Resources for Declarations in Dialogue

Weeks 4-7

S. Jarratt

Declaration of Independence

Congress’s Draft (with deletions from Jefferson’s draft). “The Declaration of Independence.” http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/congress.htm

Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Viking Press, 1963. See especially Ch. 1, “The Meaning of Revolution,” section 2 (18-25) (pdf) on the question of the novelty of the 18^th century revolutions, the difference between liberty and freedom, where the latter refers to freedom not as an inherent quality of human nature but the possibility to engage in political expression public places. See also Chapter 3, “The Pursuit of Happiness” for a discussion of Jefferson’s replacement of this term for “property” in the “Declaration.” Did he mean “public happiness”—i.e., the citizen’s right of access to the public realm (118)? Probably not, Arendt thinks: hard to know. She judges that the value of the document “owes nothing to its natural-law philosophy” but in the very writing of it: “in its being the perfect way for an action to appear in words” (120-21). Honig’s essay (below) elaborates these points.

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage. The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Chapter 7, “The Problem of Slavery in the American Revolution” (140-56). (pdf)

Honig, Bonnie. “Declarations of Independence. Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic.” Rhetorical Republic. Governing Representations in American Politics. Ed. Frederick M. Dolan and Thomas L. Dumm. Amherst: U. of Massachusetts P, 1993: 201-225. Print.

Lucas, Stephen E. “The Rhetorical Ancestry of the Declaration of Independence.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2.3 (1998): 143-84. Web. A strong argument for the indebtedness of the document to generic predecessors.

Maier, Pauline. American Scripture. Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1997. Print. A history of the making of the Declaration as an event, “the culmination of a series of revolutionary activities” and its remaking into a sacred text (xvviii). The Introduction, “Gathering at the Shrine,” is an entertaining account of how the document itself has acquired the status and presentation of a religious icon, an altar for worship. Also recommended is Chapter III, “Mr. Jefferson and His Editors”: a detailed account of the drafting and revision with a rhetorical analysis of the final document (97-153). (pdf)

Warner, Michael. Letters of the Republic. Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-century America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990. Print.

Wills, Garry. Inventing America. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. New York: Vintage, 1979. Print. A very readable argument to remove the “Declaration” from the status of myth, where Wills claims it was placed by Lincoln in his “Gettysburg Address,” and to submit it to skeptical inquiry. Wills attempts to resecularize the “Declaration”: “Jefferson never intended it for a spiritual Covenant” (xxiv). Wills’ close analysis of Jefferson’s draft finds more significance in the influence of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy (e.g., Francis Hutcheson) than in the natural rights tradition. See especially Chapter 16, “ . . . inalienable rights . . .” (229-39). (pdf)

Some related historical documents:

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, National Assembly of France, 1789 (English trans.) http://www.hrcr.org/docs/frenchdec.html

Women’s Petition to the National Assembly, October 1789 (Trans. Karen Offen, 1982) http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/629/

De Gouges, Olympe. Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen. Excerpt. From Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789-1795: Selected Documents. Trans. Daline Gay Levy, et al. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979. 87-96. Web. http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/gouges.html

David Walker. “Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829.” Boston, Walker, 1830. Excerpts. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2931t.html

Abraham Lincoln. “Gettysburg Address.” 19 November 1863. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. http://libertyonline.hypermall.com/Lincoln/gettysburg.html k

California Constitution. http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/.const/.article_1

Article 1, Declaration of Rights. SECTION 1. “All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.”

Abigail Adams’ letters; women’s rights

Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic. Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1980. Print. Especially Chapter 1, reviewing Enlightenment thinkers’ views of women, and Chapter 5, concerning coverture: laws restricting women’s property rights.

Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Print.

Haitian Constitution

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage. The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. Chapter 8, “The Impact of the French and Haitian Revolutions” (157-74). (pdf)

Dubois, Laurent, and John D. Garrigus. Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804. A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. Print.

James, C.L.R. [1938] The Black Jacobins. 3rd ed. London: Allison and Busby Limited, 1980. Print.

Frederick Douglass

Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Introduction: The Language of Slavery.” The Slave’s Narrative. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Print. A genre created in response to the claim that “blacks could not write” (xv). For a short account of the equation of writing with humanity in Enlightenment thought, and of the exclusion of blacks from this equation, see xiii-xxxi. (pdf)

Mills, Charles W. “Whose Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass and ‘Original Intent.’” Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader. Ed. Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 100-42. Print. A philosopher’s reading of Douglass’ defense of the constitution in the Fourth of July speech. (pdf)

Moses, Wilson J. “Writing Freely? Frederick Douglass and the Constraints of Racialized Writing.” Frederick Douglass. New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. 66-83. Print. (pdf)

Stauffer, John. “Frederick Douglass’s Self-fashioning and the Making of a Representative American Man.” The Cambridge Companion to The African American Slave Narrative. Ed. Audrey A. Fisch. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 201-17. Web.

Zafar, Rafia. “Franklinian Douglass. The Afro-American as Representative Man.” In Sundquist 99-117.

Background

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1950. From Part I, The Range of Rhetoric: “Identification” (19-23). Print. On identification and division: “In pure identification there would be no strife. Likewise, there would be no strife in absolute separateness, since opponents can join battle only through a mediatory ground that makes their communication possible, thus providing the first condition necessary for their interchange of blows. But put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric” (25). (pdf)

Habermas, Jürgen. [1962] Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: MIT P, 1989. Print. Multi-layered account of the emergence of an 18^th-century public sphere in Europe. Section II, Chapters 5 and 6 (31-51) discuss “institutions” of the public sphere (journals, coffee houses, art and music as sites for criticism) and the family as a place of privateness oriented toward a public (reading and writing of letters and novels, domestic architecture, gendered spheres).

Jarratt, Susan C. “Classics and Counterpublics in Nineteenth-Century Historically Black Colleges.” College English 72.2 (November 2009): 134-59. Web. An archival study of student writing in post-Civil War black colleges.

In the news

Lacey, Marc. “City ‘Brainwashing,’ Arizona Declares a Latino Class Illegal” New York Times 8 January 2011 A1, A12. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/us/08ethnic.html