Grievance #2 of the Declaration of Independence
What happens when a government ignores its own laws?
In Grievance 2 of the Declaration of Independence, the colonists call out King George III for refusing to approve important colonial laws and then completely neglecting them. As Dr. Susan Brynne Long explains, this wasn’t just frustrating, it made it nearly impossible for colonial governments to function.
At the core of this grievance is a bigger idea: government exists to serve the people. Influenced by Enlightenment thinking, the colonists believed that when a government stops doing its job, the people have a responsibility to respond.
This wasn’t a one-time complaint either. Thomas Jefferson raised the same issue years earlier, showing just how long this problem had been building and why it became a breaking point in 1776.
This is Part 2 of our 27-part series breaking down every grievance in the Declaration of Independence, leading up to Independence Day.
0:00 I’m Dr. Susan Brin Long. Let’s declare
0:01 independence. He has forbidden his
0:03 governors to pass laws of immediate and
0:05 pressing importance unless suspended in
0:07 their operation till his assent should
0:09 be obtained. And when so suspended, he
0:11 has utterly neglected to attend to them.
0:14 The maintenance of a republican
0:15 government requires the people to not
0:17 only be virtuous, but also to be
0:19 attentive to the government’s
0:20 activities. They need to make sure that
0:22 it’s doing what it needs to do. And what
0:24 the colonists of 1776, informed by the
0:27 enlightenment thought, was that
0:30 governments were there to serve the
0:31 people and to serve the needs of the
0:33 people. And so as a virtuous and a
0:36 vigilant people, when the government
0:38 stops doing what it needs to do, the
0:40 people are obligated to rebel against
0:42 that government. And of course, that is
0:44 exactly what the colonists in 1776
0:46 decided to do. The author of the
0:48 Declaration of Independence is Thomas
0:50 Jefferson, and he also wrote a book
0:52 called A Summary View of the Rights of
0:54 British America in 1774, and he says
0:57 something really similar. He says that
0:59 the king has allowed colonial laws to
1:01 quote, "Lie neglected in England for
1:03 years, neither confirming them by his
1:05 assent, nor annulling them with his
1:08 negative." So we see here in the
1:10 repetition of this grievance across two
1:12 different writings of Thomas Jefferson,
1:14 which then were amended through the
1:16 Committee of Five in 1776 with the
1:19 drafting of the Declaration, that this
1:21 issue of the king not overseeing the
1:24 colonial laws and not giving his consent
1:27 or his negative to the colonial laws,
1:30 made it very difficult for government to
1:32 work in colonial America. And this
1:33 becomes such a problem that it does lay
1:36 the groundwork for the Declaration of
1:38 Independence and the separation of
1:39 America from Great Britain.
1:41 >> [clears throat]
