CHAPTER VI:

The Panorama of the Declaration

The final chapter of Protocols of Liberty studies the Declaration of 1776 as the crowning achievement of the American Whig network. The chapter describes the sources of its efficacy by considering the three distinct ways it acted. (1) Through the Declaration Congress used boldly free speech to insult George III and to declare their separation from Britain. (2) Congress attuned the Revolution's new genre of political writing to optimize its effect, by its canny timing, its corporate method of composition, and its shape-shifting plasticity (as print and oral and manuscript). Finally, (3) the rhetorical art of the Declaration encoded risky political acts so that they achieved the calming comprehensiveness, continuity, and distant view of a verbal panorama. In this way the Whig network that the Declaration spoke for and addressed could experience the acts of Congress as momentous, as complete, and thus as part of a necessary “course of human events.”