Americans seem to have a fascination with this word. We have fought to maintain ours in two World Wars, battled to preserve it for other nations in the Vietnam and Korean Conflicts and sought to provide it to the people of Iraq in both the Gulf Wars. However, our ability to do all this would not have been possible without the Declaration of Independence, in which America first asserted that it was an independent and free nation. The Declaration consisted of three integral parts, each of which was crucial to the fate of the fledgling colonies. The first section sets forth the Natural laws and rights afforded to every man on this Earth, the second portion lists the many ways that the British monarchy has violated the unalienable rights of Americans, and finally the signatures of the framers themselves. In writing their name on the Declaration, these men knowingly signed their own death sentences, as treason was an offense punishable by execution. Even knowing that I was endangering my own life, I would have been willing to sign the Declaration of Independence, in order to achieve true freedom from tyranny.
The political system that the colonists lived under was marred by mismanagement and oppression. King George violated the Natural Laws by not deriving his power from the consent of the governed, but rather from his own military superiority. King George also forbid his governors, who act on his behalf in colonial legislatures, to pass laws that might ensure the natural rights of the colonists. In order to compel the colonial politicians into submission, King George called meeting at inappropriate locations that placed undo stress on the colonists, who were forced to travel long distances to simply voice their grievances in a democratic manner. At the slightest notion of resistance to his iron-fisted rule, King George dissolved the legislative bodies of the colonies, lest the processes of representative democracy take root.
