What is the Declaration of Independence?

The Declaration of Independence is the founding document, adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia, that announced the separation of the 13 American colonies from Great Britain and set out the principles on which the new nation rested. The document has four parts. The preamble offers a one paragraph theory of legitimate government, declaring it self-evident that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that governments are instituted to secure these rights and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that when government becomes destructive of these ends the people have the right to alter or abolish it.

The second part is a list of 27 grievances against King George III, indicting him for refusing assent to laws, dissolving colonial assemblies, obstructing justice, keeping standing armies in time of peace, quartering troops, imposing taxes without consent, depriving Americans of jury trial, transporting them beyond seas for trial, and waging war against his own subjects. The third part recounts the colonists' repeated petitions for redress and Britain's failure to listen, justifying the resort to separation. The conclusion declares that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States, and that the signers mutually pledge to each other their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor.

Thomas Jefferson did the principal drafting between roughly June 11 and June 28, 1776 working in his rooms in Philadelphia. The Committee of Five (Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston) refined the text. Congress edited the draft on July 2 to 4, 1776 and adopted it on July 4. John Hancock signed first for Congress, with most of the 56 signers adding their names to an engrossed parchment on August 2, 1776. The original parchment is held at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Although the Declaration is not law and did not by itself create a government, it has functioned ever since as the moral charter of the United States. Abraham Lincoln invoked its principle that all men are created equal in the Gettysburg Address of November 19, 1863, casting the Civil War as a fight to fulfill the Declaration's promise. The Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848 used its template for women's rights, and Martin Luther King Jr. invoked it in the I Have a Dream speech of August 28, 1963.