dies at 85

He expanded the educational mission of Thomas Jefferson’s plantation. He also embraced research that showed Jefferson had fathered the children of one of his slaves.

By Richard Sandomir

Daniel P. Jordan, who as president of the foundation that owns Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Virginia, broadened its educational mission — and, perhaps most significant, commissioned a study that found that Jefferson had almost certainly fathered six children with Sally Hemings, one of hundreds of people he enslaved — died on March 21 in Charlottesville, Va. He was 85.

His daughter Katherine Jordan said the cause was a heart attack.

Questions about Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings had circulated among historians, and among her family, for two centuries. In 1993, when Mr. Jordan (pronounced JUR-dun) invited some of her descendants to a Jefferson commemorative event at Monticello, he was noncommittal on the paternity issue.

“If there’s anything like a party line, it’s simply this,” he told The Washington Post : “We cannot prove it, we can’t disprove it.”

But five years later, his position had to evolve. The results of DNA testing, published in the Nov. 5, 1988, issue of Nature magazine, appeared to confirm that Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings, one of Sally Hemings’s sons.The tests strongly indicated that Eston had the same Y chromosome mutations seen in the Jefferson lineage.

At a news conference, Mr. Jordan said that the tests would be evaluated by a research committee at Monticello, which is owned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

“We will follow the truth where it leads,” he said.

A few days later, he told The New York Times, “My immediate reaction was to be reminded of just how vicious, abominable and complex the institution of slavery was.”

In early 2000, the Monticello study validated the DNA findings. But the study went further with its analysis, examining historical and scientific documents and conducting interviews with descendants of people who had been enslaved at Monticello.

“Although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainty,” Mr. Jordan said at a news conference, “our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one and, perhaps, all of the known children of Sally Hemings.”

He added, “Whether it was love or lust, rape or romance, no one knows, and it’s unlikely that anyone will ever know.”

Annette Gordon-Reed, the author of “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy” (1997) — which examined inconsistencies in scholars’ assessments of the existing evidence of their sexual relationship — said that Mr. Jordan ably handled the response to her book, and to the DNA results.

“Commissioning the Jefferson foundation study on the matter and accepting the findings were the right responses,” she wrote in an email. “He could have punted.”

Daniel Porter Jordan Jr. was born on July 22, 1938, in Philadelphia, Miss. His father was a dentist, and his mother, Mildred (Dobbs) Jordan, managed the house. At the University of Mississippi, where he played both baseball and basketball, Mr. Jordan studied history and English and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1960.

He met Lewellyn Schmelzer, known as Lou, at the university. They married in 1961.

After receiving his master’s degree in history from the university in 1962, Mr. Jordan served as an Army infantryman in South Korea and Western Europe and taught history to enlisted men on Army bases through a division of the University of Maryland.

Back home, he resumed his education at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson founded. He received a fellowship from the Jefferson foundation for his studies, and Merrill Peterson , a Jefferson scholar, was his doctoral adviser. He received a Ph.D. in history in 1970.

Over the next 14 years, he taught history at the University of Richmond and at Virginia Commonwealth University, also in Richmond, where he became chairman of the history department. In 1983 he published a book, “Political Leadership in Jefferson’s Virginia.”

When he was named the foundation’s executive director in early 1985, Mr. Jordan said that his goal was to expand its educational mission. He was elevated to president nine years later.

“We’re in the business of telling people about Thomas Jefferson, of educating them in the best sense,” he told The Daily Progress of Charlottesville in 1994. “It’s great if they know Jefferson was author of the Declaration of Independence, but those facts are secondary to his values and ideas.”

During Mr. Jordan’s 23 years at Monticello, publication of Jefferson’s post-presidency letters and other papers began; the Jefferson Library opened, near Monticello, on the campus of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies; descendants of Monticello’s enslaved people began being interviewed for an oral history project called Getting Word; and the Center for Historic Plants was established to collect and sell plants and seeds grown at Monticello, in addition to other historic and heirloom seeds.

“He was interested in the restoration of the gardens,” Peter Hatch, the former director of gardens and grounds at Monticello , who started the plant center, said by phone. “He wasn’t a keen fan of horticulture, but he understood the importance of landscaping when you talked about Jefferson.”

In addition, the plantation’s property was augmented with the acquisition of nearby Montalto mountain for $15 million; the main house’s leaky roof was rebuilt; and the estate’s vineyard was restored.

In 2001, archaeologists identified a slave burial ground about 2,000 feet from Monticello itself.

“It has been a longstanding goal here at Monticello to determine where slaves were buried, and we believe we have now found one such location,” Mr. Jordan told The Associated Press. “We regard this as a significant archaeological find, one that allows us to fill in one more piece of the puzzle in our efforts to research and understand all aspects of the Monticello plantation.”

Before Mr. Jordan arrived, Susan Stein, the Richard Gilder senior curator of special projects at Monticello, said, “it was a mom-and-pop place. There were serious scholars here, but Dan elevated them, and me, and he really reimagined the place. He envisioned it as a university. That made all the difference.”

After he retired in 2008, Mr. Jordan worked as a consultant for clients including people who managed historic homes like Monticello and other nonprofit organizations.

In addition to daughter Katherine, Mr. Jordan is survived by his wife; another daughter, Grace Jordan; a son, Daniel III; six grandchildren; and a brother, Joseph.

Mr. Jordan and his family didn’t stray far from Jefferson’s plantation during his years at the helm of Monticello. He and his family lived in a modern house, down the hill from the main house. Mr. Jordan rose early every Jan. 1 to greet the year’s first visitors. And both Grace and Katherine Jordan were married on its grounds.

“We love being here,” Mr. Jordan told C-SPAN in 1997 . “Let me point out that we’re not in the main house, and I should say that Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom is not for rent. We live about 150 yards from the mountaintop. It’s just absolutely magical.”

Richard Sandomir is an obituaries writer. He previously wrote about sports media and sports business. He is also the author of several books, including “The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic.” More about Richard Sandomir

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Declaration of Independence Rhetorical Devices

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Published: Mar 5, 2024

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