King George III didn’t do the things the Declaration says he did, but most Americans think he did. Why?
The Continental Congress knew their complaints were with Congress, but preferred to pin the blame on the King. Does this put the Revolution in a different light?
QUESTIONS:
Why do you think parliament’s actions were conflated with the King’s?
Would the logic of the “grievances” have been different if the American rebels had acknowledge that the cause of their grievances originated with the British parliament, rather than the King?
What do you expect American’s response will be after they update their historical understanding?
Transcript
0:02 Hey folks, as the folks come in for our event tomorrow at the Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark to talk about the uses of the 250th anniversary of
0:09 the Declaration of Independence, one of the things that we want to get into tomorrow on the live stream or that we might get into tomorrow on the live stream that Helena and I are doing with
0:16 guests to delve into these issues is one of the more thorny problems presented by a huge gap in what we know about the
0:25 Declaration of Independence and what most people think about the Declaration of Independence. There is the scholarship of the Declaration and then there is the popular beliefs about it.
0:34 There’s what historians know and think and have studied and what most other people believe that the Declaration of Independence is and does. One of the
0:42 biggest problems with that is the list of grievances. It’s probably the most problematic. The king did this, the king did that, the king did some other damn thing. But most historians acknowledge that those are not historical claims.
0:53 George III didn’t do any of those things. And the evidence is clear that no one in the Continental Congress believed that he did. I mean, they knew that the blame rested with Parliament
1:02 and with the ministry. Why Jefferson did it anyway has a few explanations. Steve Sarsson, who’s going to be there tomorrow, lays out his generous one in a new book. I have a less generous one,
1:12 but maybe we can put that to him tomorrow. But I want to actually raise all of this with you, too, because it’s something that we can talk about. The explanation matters less than the consequence of it. And here’s the issue.
1:24 Two centuries of public history have left most Americans with a model of the revolution in which a king was personally to blame for a list of things he had neither the power nor the
1:32 practical capacity to actually do. The Continental Congress, the senior patriots, all knew that the American public by and large today does
1:40 not. And that gap has shaped how Americans read political dysfunction ever since as a story about one bad man at the top rather than the structures
1:48 that give any executives the room to act. That’s a historical problem. And that’s not only the popular story of the revolution being wrong. It’s that that
1:56 being wrong about it in this particular way has trained Americans to look for George III every time the system fails them. Stripped the personalization away
2:04 from the founding the present looks different. And it’s a point worth unpacking. The whole point of the revolution from resistance through independence to the constitution looks
2:13 different which is why there is a huge disconnect between the scholarship our popular belief but it’s our popular belief that shapes our political culture and informs behavior today. So, I think it’s a point worth unpacking tomorrow.
2:24 Maybe Steve can weigh in. I mostly want you to. How was he?