Breaking History - What the Founders Really Meant to Say

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Robert Parkinson is a historian at SUNY Binghamton who has spent 25 years studying the American Revolutionary period. His new book, Tyrants and Rogues, arrives just in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — and it argues that we’ve been reading that document wrong for most of those 250 years. In this episode, Parkinson explains why the 27 grievances that follow the famous preamble are the real heart of the Declaration, what Congress actually debated and deleted from Thomas Jefferson’s original draft, and why someone in that room made sure race would be the last and most explosive grievance on the list. He also explains why those grievances, written in panic and desperation in the summer of 1776, feel newly urgent today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey listeners, this is Eli. We're still working on our first kind of multi-part season of the narrative stuff for breaking history, but we're still doing these interviews. And we've got a good one that you're about to listen to. It's Robert Parkinson. He's got a great new book, Rogues and Tyrants, which is about the Declaration of Independence and his thesis that, forget the preamble. Let's look at the meat of the document. Anyway, I think you'll really enjoy this conversation. And here's a remix version of an AI track that I did before we get started. about the Declaration. Enjoy. Like you, we care a lot about craftsmanship at Breaking History, how things used to be made, and whether that still matters today, which raises a fair question. Can you still build something well on purpose in America? Today's sponsor is doing exactly that. There, that's V-A-E-R, was founded in Los Angeles with a mission to revive American watchmaking, and they've actually pulled it off. Vair is now the largest independent watch assembler in the USA, building watches across California, Arizona, Rhode Island, and Alabama, with leather straps made in Illinois and Florida.

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Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Professor Parkinson. Thanks, happy to be here. So let's just get started. We make a big deal about the preamble and its connection to the Scottish and English Enlightenment and John Locke and sort of history of the idea of freedom. And I gather that your book says, Nope, the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War is about far more mundane issues.

What do you mean by that? Well, you know, I think for a lot of Americans, I would say probably the majority of your, maybe not the majority of your listeners, Eli, but a lot of Americans across the country would think that the top, the opening paragraphs of the Declaration is all there is to it, that it's the bit about self, or self-evident rights and pursuits of health. happiness and inalienable rights nets about it. And they don't know that there are a list of 27 grievances in the Declaration. And those are, you know, the opening paragraphs are just about entirely all Thomas Jefferson.

And like, there's other than a few snippets that are sort of done by Franklin and Adams in their first round of editing. It's almost all Jefferson. But that's not where, but there's a lot that's actually edited out and there's about 470 words that are taken out from what from the rough draft that Jefferson turns into Congress and what the what's what the final draft is. And so Congress spent a lot of time thinking about how to get this statement, this mission statement exactly right. And where they did most of their work was in the grievances themselves. And so if they thought it was this was the part that had to pay their most

attention to, I think we we should think about that as well. So let's start by setting the stage. you've got the British Empire some might say kind of nearing its peak but there is a money crunch and they've got these very prosperous colonies in America that they begin soaking

with various new taxes and this then creates a kind of you know you could say a kind of atmosphere of rebellions that lead to it maybe just sort of set the template.

Sure. What is the relationship like? I mean, because things don't exactly, in fact, some would argue that why would July 4th be the birthday of the nation? Why not the battle of, you know, Lexington and Concord or something like that? I mean, so just kind of tell us, where are we when Congress is reviewing Jefferson's draft of the Declaration? Sure. I mean, what's interesting about this and Civil War historians would also sort of of, have their own version of this exact same story,

which is who changes the most? In the Civil War, is it the north or the south? Which region changes the most? Well, in the 1760s, who's changing the most? I would say the answer is probably the British are changing. And one of the ways we know that is there are a host of reasons why. Certainly they are in the middle of what will end up being a hundred years war with France, which is going to dramatically change the British state.

but also out of the two civil wars really certainly an enormous civil war in the 1640s in Britain and then it almost won and if you're in Ireland definitely a civil war in 1688 the glorious revolution were two conflicts between who's going to be in control of of who's going to be sovereign it's it going to be the king or parliament and the the the answer to that after 1688 is They have to both be co-equal partners. The phrase king in parliament is something that the one can't operate without the other. But that's a significant change. And over the course of the 18th century,

parliament is going to rise in more and more and more in their stature and authority. By the time we get to the end of the 67 years war in 1763, they are seen as sovereign everywhere in the empire. But the Americans have never, when they play, When they first started legislatures in 1619 in Virginia or in the 1630s in Massachusetts Bay and all throughout the mainland colonies, Parliament wasn't like that. They weren't seen as this kind of sovereign thing that mimics the king as terms of where the buck stops for legislative authority. So now all of a sudden in 1763, they are saying we are in charge of everything that happens inside and outside. outside of your, so in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Empire, and also internally in your colonies.

