Ace History Desk – That the United States declared its independence in July 1776 is well known; that the British state commissioned, but never published, a counter-declaration is not.

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/disputing-declaration-independence

Disputing the Declaration of Independence by David Armitage is Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University.

The American War of Independence was a war of words as well as a war of arms. It has sometimes been said that books cause revolutions but it is often the case that revolutions cause books – and lots of them.

In British history alone, production of political print spiked in the 1640s and again during the Glorious Revolution, as duelling pamphlets debated every subject under the sun, to the benefit of Britain’s printers and booksellers. The British imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s marked another publishing peak in which a relatively obscure writer such as Thomas Paine could vault to fame with the appearance of 200,000 (Paine’s figure) or even by some later estimates 500,000 copies of his Common Sense, which first hit the streets of Philadelphia in February 1776.

The Declaration of Independence, the 250th anniversary of which we mark this year, more modestly began its journey to global fame as another piece of Philadelphian print on 5 July 1776. Three days earlier, on 2 July, the Second Continental Congress approved Richard Henry Lee’s resolution ‘that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states’. After further debate, they voted on 4 July to explain or ‘declare’ to the world just why they had ratified that resolution and, with it, resolved on independence. The result was the world’s first declaration of independence. To get the word out, Congress tasked the Irish immigrant printer John Dunlap with running off the first copies of their declaration, a task he was familiar with having printed various other announcements and documents unofficially for Congress. Dunlap and his pressmen pulled an all-nighter over 4-5 July. They printed around 200 copies of the Declaration for immediate distribution around the colonies up and down the eastern seaboard from Massachusetts to Georgia.

The Declaration’s first print run may have been small but its impact would be enormous. Yet that the Declaration ultimately became enshrined as the founding charter of the world’s most powerful nation did not mean it was ordained to be central to American history. To be sure, some contemporaries saw world-historical significance in the Declaration: it ‘asserted the claims of the American Colonies to the rights of Humanity’, George Washington grandly wrote in a letter to the Massachusetts General Court, enclosing a copy to be proclaimed in their new state. By contrast, an officer in Washington’s army was far from impressed when it was read out in upstate New York: it ‘made little Buze; but was soon forgotten’, reported Captain John Lacey.

When the Declaration reached London, the reaction was more pointed. On 10 August 1776 the exiled loyalist governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, called it, in the first recorded reaction in Britain, a ‘most infamous paper reciting a great number of pretended tyrannical deeds of the King and declaring their independence’. Battle had been joined. Within two months Hutchinson published a full-length pamphlet refuting the Declaration, his Strictures Upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia, published on 15 October. Hutchinson’s reply was soon forgotten. Meanwhile, two and a half centuries later, the Declaration is still celebrated, in the United States at least, every fourth of July.

Against the claims of America

By the end of August 1776 the Declaration had appeared in most of London’s leading newspapers. The press response was far from uniformly favourable. A nameless author in the Morning Post directed a loyal, royalist satire to ‘the Disunited States of America’ in which he sought to prove that George III’s actions in the run-up to July 1776 amounted not to a ‘long train of abuses’, as the Declaration alleged, but instead showed ‘a direct tendency to the establishment of peace, mercy, and good government’. By the end of August ‘Pacificus’ had joined the chorus with his ‘Thoughts on the Declaration of Independency of the Congress in Rebellion against Great Britain’ in the Morning Chronicle, declaring himself astonished to see ‘rebellion vindicated by an appeal to the basest falsehoods’, while ‘An Englishman’ expressed his incredulity at the Declaration’s claims of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the Scots Magazine. As such reactions suggested, Congress’ Declaration hardly seemed likely to sway public opinion in the metropole.

All these negative reactions to the Declaration came from private individuals. It is inevitable to ask what action the government of the day – George III’s ministry led by the self-doubting Lord North – planned to do. On the face of it, silence might have been the better part of prudence: any public rebuttal of the Declaration would imply that it presented a serious threat, and risked lending prestige to Congress’ cause by taking their Declaration seriously. Silence was also eminently possible because Parliament was in its recess until 31 October 1776.

