Abstract

The political independence of the United States of America was proclaimed in a Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress, in Philadelphia, on July 4, 1776. Thomas Jefferson drafted the document, and the changes made in the text reflected the struggle among different factions in the revolutionary camp. Jefferson's initial version was fundamentally retained, however; and that is precisely what makes the Declaration of Independence not merely a legal document but a vivid example of a bourgeois revolutionary program expressing in concentrated form the ideology of the radical wing of the American Enlightenment. The form of the Declaration was an address to world public opinion explaining the causes and bases for the decisive political break of the 13 British colonies with the home country. In fact it provided a general philosophical justification for the validity of revolutionary change in the social order by the people. The Declaration became the legal ground for the American system of government, sanctioning its independence and serving as the basis for the documents of a constitutional nature that followed. The treatment of the nature of man and his rights is the most important feature of the revolutionary conclusions of the Declaration