So in your towns and villages and farms, we are sovereign. And the Americans said, no, no, and so in the declaration, Parliament is referred to as a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution. We don't recognize them at all. So that's been the big change. And so, therefore, they say as a response to this debt crisis, there's a response to the British Empire being more, being, emerging as the top dog in the world, in the Western world, they are saying that they need the Americans to pay for, for their fair share. And that's what the Americans say, no, no, no, we don't do that. And so that's really what the change is.

And so from there, you have things like the stamp acts and the towns and duties and things that the Americans are increasingly upset about. but it's the principle that they are represented in parliament, so therefore they shouldn't have these, be beholden to these laws that are made without their permission. Okay. But now that makes it, I want to get back to the glorious revolution

because I think that sometimes that gets short shrift in our understanding of it, of things. Of course, everybody knows the Magna. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it is, the Americans are seeing themselves as the third in this, is the trilogy of British Civil Wars from, you know, when, on July 9th, when the declaration is read aloud

to the Continental Army that's stationed in New York City, a group of soldiers goes down Broadway and goes down to the, to the, near the battery, to Bowling Green, where there's a 15-foot tall statue of the king, and they pull it down, pull down the king. It's a very famous story. And then they knock his head off, and the head ends up in a tavern.

the body ends up going to a foundry in Litchfield, Connecticut, to be melted down into bullets, right? And so, and an American officer says to another, he says, for the next year, the British will have melted majesty fired at them, which I think is a fantastic, fantastic thing. But it's melted down into 42,088 bullets, which is a very, very specific number. And you think, well, that's got to be, why would that be that specific number? It's a very symbolic number. it's 42, 42 for 1642, and 88 for 1688. And so 1776 is just a third. So they have these things on their minds.

And also because there's never been a colonial rebellion of this size and stature before. If you go back to antiquity, there are certainly colonial rebellions if you look at the Roman Empire, right? I mean. But not of, not of three million people of this kind of square mileage, right? And so, so they're, they're feeling that this is unprecedented. So the only way to make this seem justified and legitimate is to then model themselves on these rebellions that have come before them. And so they are very much modeling the declaration on those documents that come out, especially the English Bill of Rights and what, what they're saying in 1688 and 89. And also how there's so. And also how there's afraid of things like standing armies, that comes directly out of the experience of the 1680s and

90s. Okay. So there is a bit of idealism there, although there is a different tone because in America, there is an understanding that you're going to have Catholics and Protestants and we early on have a kind of freedom of religion, whereas certainly there is a kind of revolt against Catholicism that we would associate with the glorious revolution, right? And William and Mary. But there are nonetheless the idea that there are limits to the executives' authorities

and powers. There are limits to the prerogatives of the king. Right. The first 12 grievances are specifically grouped as episodes of executive overreach. That's how we think of them.

The things the king's doing outside of his prerogative. And that's what they're getting from the glorious Revolution and the 18-20. Yeah. Okay. So that's in the air. But there's really specific, I mean, I think your thesis here is that

it's not just that you had three million Americans inspired by the Enlightenment. No. You had three million Americans who were worried about their business and they were paying too many taxes. And some of it was also just,

you weren't protecting us from pirates. Right. You're not allowing our legislatures to me, right? You're not actually providing the function of government to allow us to have freedom. So it's always been a notion of ordered liberty. It's never just get off our back. So let's talk about the grievances. What are the ones that you think are the most prominent? And can we judge them, by the way, is that the first one is the most important and the last one or is that's not the way to look at? Well, they do, as they go forward, they do. So there's, So they're in three groups, right?

The first 12 are executive overreach. The second 10 are legislative, what it's referred to as acts of pretended legislation. So if they come out of, if these legislative policies come out of a jurisdiction that is foreign to our constitutions, then we don't have, they have nothing to do with us. So these are acts of pretended legislation. They think that they're binding on us. They are not. So that's the next 10. And the last five are acts of war.

So that's the three groups. And so, but they do get, they grow in drama and they grow in, just looking at the verbs of them. They just, as you go further down the list, it seems like the, as we get into the acts of war, of course, you are getting into much more kind of, a passionate language. And I think that the expectation, as Jefferson as an essayist, is, is building. is building towards a dramatic dismount. But there are so, so you would say, well, you know, taxation representation is the motto for the revolution, but it appears in the middle of the list of the pretended legislation is number 17.

It's not number one. It's not number two. So, so I don't, I don't think Jefferson is grouping them in terms of, in terms of the most, the most egregious things to, to the end.

I think it's actually probably going the opposite direction. Okay. What's those one that I love that's towards the end? Where the one where he just, it's like, it's one of the enumerated points where you're just like, okay, that could have been the entire declaration. Like that would have been enough.

