Michael Austin
Robert Del Corso
Interpreting European Past
October 29, 2014
“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws and Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind required that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Jefferson is confirming that the idea of independence is grounded in natural law and the God who gave us that law. “Nature’s God” was a term used often by eighteenth-century deists. These deists believed that God created the world, instilled it with natural laws of science, morality, and politics, and did not interfere with it any further. Jefferson’s choice of the phrase “Nature’s God” is so vague that it would have been accepted by nearly all of the colonists. Deists, freethinkers, and Enlightenment liberals, would have no problem affirming the idea that natural rights come from God.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” the belief that the unalienable rights of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” came from God. This is the same as Jefferson’s use of the phrase “Nature’s God” in the first paragraph, Franklin never elaborates any further on the details of this “Creator.”