With that in mind, the ministry evidently decided to follow a strategy it had used before: to work at arm’s length and under cover of anonymity by recruiting a writer to ventriloquise the British case without obviously appearing to represent official opinion. The previous summer, they had commissioned James Macpherson, the Scots poet and compiler of the works of the alleged Gaelic bard Ossian, to rebut Congress’ ‘Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms’ (6 July 1775). Macpherson’s The Rights of Great Britain asserted against the Claims of America duly appeared in the second half of 1775. A year later, the task fell to a more obscure figure, the worldly and well-connected lawyer and propagandist John Lind (1737-81). One result from Lind’s pen would be the almost wholly unknown and entirely unstudied ‘Outlines of a Counter-Declaration’ written in late August or September 1776, but only published for the first time in July 2026.

Lind had been an undergraduate at Oxford, where he stayed on to take holy orders. In a notably cosmopolitan career, he spent five years (1761-66) in Constantinople as chaplain to the Levant Company and a further five (1767-72) in Warsaw, where he variously ran a cadet school, tutored a Polish prince, and became a close confidant to the last king of Poland, Stanisław August Poniatowski. On his return to Britain Lind acted as the Polish king’s representative until Lind died in 1781, a close relationship that would shape his response to the Declaration of Independence.

While at Oxford, Lind made friends with a precocious young philosophical genius: Jeremy Bentham was a 12-year-old undergraduate when they first met, and the two resumed their friendship when Lind came back to London from his travels. Much later, Bentham remembered Lind as ‘living in the high world’, hobnobbing with leading lawyers and politicians such as Lord Mansfield and Lord North, ‘and in particular in Ministerial circles’. Back in London, Lind published a set of letters defending the Polish king as well as three pamphlets setting out the British case against the American rebels. It was this publishing record together with his exalted political contacts that led to Lind’s discreet commission to refute the Declaration.

Lind’s surviving correspondence with Bentham reveals that he was collaborating with the younger man – in the summer of 1776, aged 28, not yet the towering philosophical eminence he would later become – on the demolition of the Declaration’s second paragraph, with its enumeration of ‘self-evident’ truths and argument for a right of rebellion against abusive government. Their joint effort appeared in print as the ‘Short Review of the Declaration’ at the end of a longer pamphlet, Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress, published anonymously at the end of September 1776, just in time to shape opinion as Parliament re-opened with the king’s speech on 31 October. The ministry went all out in their campaign against Congress’ broadside and had 8,000 copies of the Answer printed at a time when 500 or 1,000 copies formed a substantial run. 500 copies were reserved for export across the Atlantic to help shape colonial opinion. The bulk of the Answer – an ‘Introduction’ plus the legalistic, paragraph-by-paragraph refutation of the 27 charges against the king that formed the heart of the US Declaration – was by Lind, as Bentham and only a handful of others close to the ministry would have known.

Anyone who bought a copy of the Answer to the Declaration in late 1776 could not have known that the pamphlet in their hands was not the full text Lind had written. Nor would they have known that it was not even the first version that had been printed. We are fortunate to have the ledger books of the Answer’s printer, the prominent London Scot William Strahan, most famous as the publisher of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in March 1776. Strahan’s accounts show that payments came from the British treasury for the Answer but that its original form was 24 pages longer than the pamphlet that appeared in bookshops at the end of September. What, then, had been cut before publication? And why?

The Counter-Declaration

A single specimen of the Answer’s initial print run survives to solve that puzzle. The John Carter Brown Library (JCB) in Providence, Rhode Island, is among the world’s greatest collections of works relating to the Americas, north and south: among its treasures is a unique copy of the Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress. No other copy of this first printing of the Answer exists. And we know it is the first version because Jeremy Bentham tells us so: on the title page of the JCB copy is Bentham’s inscription noting that Lind was its author and that ‘[t]his is the work in its original state. A considerable part was left out at the desire of the ministry’. Moreover, this is the only copy including the missing pages. Most exciting of all in this semiquincentennial year of the US Declaration, those pages contain the ‘Outlines of a Counter-Declaration’ for which there is no evidence anywhere else.

