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Gilder Lehrman Document Number: GLC 962
Title: A Summary View of the Rights of British America
Author: Thomas Jefferson
Year: 1774
Type of document: essay
Quotation: "Kings are servants, not the proprietors of the people"
Annotation:
Two years before the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), then 31, distributed an essay to the delegates at the first Continental Congress in which he outlined grievances against the British government. At the time, this statement was considered too radical by most colonial leaders. In this document, Jefferson appeals not only to an English tradition of political liberty, but also to the idea of certain natural and inalienable rights--a concept that he would develop two years later in the Declaration of Independence.
Full Text:
These are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate: Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art. To give praise which is not due might be well venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature. They know, and will therefore say, that kings are servants, not the proprietors of the people. Open your breast, sire, to liberal and expanded thought.
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