Since he has plundered our seas, ravaged our coast, burn our towns and destroyed the lives of our people. I'm like, well, that's enough, right? That's pretty bad. That's pretty bad. And it's interesting like that, like, I always thought he was burying the lead. But you're saying, no, that was deliberate by Jefferson. He was trying to kind of give a narrative arc to this very short document.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's pretty cool. All right. So let's let's talk about what this means in terms of how the founders understood liberty. Because it's a little tricky, right? It's not just, I mean, we think of freedom as what the 19th century British philosophers would call negative freedoms, usually. Right. Freedom froms.

But there is an early understanding in the Declaration that no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Part of our freedom is that you have to provide for us the correct environment where we can live freely, correct? Right, right. That's part of this as well. Right. That's, I mean, there are pleas, there's, there's, what's interesting to, about when I was thinking about this is there are grievances that are I mean we talk about how the Enlightenment's how the Enlightenment's what's the word I want here just to the ethos

of it kind of is soaked into the document so there's so one of the most important kind of of parts of that ethos is about balance that what you want to have is balance and so you have So there are, there are balances and harmonies in the grievances themselves. For example, the first one is about the king's veto. Right. He's used the veto. He's done these very explicit overreaches, very aggressive knocking down of our laws. But the second one is about the negative non-use of that.

So it is about suspension clauses. So they're really about pocket vetoes, about inaction and un-use. So there's this kind of balance of too much power and not enough power. That also happens in the middle of it. Let's see. It's 9, 10, and 11 are about the kings being dependent on the will of another. So they're about judicial judges' salaries not being arrested away from the people and making us dependent on judges who are whose salaries don't come from the people that they are supposed to their jurisdiction.

They're about standing armies, which are being dependent. on soldiers not to kill you and who is paying their bills. And it's also about having the legislature stay in being and not being dissolved. Those three together are about dependence. But the next one is about independence. It's about the military being independent of the civil power. So you see these kind of interesting kind of balances going on in the declaration. And that does show you kind of what's a core part of how they want to talk about liberty.

is this, I think what we would today refer to pretty conservative idea of remaining, being free to do the things that you want to do but also having good government to support that. Well, it's interesting you mentioned the thing about the independence of the military from any kind of power because you can then see that in the, what is persisting to this day,

constitution as the confusion or the ambiguity of war powers in the Constitution. The Congress has only declares the war, funds the war, but the executive is the commander in chief of the military. That's, you know, dial it on that a little bit. That's fascinating, right? I mean, because that actually kind of gets at this tension that you're talking about there. Well, and a lot of that, I mean, this is extraordinarily important to George Washington.

That there are a couple of times when the Revolutionary War is going so badly that Congress basically just hands over dictatorial powers to emergency powers, which makes him pretty much the dictator of... They get this from the Romans, right? I mean, this is the... Yeah, but Washington turns it back over. As soon as the emergency is over, and that's something, if we look at Oliver Cromwell,

they don't do that, right? Julius Caesar, they don't do that. They don't ever hand it back. Washington, of course, very famously, resigns or doesn't run for president over and over because he also sees this, the, the, if we don't, if the civil power, if the elected officials don't have control of the military, then we are in big, fat trouble. And that's, and so that idea, but that idea is goes back to, it goes back to the Romans, of course, but it also, there's a, there are strong elements of that in, in English history, too.

But you're seeing this and that's a grievance number 12, which is the last of the, of the 12, um, uh, uh, group of executive. overreach is it's really a reference, I think, to the Gaspei affair in 1772 when you had the Royal Navy basically running amok and doing whatever they wanted to do to stop American smugglers. And when Rhode Island government was begging for them to have some sort of constraints on this, they were knocked down across the board. The Royal Navy was traded free. They were basically pirates in Narragans at Bay doing whatever they wanted to do. And that ended up leading to when the gas bay ran aground,

trying to chase down a ship, a group of about 200 Rhode Islanders got in a boat and rode out to the stranded gas bay and burned it down to the waterline. So you have this vigilantee justice as a result of the fact this is what could happen if you lose control of the civil power loses control the military. But it is, it's a, it's a clear and bright line for some of the revolutionaries, but then we do have a problem with it. But it becomes this really important American tradition for a long time, but it is confused. Well, I would say it's confused to this day. Of late, for sure.

Crazy war powers. The president declared the operation is over. He was in the War Powers Act. I mean, that's a separate issue. Okay. I want to ask, because, you know, I want to ask about your view of Charles Beard and his kind of economic interpretation of the declaration, where do you come down on that? Do you think that that's a little too simplistic?

Maybe that he was too much influenced at the time by, you know, these kinds of theories about how everybody is motivated by economic stuff and that, you know, the beard interpretation is just old now. I'm sure you're very aware of it. Yeah, yeah. It's just like, oh, these guys are, you dress it up. That's marketing material. Right.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Where do you come down on that? Yeah, I think Beard was being, he was in some ways a polemicist disguised as a historian. And so you have this, you have, he's trying to make a very, very significant point about the early 20th century. And using the 18th century to illustrate that point, I do think it's more simplistic. However, there are people pushing their way into the declaration who are not sitting in the halls of what becomes Independence Hall all over the place. And so you have ordinary, and this, this movement goes nowhere if you don't have ordinary people. That is, I mean, the Declaration is a mission statement to animate the American public.

