Pod Insights Civics 101 The Grievances in the Declaration (part 1) About this episode "He" has done bad things. Twenty seven of them. And these things were so bad that the colonists used them to demonstrate that they had no choice but to become an independent nation. King George III was, in their eyes, a despot. So what did he do?
Today we talk about grievances 1-12 in the Declaration of Independence. We will cover the rest, as well as modern-day parallels, in a few weeks. Our guest is Craig Gallagher, professor at Colby-Sawyer College.
To hear about the entire Declaration of Independence, please listen to our episode on it here.
CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more!
To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro.
Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it!
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Speaker 00 He is affected, he's combined, he's abdicated, he's pondered, he's constrained, he's excited, he's incited, he's waged cruel war.
0:14 Speaker 01 If you have grievances, and I'm sure you have, our present system must provide a gentler means of redressing them, sort of revolution?
0:23 Speaker 02 And when we dared stand up like men, they have stopped our trade, seized our ships, blockaded our ports, burned our towns, and spilled our blood.
0:34 Nick Capodice? You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.
0:37 Hannah McCarthy? I'm Hannah McCarthy.
0:38 Nick Capodice? And today, we're throwing a rider onto our foundational document series. We are deep diving into a chunk of the Declaration of Independence: the grievances.
0:48 Hannah McCarthy? The airing of the grievances? Nick, it's not December 23rd, and we don't have an unadorned aluminum pole.
0:55 Speaker 01 The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people.
1:06 Hannah McCarthy? I warmly encourage our listeners to check out our entire episode on the Declaration, link in the show notes, but if I could summarize the greatest breakup letter ever written. The Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 2nd, 1776, and printed two days later. It's got four parts: a preamble.
1:27 Nick Capodice? This is the whole win in the course of human events part.
1:30 Hannah McCarthy? Then, a statement on human rights.
1:32 Nick Capodice? We hold these truths to be self-evident, etc.
1:35 Hannah McCarthy? Then, we get a long list of grievances.
1:39 Nick Capodice? Yeah, 27 to be exact. It is the bulk of the Declaration, and that's what we're talking about today.
1:43 Hannah McCarthy? And finally, an action. Because of all of the things we've talked about so far, we are dissolving our allegiance to the British Crown.
1:53 Nick Capodice? Well done.
1:53 Hannah McCarthy? Thank you.
1:55 Nick Capodice? So, I realized if we did all 27 of these in one hunk, it'd be a very long show. So today's gonna be the first half, and then in a couple weeks, we're gonna do the second half. But we will also address how these grievances can be viewed in light of the Trump administration.
2:14 Hannah McCarthy? So Nick, these grievances, these indictments, they're aimed right at King George III, aren't they? Not England, per se, or even Parliament, but the King.
2:26 Speaker 05 I'll just say briefly that it's worth noting, the antagonism towards George III is actually pretty new at this point.
2:32 Nick Capodice? This is Craig Gallagher, friend of mine and professor of history at Colby Sawyer College.
2:38 Speaker 05 It's really something that emerges in the last six months before the Declaration, thanks to the success of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, where he specifically linked independence to the abuses of the King and the need for a republic. Prior to this, there was actually a lot of support for George III as this kind of block against Parliament. And so in this last six months, you start to see the shift towards very antagonistic language towards the King. And so this is where Jefferson laid out, as much as he could, what he thought the specific grievances against the King were, that the colonists could use to justify declaring independence.
3:12 Nick Capodice? Again, there's 27 total, so I'm going to move quickly. But if you're someone like me, who didn't know what the specifics were of the charges against the King, after hearing these episodes, you're going to go to bed knowing them all. So you ready?
3:24 Hannah McCarthy? Let's go.
3:27 Nick Capodice? Oh, wait, wait, wait, hold on. My favorite part, teeing up the grievances, Jefferson writes, quote, "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states." And here's my favorite part.
3:47 Speaker 06 To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
3:52 Hannah McCarthy? All right, give me number one.
3:54 Speaker 05 So the first listed indictment is, "He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good." So essentially what they're complaining about here is that the royal assent, which is essentially the last stage of a legislative bill being approved, roughly equivalent today to the President's signature, the President has to sign the bill after both houses pass it, is being denied.
4:17 Hannah McCarthy? So it's like a veto.
4:19 Nick Capodice? Yeah, but without like the formal statement, "I am vetoing this bill." So the King could opt to just not give his royal assent, and the bill dies in King Mitty.
4:30 Hannah McCarthy? King Mitty?
