Science  /  Comparison

The Case Against an American King, Then and Now

Liesl Schillinger Considers the Impeachment of Donald Trump vs. the Indictment of George III.

What was the Declaration of Independence, besides a declaration of… independence? For five successive semesters, since Donald J. Trump “took over” the United States, as he puts it, I’ve asked my students this question, in my Facts/Alternative Facts class at the New School in New York City. It comes up in the week of term in which we look at this country’s founding documents and talk about their meaning for freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the freedom of each citizen.

In the syllabus, the week goes under the heading “Fighting Words.” A couple of students usually know, or guess, the answer: The Declaration of Independence was also a Declaration of War. The vermilion haze of Jeffersonian eloquence that suffuses its beginning, the grandeur of Jefferson’s prose (“When in the course of human events…”) can make it easy to lose sight of that.

But when I follow up this question by asking if they know about the “Indictment of George III” (which immediately follows Jefferson’s rousing proem) they shake their heads. My suspicion is that they’re not alone; and that most Americans don’t know what the “Indictment of George III,” is, much less why it is integral to the birth of this nation, or why it’s important to remember it today, at a moment when the movement for the impeachment of the 45th President of the United States is underway, but has no unified, bipartisan support, no full-throated consensus, and little taste for Jeffersonian vermilion.

The Indictment of George III is the business end of the Declaration of Independence—something a debate team would call “the case.” In the Indictment, Jefferson and other founding fathers listed 27 distinct grievances against King George III and his governmental enforcers: 27 bad deeds done to the American people; 27 egregious acts of executive overreach; 27 abuses of power so outrageous that they moved the colonists to rise up against Great Britain and end the Crown’s unjust, capricious, pernicious misrule. The charges in the Indictment of George III were the evidence that made the case to reject and eject harmful leadership. They were the “Facts,” which were “submitted to a candid world” to mobilize the American people for a fight against “an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

The Indictment of George III is the business end of the Declaration of Independence—something a debate team would call “the case.”

Each term, to help my students feel the weight and resonance of the Indictment in the present day, I divide them into groups, give each group a subset of the charges until all are covered, and ask them to name any parallels they see between the abuses conducted against the American people by President Trump, his administration, and his Congressional and cabinet enforcers, and the charges that this country’s founders levied against George III, his administration, and his enforcers, to justify the Revolutionary War. I ask them to be creative but fair in drawing these comparisons, and to name parallels that can be supported with links to current news.