CHAPTER TWo • FoRGiNG A NEW GovERNmENT: THE CoNsTiTuTioN 27
Social Contract
A voluntary agreement
among individuals to
secure their rights and
welfare by creating a
government and abiding
by its rules.a social contract—an agreement among the people
to form a government and abide by its rules. As you
read earlier, such contracts, or compacts, were not new
to Americans. The Mayflower Compact was the first
of several documents that established governments or
governing rules based on the consent of the governed.
After setting forth these basic principles of gov-
ernment, the Declaration of Independence goes on to
justify the colonists’ revolt against Britain. Much of the
remainder of the document is a list of what “He” (King
George III) had done to deprive the colonists of their
rights. (See Appendix A at the end of this book for the
complete text of the Declaration of Independence.)The significance of the declaration. The concepts
of equality, natural rights, and government established
through a social contract were to have a lasting impact
on American life. The Declaration of Independence set
forth ideals that have since become a fundamental part
of our national identity. The Declaration also became a
model for use by other nations around the world.
Certainly, most Americans are familiar with the
beginning words of the Declaration. Yet, as Harvard
historian David Armitage noted in his study of the
Declaration of Independence in the international con-
text,^5 few Americans ponder the obvious question: What
did these assertions in the Declaration have to do with
independence? Clearly, independence could have been
declared without these words. Even as late as 1857,
Abraham Lincoln admitted, “The assertion that ‘all men
are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our
separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the
Declaration, not for that, but for future use.”^6
Essentially, the immediate significance of the
Declaration of Independence, in 1776, was that it
established the legitimacy of the new nation in the eyes of foreign governments, as well as
in the eyes of the colonists themselves. What the new nation needed most were supplies
for its armies and a commitment of foreign military aid. Unless the United States appeared
to the world as a political entity separate and independent from Britain, no foreign govern-
ment would enter into an agreement with its leaders.The Rise of Republicanism
Although the colonists had formally declared independence from Britain, the fight to
gain actual independence continued for five more years, until British general Charles
Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781. In 1783, after Britain formally recognized the- David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2007). - As cited in Armitage, The Declaration of Independence, p. 26.
Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson
work on the Declaration of Independence. Why was that document so
important? (Archive Images/Alamy)Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
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