The resolution was not approved immediately. Declaring independence was an extremely serious step. Signing such a document would make the delegates traitors to Britain. They would be killed if captured by the British.
The delegates wanted the world to understand what they were doing, and why. So they appointed a committee to write a document giving the reasons for their actions.
One member of this committee was Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. He had already written a report criticizing the monarchy. So the other committee members asked him to write the new document. They said he was the best writer in the group.
They were right. Jefferson was thirty-three years old. It took him seventeen days to write the document. The Second Continental Congress approved it on July fourth, seventeen seventy-six.
It was America's Declaration of Independence.
Historian Gordon Wood at Brown University says the declaration sent a message to more than just the British.
"They're trying to, I think, to signal to the world, 'We are a new nation. We have broken away from this other nation. We're a separate nation and we want recognition of our independence.'"
The Declaration of Independence begins with these words:
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 equal 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.
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25