Beschreibung:

A Declaration By the Representatives of the United Colonies of North-America, Now Met in General Congress at Philadelphia, Seting [sic] forth the Causes and Necessity of their taking up Arms.
Philadelphia: William and Thomas Bradford, 1775. 13 pp., 8vo (215 x 130 mm). Lacking the half-title. Signed in print by John Hancock and Charles Thomson Stitched self-wrappers, uncut. Housed in a cloth chemise and morocco-backed slipcase. Condition: circular stamp excised from the terminal leaf, upper and lower corners of the title torn (just touching one letter of the title), minor foxing and soiling. first pamphlet printing of the declaration of the causes and necessity of taking up arms -- the precursor to the declaration of independence. Following the establishment of the Continental Army, the Second Continental Congress realized the need for a formal explanation of their actions. After an initial draft was rejected (the text of which is lost), Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson were appointed on June 26 to prepare a new version. Jefferson authored the first draft, but it was, he recalled, “too strong for Mr. Dickinson. He still retained the hope of reconciliation with the mother country, and was unwilling it should be lessened by offensive statements. He was so honest a man, and so able a one, that he was greatly indulged even by those who could not feel his scruples. We therefore requested him to take the paper, and put it into a form he could approve. He did so, preparing an entire new statement, and preserving of the former only the last four paragraphs and the half of the preceding one. We approved and reported it to Congress" (Jefferson, Autobiography, in Writings (Ford) I:16). Much like the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of 1775 reviews the colonists’s grievances and their repeated attempts to petition the Crown. At the heart of the document is a description of Lexington & Concord and atrocities committed by General Gage. The combined result, the Declaration reasons, has led to the bearing of arms: “ Our cause is just. Our union is perfect. Our internal resources are great, and, if necessary, foreign assistance is undoubtedly attainable … we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare, that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers, which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverence, employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live slaves… ” The pen of Dickinson is evident, however, in the paragraph following these bold statements, as the Declaration assures the Crown that the Colonists do not intend on declaring independence: “ Lest this declaration should disquiet the minds of our friends and fellow-subjects in any part of the empire, we assure them that we mean not to dissolve that union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely wish to see restored. — Necessity has not yet driven us into that desperate measure, or induced us to excite any other nation to war against them …” The text of the Declaration was first issued as a broadside newspaper extra to the Pennsylvania Gazette; this pamphlet printing followed. This copy of the Declaration is the only one to appear at auction in the last quarter century. Evans 14544; Sabin 15522; Streeter Sale 763.