Within six months after Americans first heard Paine's clarion call for separation from the British Empire, the entire political landscape of the colonies transformed dramatically. In the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, the representatives of the colonies assembled in the Continental Congress announced the formal severance of their connection with Britain. It was an event many American Whigs still considered unlikely when Jefferson made his appeal for radical imperial reform in 1774 and almost unthinkable when Otis and Dickinson protested parliamentary duties and taxes in the 1760s. However, the rhetoric and logic of the Declaration of Independence, saturated as it was with radical Whig principles of popular sovereignty, essentially represented an extension of arguments drawn from the radical Whig philosophy that had supplied the theoretical foundations of the American Whig position from the very beginning of the imperial crisis with Britain.

The Declaration of Independence was in many respects a classic expression of radical Whig philosophy. In contrast to the conservative formulation of the English Declaration of Rights of 1689, which accused James II of violating the “knowne lawes and statutes” and the “antient rights and liberties” of the English nation, the American Declaration of 1776 reached conclusions and pronounced principles of rights and government that had proven to be politically unpopular and theoretically unpersuasive to their English Whig forbears. It clearly identified an unexhaustive list of “certain unalienable rights” and boldly asserted a universal right of popular revolution.