TYRANTS AND ROGUES

A fresh reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Drafted by Thomas Jefferson but edited by committee, the Declaration of Independence is regarded today as a timeless, sacred document. By historian Parkinson’s lights, however, it was “born out of emergency, crisis, and fear.” Whereas today we remember the Declaration mostly for its sonorous opening, Parkinson reads it for the 27 specific grievances against the British Crown and, especially, King George III, who was cast as a usurper and tyrant in contrast to the revolutionaries’ insistence that they were following the best traditions of British liberty—and therefore needed to craft a “statement of purpose” that was both detailed and emphatic. It is within those grievances, Parkinson holds, that the ideas driving the American Revolution can best be found, and if they seem somewhat abstract today, he adds, those grievances truly identified the “tyrants and rogues” of his title. He proceeds to explore the grievances, devoting whole chapters to some and clustering others. Several, he notes, have to do with the king’s vetoing laws of what Jefferson called “the most salutary tendency” and other acts of interfering with colonial legislatures, including simply ignoring laws that were sent for his authorization. Central to the revolutionaries’ argument was representation, meaning not just a presence in Parliament but also adequate legislative seats to accommodate the westward expansion of the colonies, which George had tried to block “in order to keep the peace in North America.” Parkinson notes that Black and Indigenous peoples are present, if not always mentioned by name, in several of the grievances and that Jefferson, for all the hypocrisy, both condemned slavery outright and attempted to blame the king for the institution—charges that were softened, Jefferson later recalled, at the insistence of “Southern Gentlemen whose reflections were not yet matured to the full abhorrence of that traffic.”

A timely and highly useful book in this semiquincentennial year—and far beyond.