The Declaration's Domestic International Effects

IN his insightful study of what he calls declaration of interdepen dence (30), David Armitage suggests that the effective date of U.S. independence might be 1778, when France signed a treaty recogniz ing and agreeing to aid the revolutionaries, or even 1783, when Britain conceded (85) independence in the Treaty of Paris. The date matters. In raising this issue, Armitage reminds us that the American Revolution was a drama with many acts that could have turned out differently. He also argues that the natural premise beneath the Declaration's proclamation that all Men are created equal (165) must be balanced against the positivist realism of its request for recognition, which Armitage relates to a shift from natural to positive concep tions of the of nations. It was than just a coincidence, he notes, that Jeremy Bentham coined the terms international and inter national law (11) just a few years after panning the Declaration in a Crown-sponsored reply to Congress. Bentham's new terms described a between or among states rather than within them and soon sup planted the more protean jus gentium (law of nations). The Declaration not only combined national political philosophy with a plea for interna tional recognition; it was also a methodological m?lange: naturalist, posi tivist, and full of customary constitutional claims. One question is whether Armitage goes a bit far in deemphasizing the Declaration's local effects and audience. Local means not only within the thirteen states but also within the Anglophone Atlantic world that the Revolution split in two.1 The document purported to shatter a common subjecthood and draw new baselines for political allegiance and legal rights within the United States and Great Britain. The Declaration therefore had, in addition to discrete domestic and consequences, domestic effects. It signaled within the thirteen provinces that the revolutionary governments

Declaration · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law