Michael Hattem

And so a lot of these grievances are focused on specific things that had happened in the recent past.

But the interesting thing about them is they are not specific.

So they don't name the Stamp Act.

They don't name the Townsend Acts.

They don't name the coercive acts and the specific bills that were part of that group of legislation.

Instead, it's very...

it's unspecific and in some cases it's a little bit ambiguous you know and you know i think that that is that is of course intentional but it also becomes a point of criticism for the declarations and and the credit the critics of the declaration end of independence especially in england you know to say the reason that these grievances are so ambiguous is because they're they're essentially made up or or they're you know they're nonsense and that's why they're

That's why they're so vague.

But that's what the grievances are doing.

The grievances are the case.

If you think of this as, you know, a sort of legal case, and most of these delegates are lawyers, right, to the Continental Congress, you know, the preamble is the lofty opening statement, right?

And then the grievances is the laying out of the evidence.

Gotcha.

In some sense, that's Jefferson's great achievement, is the way that he distills some of these core ideas of the Enlightenment, especially regarding government, into a few sentences that sums up Enlightenment thought about the nature and the purpose of government.

The thing about the preamble, and when we say the preamble, we're talking about the part that starts with we hold these truths, right?

There is a sort of introductory section before that, the famous when in the course of human events, you know, it becomes necessary to dissolve the political bands.

And in that introduction, they say, you know, that part of the purpose of the Declaration is

is to declare the causes that impel them to this separation to a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.

So it's not just Americans.

It's everybody.