4:30 Nick Capodice? King Mitty.
4:31 Hannah McCarthy? You're proud of that one?
4:32 Nick Capodice? I am not.
4:33 Speaker 05 It's important to note here, and I'll talk a little bit about this with some of the other examples, that in 18th century, legal and sort of enlightened thinking, the king having the power essentially to veto or delay or suspend laws is a despotic power. There had been a couple of instances where kings still did it, and actually George III was known to abuse this ability. But the understanding was Parliament passes a bill out of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the king will give it assent. And so the fact that he was holding up colonial bills, which don't have the same protection, was a major concern of the colonists because they look at this and they go, we're dealing with a despotic monarch here who is using effectively a veto power to prevent things that were passing out of our elected legislatures.
5:15 Hannah McCarthy? Did Parliament have an override like Congress does with a veto?
5:18 Nick Capodice? Nope.
5:19 Hannah McCarthy? All right.
5:20 Nick Capodice? Okay, number two. He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained, and when so suspended, he is utterly neglected to attend to them.
5:34 Hannah McCarthy? Assent again, but this time with governors.
5:37 Nick Capodice? Right, so at this point, many of the governors of the 13 colonies were not elected by the people. They were appointed by the king. And this indictment, number two, is that the king was stopping those governors from passing laws.
5:50 Speaker 05 The grievance here is worded as the immediate and pressing importance of these laws. The governor could hypothetically confirm this because they're royally appointed, but the governors are being forbidden from doing so in order to send it across the ocean to the king, which ends up being a kind of virtual suspension because it takes months when it could be handled locally. And as a result, there's this delay in pressing matters not being resolved relative to the actual severity of the issue.
6:23 Hannah McCarthy? Does Craig have an example of the kinds of things that were being held up?
6:27 Speaker 05 An example might be the sale of land bills. So like a lot of the founders are very interested in speculating on future land out in the hinterland. And they may pass a law saying, we're going to regulate the Ohio country this way, right? And as far as the colonists are concerned, that's a local issue, right? Like, the king doesn't actually care about this because we are talking about our own material interests. But the process is so laborious, they still have to get that bill royal assent in London. And sometimes what would happen is the colonies would pass a law, the governor would sign it, and they would act like it was fine. And then later, the monarchy would come in and go, wait a minute, you know, we don't want this. And that had been increasingly happening in the 18th century. So this is both a reference to something happening immediately and also a longer-term
7:12 Speaker 05 trend away from local legislatures having the power to handle local issues without sort of royal oversight.
7:19 Nick Capodice? Okay, ready for three?
7:20 Hannah McCarthy? Yeah.
7:22 Speaker 05 "He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only."
7:34 Hannah McCarthy? Is this the first time they call him a tyrant? Albeit kind of indirectly?
7:39 Nick Capodice? Yeah, it is. Tyranny has been mentioned in like the teeing up part, but this is our first tyrant.
7:46 Speaker 07 Why do you refer to King George as a tyrant? Because he is a tyrant. I remind you, Mr. Jefferson, that this tyrant is still your king. When a king becomes a tyrant, he thereby breaks the contract binding his subjects to him.
8:03 Nick Capodice? By the way, all these clips you are hearing in this episode are from the same movie, the only movie I could recite to you word for word, wearing a blindfold, 1776.
8:13 Hannah McCarthy? For Nick, the finest, if to our knowledge, the only, musical about the framers singing and dancing their way toward the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
8:22 Nick Capodice? Highest recommendation from me. All right, Hannah, grieve on.
8:26 Speaker 05 So this is a really big-picture one. In the aftermath of the Seven Years' War that ended in 1763, and the British now acquiring huge tracts of land in what had previously been Quebec, and also in places like Florida, it was very much royal policy to not allow those new colonies to develop the same way the 13 colonies had developed, specifically to not allow them to develop their own tradition of local self-government. And so historians have shown over the last few years that there's this push in the 1760s to deny Quebec, for example, the right to our legislature. And that there would be an empowered royal governor who would have a significant amount of control over the events of the colony without being subject to, for example, a
9:11 Speaker 05 salary paid out of local legislative taxes. Instead, he would get his salary from London directly. And also, any sense that local towns or provinces within these larger colonies had a right to self-determination over their own issues. Essentially, what the Crown had tried to do in these places was centralize everything back to London. So Quebec doesn't get a legislature when it's founded as a province, right? From the point of view of the Americans, this is the act of a despot, right? This is a decision aimed squarely at undermining the rights of true Englishmen to represent themselves.
