A casual reading of the Declaration of Independence may well give the impression that With its promulgation there and then the United States were born and a new American Nation created.
In a sense it was the birth of the United States; but nothing can be farther from the actual fact than that it created a Nation. It proclaimed nothing but the existence thereafter of Thirteen Independent States, if they could maintain themselves, although it contained within itself certain ideals which were to be the basis of a future Nation. Other than that, it was but a statement of grievances against the King of England, some of them complaints of the very efforts he was making to suppress the rising rebellion, and some of a very shadowy and unsubstantial nature, serving as a general proclamation to the world of the causes or pretexts for revolution.
|Category||Political Theory and History|