INDEPENDENCE HALL

We went to Philadelphia for the weekend in order to watch Rebecca and Papap complete in very respectable time the Broad Street run. Gradulations. Luca apparently also ran in the race, won, but was "so fast nobody saw [him]." We stayed at a hotal which is "a room with a little refrigerator, but not your regular home." Rebecca was living large in the presedential suite at the Sheraton. After a very impressive parallel parking job, we made it there to visit. It had a nice view of city hall, and Brian filled us in on the (recently broken) curse of 'Billy' Penn. As part of our trip we went to the old Pennsylvania Statehouse (Independence Hall). It was really quite inspiring to imagine the group of visionaries that assembled, often with vows of secrecy, to draft the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The Declaration was heavily influenced by the writing of Locke, Hume and Rousseau and their theory of social contract. Their basic idea is that people are born free with an innate right of life and liberty. This was treasonous at the time because it was common belief that rights were given to royalty who then graciously allowed some to trickle down to their subjects. (George Mason through years of friendly debate encouraged Jefferson to append the right to happiness. Jefferson felt that an important distinction was that we were only entitled to pursue happiness, so that is the way he phrased it.) The social contract is that we submit some of our natural rights to the general will in order to preserve the rights of the general body of people. This focus on "the people" as the source and beneficiary of political power in good government comes from Rouseau and shows up again in the preamble to the Constitiution. They may have been thinking of the following quote when they decided to have their new Declaration read from the steps of the Pennsylvania Statehouse on July 8,1776:

This does not mean that the commands of the rulers cannot pass for general wills, so long as the Sovereign (i.e. the people), being free to oppose them, offers no opposition. In such a case, universal silence is taken to imply the consent of the people. - J.J. Rousseau

The "Pennsylvania Statehouse" now called Independence Hall was designed and built by Edmund Woolley (Judging by the last name, probably a distant relative). Here is part of what was read from the steps. Imagine the boldness of reading this in a public square:

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles & organising it’s powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness.

This was part of an original draft written before it was watered down and secularized. For example: "sacred & undeniable" became "self-evident". The "& independent" was dropped from "All men are created equal & independent". It seems like a minor change, but being born independent of others and joining society by choice is an important ascpect of the social contract. They made these and hundreds of other changes in compromise to please the signors (or to make the cadence of the writing witty enough for B.Franklin). For example, in order to get representatives from South Carolina and Georgia to sign, they also had to take out some very eloquent sections that opposed slavery.