9:50 Hannah McCarthy? Basically, new places should have their own legislature and not just be run by a guy 3,000 miles away.
9:57 Nick Capodice? Yeah. Okay, number four.
9:59 Speaker 05 He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
10:09 Nick Capodice? This one is fun, Hannah, and it's tied to your neck of the woods. Stuff was getting heated in Massachusetts, and the people in Boston were getting all riled up in the streets. So the royal governor made the legislature meet in Salem instead.
10:23 Hannah McCarthy? Famously never heated up.
10:25 Speaker 05 So the thinking here is, we can remove ourselves from the center of government in order to avoid having to deal with loud crowds yelling at us for our decisions, which in theory would free up the man of the representatives in the legislature to vote according to their conscience, rather than fear of the mob.
10:44 Hannah McCarthy? If you don't want to hear the complaints of the mob, maybe you're in the wrong line of business.
10:49 Nick Capodice? Yeah, and this is an old trick. During the French Revolution, the parliament was forced to meet in Versailles instead of Paris. And Charles I in England had Parliament go to Oxford instead of London. Run away from the people! Anyways, number five.
11:04 Speaker 05 He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly for opposing with manly firmness of his invasions on the rights of the people.
11:11 Hannah McCarthy? Manly firmness?
11:12 Nick Capodice? Yeah, Jefferson's really working the pen there.
11:14 Hannah McCarthy? So, the king dissolved houses as in ended Congress?
11:20 Nick Capodice? Yep. So unlike in the United States today, in the colonies, we didn't have a firm congressional calendar.
11:28 Speaker 05 Under the British system, it was essentially at the pleasure of, in Britain, the monarch and in the colonies, the royal governor. They could have an election on the first day, not like what they hear, and dissolve it. The problem would be then that they would be subject to a new election. And sometimes governors would use this tactic to return a chamber that was more suitable to their interests.
11:50 Hannah McCarthy? So if they didn't like how an election turned out, they could just dissolve it and hold another one until things turned out a little more to their liking.
12:01 Nick Capodice? Exactly. But most of the time, the next Congress was even worse for them. So here's what happened. Again, in merry old Massachusetts.
12:09 Speaker 01 And what is this independence of yours except the private grievance of Massachusetts? Why is it always Boston that breaks the king's peace?
12:18 Nick Capodice? So mass folk were boycotting England by not buying stuff from them, though they were getting it from smugglers instead. Boy, howdy, were they getting it from smugglers. And the royal governor said, hey, if you guys bring up this boycott at all, I'm going to dissolve this Congress immediately.
12:35 Hannah McCarthy? Taking my ball and going home.
12:37 Nick Capodice? Boston people called the governor's bluff. The governor said, that's it. And he dissolved the house. And this happened a lot.
12:43 Speaker 05 And so this idea that you do this, that you dissolve chambers rather than hear them out or let them speak freely, again, has this kind of reputation of a despotic act. It's something that you do when you're trying to crush political discussion.
12:55 Nick Capodice? All right, we gotta take a break. More airing of the grievances in a little bit.
13:01 Hannah McCarthy? But before that break, just a reminder that if you want more Civics 101, there is so much more at our website, civics101podcast.org. Like a lot more.
13:09 Nick Capodice? Hundreds of things.
13:18 Nick Capodice? Haven't you out there ever Googled your own name? Like, actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing. There are companies called data brokers whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over, so your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once, and they keep working in the background.
14:03 Nick Capodice? You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.
14:23 Nick Capodice? We're back. You're listening to Civics 101. We are going through the grievances in the Declaration of Independence. Where were we, Hannah?
14:31 Hannah McCarthy? Six, I believe.
14:32 Nick Capodice? Six it is.
14:34 Speaker 05 He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the legislative powers incapable of annihilation have returned to the people at large for their exercise. The state remaining in the meantime exposed to all dangers of invasion from without and convulsions within.
14:52 Hannah McCarthy? That one is kind of tough to parse.
14:54 Nick Capodice? Yeah, I felt the same way. But really, it's just a continuation of the last one? The dissolving of legislative bodies willy-nilly? But then the next step is taking their sweet time to create another legislature.
15:08 Hannah McCarthy? What was meant by the dangers of invasion part?