And so you, and so the reason why they spend so much time trying to get these words right is to, to impress that candid world primarily at home. That's job one, but also out in the world. And they're thinking of France and Spain as job two. And so there, this is not something. where elite white men, college-educated, sitting around, surrounded by the books in their libraries, are driving this entire thing. It is a, it is very, mobilization is very, very dependent on animating the spirits of the people.

Okay, that's really important. So your point here is that it's too simplistic to simply say the American Revolution is fundamentally about high taxes. Yes. Oh, for sure. It's, okay. All right. So I'm, all right. And I, by the way, wholeheartedly agree with you. I mean, the effect. They're not high.

They're not high. I mean, they're 1.20th of what the British taxpayer is paying. I mean, earlier, you said soaked in taxes, and I kind of went like, no, no, I'm getting. And what's interesting about it, though, is it's about tyranny anticipated more than it is tyranny expected, which is an entirely an American thing that has gone by the way. Yeah. Right. I mean, I think of Jimmy Carter in the 1970s saying, hey, fossil fuel is a huge problem. And we're like, yeah, it's fine.

Like, for 50 years, we've been pushing that can down the road, right? Yeah. Yeah, okay. So I just wanted to sort of level set on that because I agree with you that you can't explain, it's the combination of the declaration, I would argue, and Thomas Payne's common sense that really kind of stirs the common man and gets, you know, popular support for the revolution. Even still, there are still loyalists, and it's still a huge problem, right? Well, and the loyalist, the loyalist problem is a very significant problem.

In the Hamilton musical, Samuel Seaberry is there as a foil to make Alex and Hamilton look cool and young and smart and hip. And so he seems like he is just entirely out of touch. That is actually not what's going on in America at the end of 1774 and early 1775. The loyalist argument is it certainly has the Patriots notice, right? They are concerned that this is going to be a problem. My scholarship over the last 25 years has added one other thing to this conversation, and that's about race. That race is the thing that if we're thinking about what it is that, if we're thinking about how fragile this union and this movement is and how very difficult it is to find glue to make what Adam says is 13 o'clock strike is one. The thing that they do come up to find, yeah, the thing that they do find that they kind of, I call it the kind of the toolbox laying on the top.

of the, of the, when you open the box, it's the, it's the wrench laying on top is about making people afraid of, of, uh, native massacre or enslaved insurrections. And that's the thing that they use over and over and over and over and over and over. And that's the last grievance. And we can talk about how there's a very specific reason why it's the last grievance. Okay. Tell me. Okay. So, uh, so, uh, so the last grievance, the number 20th, Jefferson turns in 29. And they cut two. One very famously is the 168 word attack on the slave trade, which almost all of that goes away, which is a very tragic kind of moment because a lot of people in the room are made very uncomfortable by that. Not just Southerners, Jefferson later says, but Northerners who are feeling a little tender about the attack on the slave trade,

which they are building the ships and crewing those ships from Rhode Island and Massachusetts to go to Africa and bring people back. so they don't like it either. So that goes by the wayside, except that Congress writes a new phrase to try to hold on to part of it, which is the second part. That long grievance that Jefferson writes is in the past tense

and it moves into the present tense. The past tense part is about how the king has done all these terrible things to basically voice slavery upon the American, the innocent, unsuspecting colonial public. That's a bit of a hard argument to make Thomas, but okay, but then it shifts and then it says,

and he is now exciting those people to take up arms against us. And Congress wants to hold on to that. So they add a phrase and they add it to, they insert it before the attack on native peoples. So now that says he has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, domestics being a euphemism for enslaved people of the 18th century. And has endeavored to bring on to our inhabitants the merciless Indian savages whose no rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction

of all ages, sexes, and conditions. But if you look at where that would have been, because of where they delete the grievances, they delete 29, but then add it and they move it into 26, and then they cut out 28. The document would have ended with impressment. Impressment would have been the last one. But somebody in the room makes a motion to say,

let's swap the sequence on these two because that's not how it ends up. So if you look at the Jefferson's manuscript that's going to be on display at the Library of Congress for the first time ever this summer, you'll see two tiny little pencil marks X's and the margin next to those two grievances

to signify the swap. And it's a swap that happens and only Julian Boyd in 1943 has ever, he wrote a book about this stuff and he just says, Congress swapped the sequence. That's the only scholar and all these books on the Declaration that's ever noticed that's happened.

And I didn't figure it out until I've been thinking about this stuff 25 years, about this grievance 25 years. And I didn't notice until I was going over this with my class. And I went, oh, my God. Somebody purposefully intentionally made sure that race would end the Declaration's grievances. I've been saying it's a climax for years. Now I think I have proof. Those little pencil marks are proof.

