ABSTRACT
Americans think of the Declaration of Independence as the founding statement of their nation. It is the first entry in countless popular collections of documents relating to the constitutional history of the United States. To its authors, though, it must have seemed more like the end of a long process — the final term in a prolonged series of anxious arguments punctuated by fragmentary propositions, uneasy compromises and partial solutions. America decided on independence on 2 July 1776, when a majority of the delegates to the second Continental Congress carried the motion of Richard Henry Lee, of Virginia, ‘That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States’. In constitutional confrontations both declarations and petitions commonly affirmed rights and grievances. One of the rights declared in the English Bill of Rights was that of petition.