It might seem obvious that an argument written – or proposed to be written – against the American Declaration would be called a ‘counter-declaration’: obvious in retrospect, perhaps, but not so self-evident in 1776. The term ‘counter-declaration’, and its European analogues – the French contre-déclaration or German Gegenerklärung, for instance – was confined to diplomatic jargon in the 18th century. It referred to a document issued by one sovereign to rebut the claims of another: for instance, Francis I, Holy Roman emperor, had published one against the French king Louis XV in 1753, and the kings of Britain and Prussia issued another against him in 1761.

Before 1776 the counter-declaration best known in the English-speaking Atlantic world was the one King Stanisław August Poniatowski and his Polish parliament, the sejm, had directed against the monarchs of Austria, Prussia, and Russia in October 1772. This firmly argued the Polish case against the August 1772 ‘Manifesto’ in which those foreign rulers announced their intent to carve up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, then Europe’s largest state. In hindsight, this would be known as the First Partition of Poland: among its effects was the shrinking of the king’s authority. To many contemporary observers, the First Partition was as brazen and brutal an attack on a sovereign state and the contemporary international order as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022: indeed, the distance between us and that assault is not much less than that between the First Partition of Poland and the US Declaration of Independence. According to Edmund Burke, the partition was nothing less than ‘the first breach in the modern political system of Europe … laying the axe at once to the root, in such a manner as threatens the overthrow of the whole’. Burke thereby traced threats to European order back to 1772, much as we might now trace the unravelling of the postwar international order back to Putin’s aggression towards Ukraine in 2022. As Burke wrote later in 1774, ‘Poland was but a breakfast’: where else might predatory powers now dine?

The Polish king’s counter-declaration had appeared twice in English translation before 1776. Each time it appeared in an edition of the Letters Concerning the Present State of Poland (1773) by none other than John Lind, the British representative of the Polish king. The Polish ‘Counter-Declaration’ (as it was titled in Lind’s English version) spoke in an aggrieved princely tone, appealed to recent history, deployed slippery-slope arguments about the danger of overturning traditional rights, and pointed repeatedly to views shared across Europe (‘all Europe knows’; ‘all Europe has seen’): these were all elements that Lind the propagandist for pre-partition Poland imported into Lind the ministerial apologist’s proposed royal counter-declaration against the American Declaration in 1776. The analogy implied that 1776 was like 1772. The rebellious American colonists were the counterparts of Joseph II, Frederick the Great, and Catherine the Great. The main difference was that the agents wrecking a long-standing monarchy in 1776 were insurgents bent on secession not princes greedy for territory.

Lind’s ‘Outlines of a Counter-Declaration’ skipped any philosophical treatment of rights and assumed that he had already convinced his readers with his forensic dismantling of the colonists’ accusations against George III in their Declaration elsewhere in the Answer. Instead, he proposed, any regal refutation should systematically lay out the history of colonial perfidy for all to see. Colonists such as Thomas Jefferson claimed in their pamphlets that the settlements in British North America had been planted at private expense: Lind argued that the Counter-Declaration should recall the deep history of English and later British sovereignty, in both Crown and Parliament, over the colonies. To disprove any alleged ‘long train of abuses’ by George III, it should lay out the Hanoverian monarchs’ patient care for the colonists, especially the great expense of defending them during the Seven Years War. ‘All Europe might be called upon to testify – for all Europe knows’ how much blood and treasure George II and George III had spent on their behalf. His Majesty’s subjects in Britain and observers throughout Europe could be turned against the rebels by proving the king’s liberality and their abuse of his graciousness. Not least, the Counter-Declaration would lay out to the world the appalling conspiracy ‘by which, step by step, artful and ambitious men’ had led the colonies’ ‘deluded people’ from ‘discontent and murmuring, to open revolt and avowed rebellion’ with independence as its animating aim.

With a sly nod to the American Declaration, Lind suggested that the British Counter-Declaration should address itself to matters of fact, just as the Declaration had presented its ‘facts … to a candid World’. The main difference between the Counter-Declaration and the Declaration would be that the British account should present a single joined-up narrative of the conspiracy that propelled American independence. Lind then listed 35 articles that mirrored British conservative arguments against the colonists as well as an emerging loyalist historiography of the Revolution. Taken together, these would show how a devious colonial cabal springing from Massachusetts had plotted independence as far back as the 1760s. They gradually deceived ‘the deluded multitude’ and repeatedly resisted Parliament’s legitimate authority over the colonies from the Stamp Act of 1765 onwards, culminating in the alleged atrocities committed by American forces in the early stages of the War of Independence.