Okay. So I'm going to ask a crazy question here. But it's one that as an amateur historian, like a fan of history, I like to consider myself. I'm not an historian, and you've done the training, you got the PhD, but I love the work that you guys do, obviously. So I want to ask you this, because I've always thought this, right towards the end of the declaration, we get this line. In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury, a prince whose character is thus marked by every act

which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. There's a lot going on there. Oh, yeah. I want to get to this question of the buildup to getting to the point where they declare independence. Because there's an argument that maybe if there had been, you know, if King George had at some point focused on it, because my understanding is that he had left, he didn't even read these things, right? I mean, it was like his secretary, like he, some of this just, he didn't bother to even respond, right?

Is that, this sounds crazy, but if there was FaceTime in the 18th century, might we have avoided the American Revolution? Well, I mean, this is this. So if Parliament means nothing, if they are foreign, then the only tie is to the king. And so, and that is the last one to fall. I mean, the fact that these grievances, most of them start with he has, is one of the kind of biggest changes of. of this. So it's the last domino to fall that this idea that it's actually the king's fault. Now, those dominoes start to fall with pain in common sense, who not only attacks George the third, who, by the way, is beloved. He is beloved in America. He's been king since 1760.

He's the first of the Hanoverian, so he's George III. George I, George I comes in 1714, and then his son, and then George the third is the grandson of George the second. But the first to don't even speak English. They speak German. They never learned. George II kind of learns English, but it's very hard for him. So when this,

and he's an old man when he, when he drops dead in his, in his bathroom in 1760, this new king seems fresh and hail. I mean, can you imagine having a king who's, or having a leader who is like, you know, fresh and fresh and young again?

It's incredible. So he's very beloved. And so he's the one guy to, to leave. Now that paragraph, when I just had my students reading it, reading Jefferson's rough draft, it's about twice as long as that, and it's very, very sad. One of my students refer to it as being, Jefferson being very sassy. And it's like a, it's, it's the, it's the most impassioned part of the breakup letter where Jefferson goes on and on and on about how heart hurt our feelings are that no one has

interceded. Right. And so it is, it is, it is, and Congress does a good job cutting out about half of that paragraph because it would have been there would have been like, dude, this is a little bit too much. But that's also where their feelings are. Their feelings are so hurt that this is almost in many ways like a temper tantrum that the Americans are throwing because they're feeling like their parent has abandoned them. But I want to get to this idea that it starts off. It could be pretty reasonable, it seems.

I mean, I mean, I'm just looking at it from like the core strategic, you know, concerns of the British Empire in 1774, 1775, he could have accommodated. He could have thrown them a bone. I mean, what I'm, what strikes me is the main thing is in that, in that little clause there is saying, you've ignored us.

We've been telling you, we can't have these taxes. The king is not, get your, get your, maybe under control, you know. But the king is not aloof or separated from this. I mean, when, when, when Lord Dartmouth presents the olive branch petition

in November of 1775, George turns his back on it. He will not receive it. It is brought to him. And he says, no, because he's made it, he's made it. And later on, George the third is who's,

I mean, he has a very famous quote where he says, if others will not be active, I must drive. I mean, this idea that this is, this is not him that wants the American colonies back.

He definitely is very involved in the prosecution of the war. And that stems from this idea that you can't have a division of authority in the British Empire. So, and that's, and it's only, you know, the thing, you know, basically had they just, you know, had we just become Canada,

had they thought about the Commonwealth, then we would be no United States, right? That's, that's true. And that, the, the very seat of that idea, you see it in 1778 when the Americans are about to sign the alliance with France. And they send over. and they send over a peace commission led by the Earl of Carlisle,

where say, okay, okay, you want your, you want your continental Congress or your criminal army, fine, just renounce independence, don't sign that alliance with France, and we'll give, we'll let you be sovereign over your people there, you maintain your connection with the king, which is basically, I mean, that's, that's the common. That's what they wanted. Yes, that's what they wanted. What they wanted in 1775, right? Yes, yes, but the British cannot conceive of states within a state.

And the Americans, right? And so this, and that journey is where we get to federalism, too. The Americans also are trying to figure out how can you have an extended republic? How can you have states within a state? How can you have small F federalism? That's also the political science journey that's going to happen between 1766 and 1787. The Americans are trying to figure out how to make that work. The British will not move from that.

And that's why there are red coats in New York City in 1776. No, I love this. Okay, I got to ask another thing about that clause. Is Jefferson, is he name-checking Machiavelli? Because he says Prince and Tyrant, which is, you know, what McIvelli wrote a few hundred years earlier. Probably, I don't think there's a smoking gun that says that, but that's in the air. Yeah. And by the way, that word.

So when the British reprint copies of the declaration, they can't use the T-word. So they have to block out because it's a seditious libel against the king in England. So they, they, so those. It says, it says, and they turn that he has us into it wases, I think. Oh, wow. Okay. Because he can't. And that's, that's a serious word to see.

Yeah, no, it is. I mean, as somebody who loves Machiavelli, that's, that's his main thing. He's talking about the difference between good, good kings and bad kings and tyrants and kings and kings that respect the freedom of their people and all that. Declaring us out of his protection is a problem for the Americans, right? That's, that's, okay. Yeah. All right. I got a

warily with respect to your great, you know, scholarship, somebody like Harry Jaffa, who I'm sure you know, right, he would argue, are you kidding me? The preamble is everything. The preamble is the engine of America. Lincoln picks it up and House Divided.

And if we didn't have that preamble, we wouldn't be getting, we wouldn't have had all the progress on race. We wouldn't have had all the progress on, you know, expanding the franchise of voting. and, you know, your scholarship is somehow trying to tell me that the preamble is not important? No way. What's your response to, like, the West Coast Straussians?

Right. Of course. It's the mission statement, right? Of course. It's important. It's the inspirational part. But here's the other thing, too. Okay.

So what gets cut? Jefferson refers to slavery as cruel war against human nature. he refers to the slave trade as an assemblage of horrors, piratical warfare, and all these, think about what Frederick Douglass does with that. All he has to work with is the All Men of Created Equal stuff, which is important, and it's really important that it's there. But why is it gone because of the union?

The privileging of the union over slavery is there on the 2nd of July, 1776, and will continue to be the bedrock of American political development until the Civil War. So that's a important part of the story as well. But no, I think that that, I think it is, those are some of the most beautiful sentences we've had. And for people to be able to attach themselves to that is very, very important. But we also need to understand what were their deal breakers and their red lines and the things that are, we should, they're telling us, These are things you shouldn't put up with. Don't put up with changes to trial by jury.

Don't put up with a military being independent of civil power. And if they try to do that, you should do something about it. Right. Okay. So in that respect, I think, let me to just, I want to get back to your kind of the mission statement of your book and your scholarship here. What you're saying is, is that in the moment, what was far more important to the Continental Congress were the grievances.

Yeah. It was, they had to explain why they. are taking this unprecedented. We don't do this for light and transient causes. I love that part of it. Right? We don't do this for life. Because we can't, we can't have the world thinking that we are just trying to skate

on our taxes or we're trying to set up for ourselves. We're trying to do the things that Charles Beard's going to accuse us of doing later. That's, we're, I mean, whether or not that's actually true, they don't want the world to understand that that's what the American Revolution is all about. Right. Okay. So they are concerned about world opinion. which is very interesting, right?

Yes. But there's also an element there where aren't they kind of also appealing to like the Charles Foxes in, you know, they're also appealing to the British people in England, right? I mean, they're also appealing to, you know, what's stirring around in the mother country, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think that's, that's the most hurt. Again, it's the most hurt feelings. And we have tried with the British brethren, But they are, that part of it is this kind of, it is the point of the point of the most hurt. It's right in the cut the most. Why hasn't anybody come to our aid in Britain and not enough of it? So, but yes, for the most part, I mean, you think about the thing like the foreign mercenaries, foreign mercenaries, which is, which Congress, by the way, deepens some of that stuff and adds all kinds of crazy language about scarcely, scarcely paralleled in the, in the history of mankind.

And they add that to Jefferson. They don't think Jefferson is going far enough when he does that. Well, that's the Adams family, right? I mean, that's the Massachusetts delegation. Obviously, they're experiencing it, right? No, everybody's mad about that. I mean, that is the, I mean, the foreign mercenaries thing is what sets this whole, this whole thing into motion.

Everything gets, when they get news that there aren't peace commissioners in early May, that's what sets all of this going in, happen. But the idea of hiring Germans is a very controversial thing in Parliament. You have the Edmund Burke's of the world saying, guys, all we're doing is basically paying for the emigration of tens of thousands of German people to America. They're never going to fight and they're never going to come back. And a lot of them don't actually. But that part of the prosecution of the American War is something where it gives rise to the –

gives sort of a sucker to the opposition to the king. Right. Okay. Okay. So that's, that's, okay. So now let's just take it. And I think you've, you know, we've covered a lot. You explained really well what the declaration meant in the moment.

How would you talk about the importance of it through American history? Because I always feel that the declaration isn't law like the Constitution, but in some ways it's more than just our national charge. but it's the engine of our progress. I always like to think of it that way. Commissary note, like Martin Luther King, Jr. said, Frederick Douglass, you know, all of these people. And then we, you know, so. Well, Lincoln especially.

Yeah, Lincoln, obviously, yes. Yeah. So just talk to me about the importance of the declaration kind of going forward. I know that's a little bit off your topic of the book. Yeah. I mean, you know this stuff so well. Yeah, I mean, it's very, very important. I mean, the, you know, it's funny, you know, nobody knows Jefferson wrote it.

until he runs for president in 1796. They think it's just a statement of Congress. And so when Jefferson runs for president, his friends go around saying, you know that's the author of the Declaration, right? And no one, and the thing that is the icon itself, the sign, the big block of print with the looping, all of the words that if kids can't read cursive,

they can't read it anymore anyway. That's not really, no one sees that really until after the War of 1812. And then it becomes this kind of icon. So it's really, I was just talking when I was. class about this, about how 1818, 18, 1920 in that kind of surge of American nationalism after we, quote unquote, win the war of 1812, that's when that becomes a thing. And so that's also when, you know, in 1818, Lincoln is nine, right? And so these are, these, that generation grows up with this kind of sent, this is also the time when the Trumbull paintings are commissioned and put up in the,

in the rotunda. So that kind of connect, and the American revolutionaries are dying. And so that connection to this. And then, of course, Jefferson and Adams died. on the 4th of July of 1826. It's a kind of a providential act. It's a crazy thing. And so that really begins to change it. I do think, I wonder what the, so if Jefferson just copies lock,

life liberty, does it change it? I think pursuit of happiness is doing so much interesting work. Because a lot of people can get on board with that and see themselves in that much better than if it was just property. Property is almost off-putting. and specific, Persuits of happiness can be anything, right?

Right? So I do think that's, it's an important, I don't know why Jefferson picks that, but I think that becomes a really, really important a phrase, not as important as created equal, but in the ballpark of that. That's an important thing to do. And I think Americans just see themselves.

People who come here see them, they think, yeah, I'm here to pursue my happiness. Yeah. Now, the other thing I wanted to ask you about, and I did an episode on the Declaration last July 4th, because the part of it that I love is that the whole world, if you go through, they copy it. Even Ho Chi Minh, his Declaration of Independence for Vietnam is kind of a rip off of our Declaration of Independence, the Israeli Declaration. Talk about how this became the most viral document, political document ever. Yeah, I mean, it certainly has a global impact. I do think it, it, because it is, I mean, the reason there's some neutrality in it,

or in many ways, kind of capacious, capaciousness, but it's also because of that real problem of unity. So you're not, there's not an endorsement of a specific Protestant Christian God in it. And it is, it's talking about men in ways that, you know, if you were to ask them, well, Jefferson, like, dude, what do you mean by this, right? Or, dude, what do you mean by this? If you point out to those, if you ask him follow-up questions, it would have been smaller and smaller. But you're trying to, you're trying to say that this is a statement of human history that we are in line with all these people who have been on this progress machine in the, in the Enlightenment scientific rationalism of the 18th century.

We are, we are wigs just like those wigs of 688. And so we are going to, we are, we are, it's just about all. All of us, except that they don't want to endorse things. So that makes it available, I think, to people in Vietnam in the 1940s and 50s. It makes it available to Israelis. So I think that that's an important part of it. But that comes from the union and mobilization problem. They don't want to upset anybody, and they want to make this available for everybody to get on board with.

Right, right. That's, yes. And I certainly see that. But there's so much panic and desperation. Right? I mean, that's the whole theme of what's going. When I talk to my students, I'm like, you guys, this is not, Jefferson is not sitting around, but, you know, mulling with his quill pen. What do I mean by these phrases? Not only is he writing this fast, but they are in panic mode.

What else do they do on the 4th of July? You would think that they would just high five each other and all go out for a drink for the rest of the day. No, they are, they are sending out panicked messages to Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, saying, guys, get your men to New York City as fast as you can because that invasion army is in New York Harbor. First ships arrive on the 2nd of July, the day they're taking the vote. So they know this war is coming at us right now,

and that's the mode we should read it in this is immediate desperation. Got it. Okay. I know you're an historian. You deal with the past. You deal with documents, but I have to ask. how do you think the declaration is doing in the 20 we're in the 250th anniversary are we living up to the ideals and do you feel that like right now it still has that same pride of place that it did

with lincoln frederick douglas martin luther king is it still have that power here if you yeah i think so i mean one of the reasons why i mean i was i was on leave last year and um so i was I was already going to write a book about the grievances. I thought that that was an important thing to do. And then we had an election and then we had an inauguration. And then very soon after that, all of a sudden, everybody's talking about the grievances. Look at what the executive branch is doing. And I'm looking at social media and the grievances are everywhere.

So I went, uh-oh, I better get on. I better plant my flag. And so I had a very quick meeting with my editor. It was like, good, get it done. And so I wrote it like crazy in the spring and summer of last year to get this book done. The grievances themselves have a, have a freshness and availance that we've never seen before. But the declaration as a whole, I hope we're not losing touch with it because it's extraordinarily important. Extraordinary important. And a couple of weeks ago, I was at the Organization of American

Historians Conference. And Annette Gordon-Reed, the very, very famous and eminent Harvard professor You mean Gordon Wood? No, Annette Gordon Reed. Oh, okay, sorry. Yeah, and who's written about Sally Hemings and the Hemings's Monticello. Oh, of course, right? Yeah. She gave her presidential address was about African Americans in the Declaration,

but about the trajectory of that we've had since Lincoln, where the idea that King talked about the trajectory of bending towards justice. And people who weren't on board with everybody sort of being a part of this, were always seen as out of touch or out of step, right? They're wrong. So the segregationists at Pettus Bridge, they're wrong, right? And they're not really doing what the Americans are doing, or the guys in Birmingham. Now that doesn't seem to be the case, right? We've seen like that trajectory is now if you, you aren't seen it really is wrong. And we need to get back to that. And so I really hope that we are able to do that in the coming years.

And maybe 20, 20, I mean, I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm young enough that I wasn't there at the bicentennial, but I was there for the kind of the penumbra afterwards. And that's what, I mean, I was living at that time halfway between Plymouth Rock and Lexington Green and my job as a four-year-old boy was to try to convince my mother to go either, either east or west to one of the other. And that was in the kind of the years after, in the late 70s when this was, people were really excited about history. And I'm hoping that kind of thing is a result.

of what we're doing in 2026. I'm not super optimistic, but I'm hopeful. Yeah. Oh, that's good. All right. And the last thing I want to get into and one of the things I love about the Declaration is that it's not just this forceful argument. It is a forceful argument. And it is a statement.

But they have these nuances. You mentioned one earlier, which is that you don't just do revolutions for transient reasons. Like, that's a big one. Yes. So talk about, that idea that there is, like, in some ways, I almost want to say it's Telmudic,

which is that they include maybe some of the best arguments against what they're doing in the document itself, which is they're kind of checking themselves a little bit. And they're trying to be very specific, saying we're not just saying, when you're unhappy, you know, go have a revolution. This is serious business. But there are other things as well where it's not as simple as,

you know, we're going to like lay out these things and we're just out there, you know, letting it rip. Right, right. I mean, and this is, you know, the, when the declaration goes to England, Lord North commissions a writer named John Lynn to write a response pamphlet. And it's 132 pages long, and 119 of those pages are about refuting the refuting what they've said in the grievances. On page 119, he says, of the preamble, I take no notice, none does it deserve, right? So he basically just waves away all the stuff that we know about the declaration. It's like ridiculous nonsense, right?

And so that, but that, and so oftentimes what Lynn talks about is the hypocrisy, right? Oh, you say that we've, he's, the king has incited merciless Indian savages. Well, here are all the examples that we know of, of the Americans doing the same thing. So that, that kind of court of public opinion is really, really important. And so that that's what they really want to make sure that these things are ironclad. and water tight. And if that means cutting some out, I mean, the other one they cut out

is these excited treasonable insurrections against us with the promises of forfeiture of property. Like, well, A, we're doing that too. We're confiscating loyalist estates and promises of other stuff. And B, how do you commit treason against a country that doesn't exist? Good. You can't, right?

Can't, right? So until we get to the bottom of this document, you can't commit to reason against this. So I think that they're, so I would assume, we don't know why they cut that one, but I think their lawyers in the room are saying, yeah, that might get us, that might not, people might point to that and say,

well, if some of this stuff is, you know, easily disproved, then the whole thing might seem like it's a fool's errand. Right. So that, so they did try to tighten it up. Yes. What you were saying, right? Oh, yes.

Okay. All right. Well, listen. Robert Parkinson, this is great. Thank you very much. And congratulations on the book. Thanks. I'm so glad.

Let's keep in touch on stuff. What's your next big book? What's your next project? Well, this is four books in 10 years for me and three and five. So my next thing is, I don't know this crazy place where I'm really kind of feel like I'm starting over. So I'm going to spend this year basically going back to graduate school and starting, I'm going to start and write a prospectus of and start a new project. I'm going to work on the 1780s and think about it.

And think about it in terms of thinking about the 12 years after the end of the revolution in thinking about what happens at the end of the, from 1765 to 1877. That's reconstruction. I'm calling this project construction and thinking about how to construct a republic. And doing so, I'm trying to figure out four places. to look at that. I'm hoping maybe the four corners of the Republic, from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean

to northeast, somewhere in there, and really do a deep social history about how those places, and also do a lot of environmental history, so how the Republic itself inscribes itself onto the landscape. But thinking about this, not in terms of the road to Philadelphia

and the road out of Philadelphia of the Constitution, which happens in the middle of this period, but really thinking about this as its own thing that we have to think about, is this actually a critical period? What's going on? And how do we come out of this revolution and the consequences of it,

hopefully in a fresh way? It's going to take me a while to write it, though. So we might not be around, but we'll see. Rob, thank you so much for coming on Breaking History. This was a great conversation, and I'm recommending the book. Thank you. Thanks for having me all. He asked some great questions.

This is a lot of funny.