15:12 Speaker 05 There's some debate about what they're alluding to. I tend to think that invasions from without refers to native peoples, right? Legislatures are often the institutions that muster militia, muster defenses of their colonies. And so by not having one in session, you run the risk of an attack by a native people. And you're in a situation where you can't respond immediately to defend yourselves. Convulsions within almost certainly mean slave rebellions, right? An uprising internally by enslaved peoples against their enslavement, which happens frequently, right? Hannah, have you ever heard of the Dunmore Proclamation?
15:48 Hannah McCarthy? I have. This was when the governor of Virginia said any enslaved person could enlist in the British Army, and they would be freed from their bondage.
15:57 Speaker 05 Right. A huge number do. Why wouldn't you, right? You're being offered the right to go fight for your freedom under British auspices. And so this idea that the legislature not being in session endangers us? Because we don't have the capacity to respond to these external and internal threats.
16:15 Speaker 05 Seven.
16:17 Speaker 05 He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states. For that purpose, obstructing the laws of naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of land. This one is one that I have listed as a little exaggerated. So unlike most of the other empires in this period, the British were actually really open to naturalization. So the position of the British government was, from 1740 onwards, if you were a foreign Protestant, so you had to be a Protestant, that is, if you were from France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland, and you traveled to the American colonies and you lived there for seven years, and you mostly didn't leave, you were entitled to be a naturalized subject of the British monarchy.
16:59 Speaker 05 The period between 1770 and 1776 has the highest uptick of immigration into the American colonies of any period in the 18th century, right? So there's just a huge number of people going to the colonies. And so this idea that the king prevented that is a little bit overheated. It's based on a couple of reported parliamentary debates, and Jefferson has taken a little creative license.
17:19 Speaker 07 Just another literary license, then, if you like. I don't like at all, Mr. Jefferson.
17:28 Nick Capodice? All right, moving at a good clip now. Here is indictment number eight.
17:32 Speaker 05 He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
17:38 Hannah McCarthy? I'm guessing this is about appointing judges.
17:40 Nick Capodice? It is. Massachusetts elected their judges, but in 1774, Parliament forced the colony to have judges appointed instead.
17:51 Hannah McCarthy? Appointed at the king's pleasure.
17:52 Nick Capodice? Yeah.
17:53 Hannah McCarthy? How much water did you let Craig have during this?
17:57 Nick Capodice? By this point, we were at two coffees and two waters, but he was a champ.
18:01 Speaker 05 Oh, no, please. That's fun.
18:03 Nick Capodice? You ready for number nine? Pre-revolution number nine.
18:06 Speaker 05 He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices and the amount and payment of their salaries. So here again, it's just doubling down on the independent judiciary problem. In particular, the fact that the king and the government has specifically attempted to make royally appointed judges paid from London rather than by local legislatures. Very briefly, I'll say that office holding in the British Empire traditionally depended on locally raised taxes for salaries, especially for governors. After 1763, you start to see the British government try to claw this back and try to allow for more London-paid salaries, with the idea being that the judges would be loyal to the crown rather than to the colonies.
18:48 Hannah McCarthy? You'd think the colonies wouldn't mind not having to pay a bunch of salaries, but I can see it. You're worried the judges are going to feel beholden to the person who writes their checks.
18:57 Nick Capodice? Ain't that always the way? Here is 10.
19:00 Speaker 05 He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
19:08 Hannah McCarthy? Jefferson is laying it on pretty thick there.
19:11 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah. He's really feeling himself when he gets to this point, I think. This is probably a reference to the number of new officials appointed to collect taxes. So the new taxes imposed on the colonies involved creating new officers.
19:24 Hannah McCarthy? Why would the colonies be so upset about new officers? Are these military officers?
19:29 Nick Capodice? Yeah, I wondered the same thing. They are not military. They are just people who work in the government. So I wanted to know why this really passionate language on this particular grievance, which seems sort of mundane compared to some of the other ones. And Craig said to me that King George was appointing a continuous stream of British employees who added a bunch of red tape to everything. And these were people who had no interest in making things better for the colonies.
19:58 Speaker 05 It's a little bit overheated and sort of a conspiracy theory, but one that Jefferson mentions in not only this document, but in the notes on the state of Virginia. It's sort of a particular fixation of his, that somehow the crown has been adding just levels of bureaucracy to crush us. And for the most part, there's also a little bit of a complaint about the fact that officers who come from the British mainland are only in the colonies to advance their careers. They're not there to actually help or make things more efficient, right? It's a stepping stone. And so this idea that all they do is they come here, harass us, eat our substance, and then leave is sort of implied, right? They're appointees from abroad. They're not local people. They don't care about local issues.
