The Declaration Was the First Great Act of Protected Speech

The American Revolution was not born on a battlefield. It was born in print shops, churches, taverns, and legislative halls.

Before Lexington and Concord, stinging critiques appeared in colonial newspapers, sermons, pamphlets, town meetings, and open debates that relentlessly criticized the rule of the British Crown.

It was only after years of what the British regarded as seditious commentary that fifty-six men came together on July 4, 1776, to sign what was arguably the most dangerous political document in history. They publicly accused King George III of tyranny, cataloged his abuses, declared him unfit to rule, and pledged to one another “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Had the Revolution failed, many of the Declaration’s signers would almost certainly have been tried for treason and hanged.

These Founders put their lives on the line not merely over disagreements about taxes or representation, but over the right of a free people to think, speak, worship, assemble, publish, and petition without fear of government retaliation. Perhaps the single most important sentence in American political philosophy appears in the Declaration’s opening paragraphs:

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Those words are impossible to separate from the First Amendment that followed in 1791. Consent cannot exist unless citizens are free to criticize those who govern them, publish unpopular opinions, organize with like-minded people, worship according to conscience, and persuade their fellow citizens to embrace a different course.

James Madison later distilled that principle into one unforgettable sentence, that “the censorial power is in the people over the Government, and not in the Government over the people.”

The Declaration also helped lay the intellectual foundation for religious liberty. Thomas Jefferson's assertion that all people possess natural rights by virtue of their humanity – not by permission of government – led directly to the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which in turn profoundly influenced the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Religious liberty was not an afterthought to the American experiment. It was one of its central promises.
Those promises remain under constant assault today.

A growing intellectual movement argues that the First Amendment’s neutrality is itself a flaw. One of its leading proponents, law professor Mary Anne Franks, contends that the Constitution places too much emphasis on protecting speech and too little on shielding people from the harms speech can cause. As Protect The 1st has previously noted, this school of thought would fundamentally transform the First Amendment from a shield against government censorship into a tool that empowers government to decide which ideas may be expressed and which may be suppressed.

That would reverse the Founders’ design. The First Amendment was written precisely because government cannot be trusted to distinguish acceptable opinions from unacceptable ones. Once government is empowered to silence speech because it is deemed harmful or offensive, every dissenter speaks only by permission of the state.

The free exercise of religion likewise remains under pressure.

Protect The 1st has repeatedly defended the rights of Americans of all faiths – from faith-based schools to ministries and prisoners – to live according to their beliefs without being coerced by government into violating their consciences. The many efforts by federal and state officials to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to abandon their religious convictions remind us that the struggle for religious liberty did not end with the Founding.

The Declaration of Independence was America’s first great act of protected speech – a declaration that government’s true purpose is to secure liberty, not to ration it.
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Every Fourth of July, we rightly celebrate our independence with fireworks and family gatherings. We should also celebrate the freedoms that made independence possible in the first place – the freedom to speak boldly, worship freely, criticize fearlessly, and persuade peacefully.

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