Our Declaration of Independence was approved by Congress on July 4, 1776, a date that is still celebrated each and every July 4, with fireworks, parades, and family gatherings. Although many people call the war between those that had declared their independence from Great Britain, the revolutionary war, the words revolution are not found in our Declaration of Independence, mainly because those that debated and signed this document did not believe that that their purpose was to declare a revolution against Great Britain but instead that their purpose was to present to the world the candid facts as to why they had a right to dissolve the political bands that connected them with Great Britain.
While some people may consider that the words revolution and independence, and the denial that we fought a revolutionary war, some sort of semantic dance, it fundamentally is not. There are many people that rebel against their government for all sorts of reasons, legitimate or not, carefully constructed and debated or not, but far fewer, that put pen to paper, to declare the reasons why they must declare and have the right to their independence from the tyranny that presently oppresses them.
In the case of America, the Declaration of Independence is the seminal document that is the very essence of what our Founding Fathers risked their lives, their fortunes, and their scared honor towards. Their appeal was made to not only other men and other nations, but more importantly was also made to the Supreme Judge of the world, signifying that their underlying belief was that the rights of mankind was not bestowed upon them by the so-called Divine rights of Kings, but instead that each of us are gifted by our Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that to secure these very rights, governments are instituted amongst men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, and when the form of that government is inimical to these unalienable rights, it is the right, it is their duty, to throw off the chains of that oppressive government and its agencies.
The petition made by our Declaration of Independence, was a well reasoned and carefully constructed argument that justified Americans from further remaining under the oppression and control of the British State, and that the illegitimacy of the present rule was entirely to the disgrace of Great Britain, for a litany of abuses and usurpations to which the British government had enacted against the people, without their consent, as if the people were mere pawns to the British crown.
The Declaration made clear that the King was unfit to be our ruler, and that any ruler that becomes destructive of our life, liberty, and happiness had no place as our ruler and was by definition, a tyrant, and therefore illegitimate in his power. Further, in order to secure our natural and unalienable rights, America had to fight Great Britain, in a war of Independence, to which our justifications were clearly delineated, clearly understood by the people, and clearly declared to the world.
This war was not a revolution it was instead, a war to return to the people fair access to the public good, as well as to their natural state of free association and freedom, to which these natural rights had been wrongly taken from them. It was, therefore, a war of independence, lawful in its purpose, against the lawlessness of those that believed that they were above the law.