20:41 Nick Capodice? And now the last two for today, Hannah, both tied to a very real, very visceral dread felt by those in the colonies. Having British soldiers everywhere, watching your every move. Here is number 11.
20:57 Speaker 05 He has kept among us in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures. So just to compare here, you know, most colonial legislatures in the 18th century have militias, which are mustered amongst the able-bodied men of the colony, but they do not stand in military readiness at all times. The soldiers are not professional. They're not paid to be soldiers. The British Army, of course, is a professional army, right? The British Army is something that you join, you go live in a barracks, you do all your training, you're maybe called out to do battle, you're maybe called to do exercises, but it's a job, right? The important thing to note here is that historically speaking, standing armies were used as a way to get around the need for a legislature to muster a militia.
21:43 Hannah McCarthy? Ah, okay, so a king would much rather have folks in the colony say, "Hey, we need help. Can you send your redcoats over?" than for them to form their own militia to do whatever they needed.
21:54 Nick Capodice? Precisely. England had just come off of the Seven Years' War, and George did not want independent militias to mess with any relationships or agreements with native communities around them. Now, folks in England were used to having a standing army around due to a Jacobite uprising in the early 1700s that I'm not going to get into, but the colonists were not used to it. And after the Seven Years' War in 1763, England stationed a ton of British soldiers over here. And it was, frankly, unsettling. Like, say, tanks in the streets.
22:29 Speaker 05 And they're seeing the presence of the redcoats in the colonies as potentially a threat and a warning. Kind of a tool of the crown to keep them in line.
22:38 Nick Capodice? And tied to this, our last grievance for today, and one you hear in the movie 1776, when the Declaration draft is being read to Congress.
22:46 Speaker 07 They're reading the Declaration.
22:47 Speaker 02 Good God. How far have they gotten?
22:50 Speaker 07 To render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. Independent of and superior to the-
22:57 Speaker 05 He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. So this is, again, the idea that civilian control or civilian oversight of the military is something that Parliament or a legislature should have, right? If the civilian authority is subordinated to the military authority, then the military can act without civil oversight. And the idea here is that kings use this tactic to undermine legislatures, which are more representative of the people, and it's a sign of a despotic monarch, right? And in the case of the British Army in North America, they did not have to answer to local legislatures in a way that a militia would-
23:38 Hannah McCarthy? Jefferson is saying here, when the king orders a military to oversee your people and enforce the law instead of your locally elected legislature, your legislature, in essence, loses its power.
23:52 Nick Capodice? Yeah. Look, I know the parallels to what's going on in 2025 are coming in the next grievance episode, but as I am speaking these words, Hannah, the National Guard has been deployed in Los Angeles and Washington DC, and President Trump has threatened to send them to Chicago, expressly against the wishes of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. So Governor Pritzker, in response, gave scores of briefings and interviews, saying this action was unconstitutional, and he rallied support around this.
24:25 Speaker 06 And to have people roaming the streets, wearing uniforms, arresting people off the streets, wearing masks and driving their military-like vehicles and tossing people in, I mean, that's incredibly disruptive. Yeah. And if they would just let us know, Chicago Police.
24:44 Nick Capodice? And just this week, citing, quote, "legal headaches," end quote, the Trump administration said that it was moving its focus from Chicago to Memphis, Tennessee.
24:54 Hannah McCarthy? It sounds like Pritzker successfully aired a grievance there, Nick. Anyway, I am looking forward to part two.
25:01 Nick Capodice? Me too, Hannah. So keep us in your feed for the rest of the grievances, including one that did not make it into the final edit of the Declaration, and be careful out there. That's enough grieving, for now at least. This episode was made by me, Nick Capodice, and Hannah McCarthy. Thank you, Hannah. Our staff includes producer Marina Henke and executive producer Rebecca Lavoy, who hears our grievances on a weekly basis. She would even say daily. Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound, Kilo Kaz, and Chris Zabriski. Civics 101 is, and of right ought to be, a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.
25:58 Speaker 08 Did you know that if your spouse goes missing and you don't tell anyone, that's not necessarily a crime? That surprising fact is at the heart of the brand new season of Bear Brook, the critically acclaimed true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. I'm your host, Jason Moon. In this season, Bear Brook investigates another New Hampshire mystery. A Christmas tree farmer with dementia vanishes. His wife never reports him missing. Can he still be found? Don't miss it. Follow Bear Brook wherever you get your podcasts.
Previous Why does the government fund things, and what happens when it stops? Next Can the president legally hide their health status? Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated