Variations on a Theme by Jefferson

Jay Fliegelman's dazzling essay on the cultural context of the Declaration of Independence, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance, is an elaboration of the wonderful discovery that Jefferson intended the Declaration of Independence to be spoken and hence performed, and not simply read. Jefferson's final draft of the Declaration is punctuated by a series of what might appear to be single and double quotation marks. That is what they must have seemed to John Dunlap, who inserted quotation marks into the first proof of the printed version of the Declaration; no doubt recognizing that the quotation marks made no sense, he removed them for the first print run, leaving gaping white spaces in the official printed text. As Fliegelman notes, it was not until two centuries after Jefferson penned the Declaration that anyone paid much attention to these peculiar markings or the way that their insertion and retraction by the printer disfigured the first printing of this canonical document. Julian Boyd has speculated that Jefferson's markings were intended to accent particular syllables, but Fliegelman demonstrates that Jefferson meant them to indicate pauses for dramatic effect. When the Declaration is read with Jefferson's marks restored, we can see-hear, reallythat Jefferson intended the document to be read aloud, before an audience. Fliegelman's reading of Jefferson's original intent restores to the Declaration a cultural and social context that had been lost in the mysterious white spaces of the first proof: The Declaration of Independence presumed and spoke to a relationship between author and audience, ruler and ruled; at the same time that the document severed the ties between the colonies and Britain, it attempted to knit ones between the American people and their leaders. Fliegelman finds this lost world in the pages of the texts of what he calls the elocutionary or oratorical revolution of the mid-eighteenth century. The new and its expositors-James Burgh, Thomas Sheridan, John Rice, and others-favored a purified rhetoric of persuasion broadly understood as the

Theme (computing · World Wide Web · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Computer Science · History

• The Scholars' Jefferson

  Peter S Onuf•The William and Mary Quarterly•1993

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