The Part of the Declaration of Independence Nobody Reads (Grievances Against King George) Is the Part That Actually Mattered

On July 9, 1776, a group of American soldiers listened to the Declaration of Independence read aloud in New York City, then rushed down Broadway and spent several minutes prying a two-ton golden equestrian statue of King George III off its pedestal on Bowling Green. They hacked off the head, sent the body to a Connecticut foundry, and melted it into exactly 42,088 bullets, a number chosen deliberately to evoke the British revolutions of 1642 and 1688. On the road to the foundry, loyalist neighbors in Wilton crept out at night and stole pieces of the statue, burying them in their yards as a quiet counter-protest. Those fragments stayed hidden for centuries until treasure hunters with metal detectors dug them up.

Today's guest is Robert G. Parkinson, author of Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence. We look at the 27 grievances that make up the body of the Declaration, the section that Jefferson, Congress, and the British government all considered the essential part of the document but that modern Americans almost never read. We discuss how the very first grievance is secretly about the king vetoing Virginia's attempt to curtail the slave trade, and that the patriots saw themselves not as radical innovators but as the heirs of 1688, conducting the third British revolution in 135 years, and that the Declaration was written not in a moment of triumph but during nine weeks of almost unbelievable catastrophe.

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