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The First
Paragraph of the Declaration
 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, the separate
and eqaul Station to which the Laws of Nature
and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent
Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that
they should declare the causes which impel them to
the Separation.
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Sir
William Blackstone (1723-1780) Knight, King's
Counsel, Solicitor to the Queen, Member of
Parliament, and a Justice of the Court of Common
Pleas and the King's Bench. His Commentaries on the
Laws of England grew out of his lectures as a
professor at Oxford, and were published in four
volumes from 1765-1769.
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The First Sentence
of the Declaration's Second
Paragraph
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 . . . .
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The Rules that Limit Government - And Protect Our
Rights
Because
the rights the colonists claimed were their rights as
Englishmen, for our Declaration of Independence to be valid,
it had to be based on the same principles that formed the
basis of English liberty. The Founders presented the
strongest argument they could make for independence: that
Great Britain's government had become illegitimate by
violating its own principles. The Founders stated clearly
what these principles were in the Declaration's very first
paragraph. The principles that Britain had violated and that
entitled the colonies to become a separate and equal nation
were "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." These
were the rules that justified the Founders' conclusion that
we must declare independence.
We
don't often hear this phrase used anymore, and nowadays
there is a lot of confusion about what "natural law" is. But
to Attorney Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration's drafter, and
the lawmakers of the Second Continental Congress who signed
the Declaration, this phrase had an exact meaning. It also
had an exact meaning to King George and Parliament, to whom
the Declaration was addressed. The reason? The phrase was a
direct quote from virtually the only
law book in existence in the colonies at the time, a
book that not only explained English Law in detail, but also
laid out the foundation of English Law and Liberty:
Blackstone's Commentaries on the Law of England.
To
discover what the Founders meant by the phrase "the Laws of
Nature and of Nature's God," we need only look at what
Blackstone wrote. Blackstone defined law, in general, as
a rule of action established by a superior that an inferior
must obey. By example, he noted that God had established
certain natural laws, like gravity, which physical things,
be they rocks, plants, or human bodies, must always obey.
Blackstone passed over these unalterable physical laws to
focus on the laws that govern human action, the laws by
which man, "a creature endowed with both reason and
free-will, is commanded to make use of those faculties in
the general regulation of his behavior."
To
explain how the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God applied
to human conduct and government, Blackstone began with the
fact that man is created by God. The Founders chose this
same starting point in the opening sentence of the
Declaration's second paragraph (below left), the paragraph
that explains how the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God
gave us the right to throw off British rule. Blackstone then
explained that because of man's state of total dependence on
God, man is obliged to restrain his free-will and should,
instead, "in all points, conform to his Maker's will." "This
will of his Maker," Blackstone said, "is called the law
of nature," and is the "eternal immutable laws of good
and evil" - the rules for what is right and wrong - to which
God Himself conforms. So the first principle on which the
Founder's staked American independence, and freedom for the
American people - "the Laws of Nature" - are God's own rules
of right and wrong!
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