What structure did the Declaration of Independence create?

Answer 1

The Declaration of Independence created no government structures. This might be a bit unclear to some because the document was debated, voted on, passed, signed, and presented to King George by the First Continental Congress. Our present-day Congress is a government structure, but it wasn't in 1776. Back then, it was just the word they chose to describe their coming together from all over the 13 colonies for discussion. The word means simply, "meeting" - it comes from the same root as ingress, egress, and progress.

The sole function of the Declaration of Independence was to explain to King George and the world why We, the People of the United States, are no longer subject to your British royal proclamations and Acts of Parliament as of this moment. We knew very well that King George would not accept such a challenge to his authority, which he believed came from God. The Declaration of Independence was, for all practical purposes, a declaration of war.

The First Continental Congress then started talking about actually creating the framework of government structure when they met later that month, July 1776. They proposed, debated, rejected, and compromised on ideas for making this new government workable for the next five years while also trying to coordinate the war efforts of 13 Independent States (which meant, independent from England but also, independent from each other).

They finally finished this plan in 1781 and started taking on the jobs it assigned to Congress. The plan was called the Articles of Confederation (which is why we refer to the federal government and not the nationalgovernment or some other word).

It didn't work very well.

The Second Continental Congress (a number of whom had also served in the first one) took another seven years of debate and brainstorming and study before it hammered out the Constitution and achieved the ratification of nine States - the minimum number needed to make it official. Another two years passed before the last of the other four States voted to ratify it. (The chief problem for them had been the absence of an explicit Bill of Rights.)

So what's the bottom line? Why all this extra information?

The first acts of what roughly a third of the American colonists considered tyranny occurred after the end of the French and Indian War in 1763. The last State recognized the authority of a federal government in 1790. That's almost 30 years of identifying what a government of the People, by the People, and for the People should and should not, must and must not be able to do... and creating it.