How History Unfolds on Paper: Important Americana from the Eric C. Caren Collection, Part X

The Pennsylvania Magazine: Or, American Monthly Museum. For July 1775
Philadelphia: Printed by R(obert). Aitken, 1775. 12mo. (v), 296-338 pp. Edited by Thomas Paine. Disbound; sheets toned; scattered spotting and soiling; 2-inch closed tear in bottom edge Tt2.

The Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking up Arms, a resolution adopted by the Second Continental Congress, was a major prelude to the Declaration of Independence. This issue also includes two pieces by Paine, as well as a report on the casualties at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

On June 23, 1775, shortly after the opening salvos of the American Revolution at the Battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, the Second Continental Congress formed a committee charged with drafting a declaration on the causes and necessities of taking up arms against the English Crown. It was comprised of five men: John Rutledge, William Livingston, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Thomas Johnson. After some debate, and the creation of a now lost draft by Rutledge which was deemed inadequate, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia were added to help complete the text. Jefferson quickly produced a new draft, which was deemed by some committee members to be too provocative, which Dickinson then revised. The final work, which proved to be more severe than Jefferson's original, was approved by Congress two weeks later, on July 6. It stands as one of the first attempts by Congress to justify to the American people, and to the world, the necessity for armed resistance, and represents the beginning of a trajectory that would ultimately lead to independence the following year.

The document enumerates numerous grievances and provocations at Parliament, including the losses of personal and property rights, including the suspension of trial by jury, the quartering of soldiers, the use of vice admiralty courts, taxation without representation, and the passage of the hated Coercive Acts and Declaratory Act, among others, that led to the taking up of arms. It then exhorts its constituents by asserting the justice of their cause, before closing with a prayer for reconciliation to avoid a civil war. "If it was possible for men who exercise their reason to believe, that the Divine Author of our existence intended a part of the human race to hold an absolute property in, and an unbounded power over others...the inhabitants of these Colonies might at least require from the Parliament of Great-Britain some evidence, that this dreadful authority over them has been granted to that body....Our cause is just. Our union is perfect. Our internal resources are great, and, if necessary, foreign assistance is undoubtedly attainable...With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare, that...the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance, employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die Freemen, rather than live Slaves."