The US Declaration had listed its grievances without names, dates, places, or even a clear timeline; in contrast, the British Counter-Declaration would lay out its charges with precision and in the exact order in which they occurred, the better to reveal consistent plot underlying apparently disparate events. This criminal chronology would confirm that patriot leaders had aimed at independence all along: ‘Having thus led the people to 
offend … they completed the work of rebellion, by solemnly renouncing all allegiance to His Majesty’s Crown’ with the Declaration of Independence. The only means to return them to his fold was force: ‘the sword of justice will even yet be tempered by the hand of mercy’, the former clergyman Lind concluded in pseudo-biblical tones.

We can only speculate why the North ministry wanted Lind’s ‘Outlines of a Counter-Declaration’ omitted from the Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress. The dignity of the Crown and Lind’s overreaching might provide the best explanation. Lind had dared to speak in the voice of his king; moreover, he had done so in a counter-declaration, a form reserved for sovereigns speaking publicly to other sovereigns. ‘Ill would it become the dignity of an insulted Sovereign to descend to altercation with revolted subjects’, Lind wrote in what became the opening words of the published Answer: ‘This would be to recognise the equality and independence, to which subjects, persisting in revolt, cannot fail to pretend.’ This was precisely the faux pas he had committed by imagining his sovereign condescending to engage with the rebels against his rule in North America. They were not worthy of receiving any kind of diplomatic declaration, let alone a counter-declaration, the genre ennobled by the unjustly weakened Stanisław August Poniatowski. The Answer could only appear with its offending thought-experiment left out.

The king’s speech

Lind’s planned argument against the Declaration was effectively redundant by the time George III took the throne at Westminster to address the opening of Parliament on 31 October 1776. In a speech likely from the king’s own hand, George succinctly summarised the arguments Lind adumbrated at greater length in the ‘Counter-Declaration’. A deep conspiracy lay behind the revolution in America. Colonial leaders had only corrupt, self-serving motives. Dire consequences would befall international order if their revolt was not crushed and their insulting, treacherous, and inflammatory Declaration left to stand:

So daring and desperate is the Spirit of those Leaders, whose Object has always been Dominion and Power, that they have now openly renounced all Allegiance to the Crown … and have presumed to set up their rebellious Confederacies for Independent States. If their Treason be suffered to take Root, much Mischief must grow from it, to the safety of My loyal Colonists, to the Commerce of My Kingdoms, and indeed to the present System of all Europe.

In the audience for the king’s speech that day were former governor Thomas Hutchinson and his fellow loyalist Peter Oliver, who soon wrote his own conspiracy theory of the Revolution, attributing it to scheming Puritans. Perhaps John Lind was there, too. He lived to write another day, with at least three more polemical pamphlets to his credit before he died in 1781. He seems to have been forgiven for any transgression in 1776 by being commissioned to respond to French and Spanish recognition of the United States in the 1779 Remarks on the Rescript of the Court of Madrid and on the Manifesto of the Court of Versailles. He had learned his lesson and would not speak for his monarch but leave that to his ambassadors: insofar as the French and Spanish declarations were ‘meant to operate upon the Rulers of States’, he wrote, ‘it is the proper business of his Majesty’s confidential servants to reply to them’. Still, even truncated and without the ‘Outlines of a Counter-Declaration’, Lind’s 1776 Answer received warm reviews in the British press. Meanwhile, two copies of the published version, shorn of Lind’s ‘Counter-Declaration’, found their way into George III’s library, one in English, the other in French. As far as we know, ‘the present king of Great-Britain’ never owned a copy of the US Declaration of Independence itself. 

At Sterling Publishing & Media Service Agency, we prioritise transparency and accountability in all our operations. We wish to clarify that we are not responsible for any external content, hyperlinks, or costs associated with our services. Nevertheless, we remain committed to delivering outstanding services and greatly value your continued support. Thank you for your trust in us.