These central passages of the Declaration’s bill of indictment are conveniently grouped in three divisions. The first is concerned with constitutional violations and abuses of constitutional powers by the king. Here, twelve different complaints are lodged, accusing the king of threatening the public good by the use of his veto, dissolving colonial assemblies, obstructing justice, keeping standing armies among them in peacetime, and the like. The thirteenth grievance introduces the second division, the “Acts of pretended legislation” that the king has passed by “combin[ing] with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws.” Referred to here are nine acts of Parliament, described not by name but by their effects—imposing taxes without consent, suspending trial by jury, abolishing colonial charters, and so forth. Finally, there are five statements introduced by an implicit reference to the King’s Proclamation of Rebellion of August 23, 1775, under which “He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.” Here, his acts of war are summarized and denounced.
From the point of view of the theoretical paragraphs with their “self-evident truths,” these many statements in the middle of the Declaration are the “facts” which prove that the king has in mind a despotism over America and that the colonists had better act now. As a reading of the middle section, this is sound, but not sufficient. To be sure, if revolution has to be made for a reason, then there has to be a way of proving that the king is becoming tyrannical; this is precisely what the various facts are meant to show. But unlike the first principles of politics, the tyranny in these rather general facts—which never name names or dates or places—is not immediately self-evident. The outrage comes from a hidden premise: the English constitutional tradition, or at least the common law rights and liberties of that tradition, which the Americans claim as their rightful heritage.
Here is the source of the principle of no taxation without representation, the independence of the judiciary, trial by jury, the priority of civil to military authority, and much else. That scholars today no longer tend to read these parts of the Declaration is some measure of how far we have lost touch with that tradition, but that does not mean the complaints were not taken seriously by our founding generation. To speak only of the federal level, nearly every grievance detailed in the Declaration is addressed and prevented by a specific provision of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The bill of grievances, in other words, adds gravity and substance to the abstract principles formulated in the “self-evident truths,” and thus guards against arbitrary recourse to rebellion.