Paul M. Craig: Petition power

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Published: 07-02-2025 11:48 AM

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects our right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” All through the colonial period, long before our Constitution with its Bill of Rights was written, British North American colonists had held that this ancient English right of petition applied equally to them as loyal subjects of the British Empire.

Thus they could — and indeed, should — petition king and Parliament to correct policies that the American colonists insisted violated their British constitutional rights of liberty and freedom.

The Declaration of Independence (written 15 years before the First Amendment was adopted) was the last in a long line of grievances the colonists had made against the king with a huge, even revolutionary, difference.

This Declaration was no ordinary petition for redress. Quite the contrary, it presented a “long train of abuses and usurpations” that would prove to a “candid world” the American necessity for proclaiming independence as a united political entity.

The 27 grievances, some carried over from earlier unanswered petitions, form the largest, most critical and most discussed part of the Declaration of Independence. Since the end of the Seven Years War (1763) London began changing policy throughout the Empire which included making laws for the Americans who had no voice at Parliament in their making. This basic grievance informed all the others.

So, as British policy grew increasingly tyrannical, and their own petitions increasingly ineffective, the 13 “United Colonies” in Congress assembled and asserted their right and duty to ““assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them ... that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation” from Great Britain.

Independence had already been declared on July 2nd. But as of July 4th foreign nations, especially France, now had all the evidence they needed to determine whether they could legally and logically consider entering into treaties with the emerging American state.

Paul M. Craig

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