Declaration of Independence
object · 3 works · 5 mentions · 7 anchored passages · cited 9 times in 4 works
the declaration of independence · that sacred instrument · the Declaration of Independence · the declaration
in the texts
Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated
The founding American document proclaiming the people's right to alter, abolish, and institute governments, quoted as authority for the constitutional divisions of power.
Let us go back to the quotation from the declaration of independence, for the sake of remarking, that its assertion of the “right of the people to alter, abolish and institute governments” could only have a reference to the conventional or collective beings, under that denomination, then existing.
By the declaration of independence, they solemnly stationed our social institutions upon solid ground, for the purpose of effecting both ends.
The declaration of independence declares the colonies to be free and independent states;
The Unconstitutionality of Slavery
Founding American document declaring natural and inalienable rights, treated as constitutional law.
If, then, the declaration were the constitutional law of the country for that purpose, was it not also constitutional law for the purpose of recognizing and establishing, as law, the natural and inalienable right of individuals to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Admitting, for the sake of the argument, that prior to the revolution, slavery had a constitutional existence, (so far as it is possible that crime can have such an existence,) was it not abolished by the declaration of independence?
The people of this country—in the very instrument by which they first announced their independent political existence, and first asserted their right to establish governments of their own—declared that the natural and inalienable right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, was a “self-evident truth.
Ancient Law
The American founding document in which Jefferson and colonial lawyers joined the equality and freedom doctrines.
A very few glances at the writings of Jefferson will show how strongly his mind was affected by the semi-juridical, semi-popular opinions which were fashionable in France, and we cannot doubt that it was sympathy with the peculiar ideas of the French jurists which led him and the other colonial lawyers who guided the course of events in America to join the specially French assumption that “all men …