![]() Further comparison illustrates more similarities: It is merely the first of many parallels, Lucas says, between the Declaration and the Plakkaat, written to justify the actions of a long-suffering Dutch people to shake off colonial domination and establish a sovereign nation. British state documents, he says, say nothing about the natural rights of citizens to remove a tyrannical leader. ![]() “When you look at the two documents side by side, you cannot avoid noticing that the American Declaration more closely resembles its Dutch predecessor than any other possible model.”īoth documents, for example, begin with a preamble that justifies, in remarkably similar fashion, the right of citizens to revolt against tyrannical authority, Lucas notes. “Of all the models available to Jefferson and the Continental Congress, none provided as precise a template for the Declaration as did the Plakkaat,” says Lucas, an expert on historical rhetoric. Lucas, however, is the first to point to the Plakkaat, one of the earliest statements of the rights of citizens to combat a tyrannical ruler. While very little is known about the Declaration’s true genesis, scholars generally agree that the document was influenced by several British state papers, especially the 1689 Declaration of Rights, which deposed King James II and brought to power William and Mary of Orange. The Library of Congress Web exhibit about the drafting of the documents related to the Declaration of Indpendence. He has concluded that Jefferson and his colleagues in the Continental Congress based the Declaration in part on the Dutch Plakkaat (plah-KAT) van Verlatinge (vur-LAT-ing-uh), issued in 1581 to justify the Netherlands’ revolt against Spanish rule. Stephen Lucas, professor of communication arts, has spent the last 15 years studying the origins of the Declaration, “arguably the most masterful state paper in Western civilization,” he says. But was he the first to write them?Ī UW–Madison expert says that Jefferson may have modeled the Declaration after a 16th-century Dutch document. ![]() When he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson penned words that would live forever in history. ![]()
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