right ought to be, free and independent States.” On June 10, a committee was appointed to prepare an independence proclamation. The actual writing was assigned to Thomas Jefferson. On July 4, the Declaration was agreed to and sent to the legislatures of the thirteen States for signatures and ratification.

The Declaration consists of three parts: first, a profound and eloquent statement of political philosophy—the philosophy of democracy and of freedom; second, a statement of specific grievances designed to prove that George III had subverted American freedoms; and third, a solemn statement of Independence and pledge of support for that policy.

This semester I have learned the class of English stylistic analysis, so I will analysis this passage from these parts by stylistic analysis. The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most masterfully written state paper of Western civilization. As Moses Coit Tyler noted almost a century ago, no assessment of it can be complete without taking into account its extraordinary merits as a work of political prose style. Although many scholars have recognized those merits, there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration.

(1) This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable. By approaching the Declaration in this way, we can shed light both on its literary qualities and on its rhetorical power as a work designed to