“Somebody who tries to tell you that the Declaration of Independence was written by a bunch of old white guys 250 years ago doesn’t matter anymore, doesn’t know anything about history. They don’t even know what it says because anybody that knows what it says knows that it’s Jefferson telling us the same things today that he was telling us in 1776. Read it.“
Segment 1 – The King vs. the People’s Voice
Picture the chamber of a colonial legislature in full session. The air is heavy with the sweat and powder of men who have been arguing for days. Clerks sit at their desks, quills scratching away as resolutions are read and counter-resolutions debated. The galleries are filled with townspeople craning their necks to watch. Then suddenly, a messenger arrives from the Governor with a terse note: the assembly is dissolved. No debate, no negotiation. The royal seal carries more weight than the will of the people. Clerks hurriedly gather papers, ink is spilled in the rush, and elected delegates, stunned but unbowed, file into the street. The official hall is barred to them, so they march down to the tavern—often the only building large enough to hold them—and continue the people’s business over ale and smoke. It is one of the oldest stories of the Revolution, the tale of kings and governors who treated representative assemblies as irritants to be shut down whenever they resisted.
This is the grievance Jefferson summed up with that damning line in the Declaration: “He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.” It was not just rhetoric. It was the lived experience of almost every colony in the years leading to independence.
Let’s start in Massachusetts in 1768. The trouble began with what came to be known as the Massachusetts Circular Letter. The House of Representatives in Boston, fed up with Parliament’s Townshend duties on glass, paper, paint, and tea, sent a letter to the other colonies calling for joint opposition. To royal officials, this was nothing short of sedition. Governor Francis Bernard demanded the House rescind the letter. The House flatly refused, voting ninety-two to seventeen to stand by it. Ninety-two men, many of them small farmers and tradesmen elevated to office by their neighbors, showed what Jefferson would later call “manly firmness.” They would not be cowed by threats from across the Atlantic. Bernard, enraged, dissolved the General Court.
The dissolution did not silence Massachusetts. Far from it. Towns sent delegates to an extralegal convention in Boston, while the royal governor fumed. Within weeks, British troops were ordered to occupy the city to keep order, setting in motion a chain of resentment that would lead straight to the Boston Massacre two years later. The lesson was clear: dissolve a representative body and the people will find another way to govern themselves.
Fast forward six years to Virginia in May 1774. The news from Boston was grim. Parliament had shut down the port under the Coercive Acts, punishing the city for the Tea Party. In Williamsburg, the House of Burgesses rose in solidarity. On May 24, they passed a resolution declaring June 1st—a day set for the closure of Boston’s port—to be observed as a day of fasting and prayer. They called on Virginians to reflect on Boston’s plight and pray for relief. It was a bold act of unity across colonial lines, couched not in politics but in religious devotion.
Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s royal governor, did not see it as pious. He saw sedition. The very next morning, May 25, he stormed into the chamber and declared the House dissolved. The Burgesses were locked out. But like their brethren in Massachusetts, they were not so easily dismissed. They walked to the Raleigh Tavern, a short distance from the Capitol, and convened in the Apollo Room. Without official sanction, they organized a plan: call for a congress of the colonies. That step led directly to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia later that year. Again, the King’s attempt to stifle resistance only hardened it.
And it wasn’t just in New England or Virginia. Consider New York, where the struggle over representation had been festering since the Quartering Act of 1765. Parliament demanded the colony provide food and housing for British troops. The Assembly balked, arguing it had not been consulted and that the Act undermined its authority. The standoff grew bitter. In 1767, Parliament went further, passing the New York Suspending Act, which effectively dissolved the Assembly until it complied. For months, New Yorkers had no elected legislature. Taxes went uncollected, supplies went undelivered, and public order was left in limbo. Eventually, under duress, the Assembly caved and partially complied, but the damage was done. Colonists had seen how easily the machinery of representative government could be shut down.
These were not isolated incidents. They were a pattern. Governors and kings wielded dissolution like a club, striking assemblies whenever they opposed imperial policy. The colonists, however, developed a counter-pattern: every time their representatives were dissolved, they regrouped in taverns, churches, and meeting halls. If the official government was barred to them, they invented new ones. These extralegal bodies—the conventions, congresses, and committees of safety—would eventually evolve into full-fledged revolutionary governments.
The tone Jefferson struck in that grievance, praising “manly firmness,” was not hyperbole. It was recognition of the courage required to stare down royal authority and refuse to bend. To Bernard, Dunmore, or Parliament itself, these men were obstinate troublemakers. To their neighbors, they were representatives who had stood by their oath to defend the rights of the people. And it mattered that this resistance was not wild or violent in its earliest stages. The colonists did not storm the governors’ mansions or burn the courthouses. They simply kept meeting. They prayed. They wrote letters. They refused to rescind resolutions. They demonstrated that the people’s voice was not so easily silenced.
When the King dissolved assemblies, he was not just striking at politics. He was insulting the very principle of representation. Colonists had long prided themselves on electing men from among themselves to represent local interests. To be told that those voices could simply be dismissed when inconvenient was intolerable. It confirmed what many already suspected: that Parliament and the Crown viewed them not as freeborn Englishmen with rights, but as unruly children to be disciplined.
The irony is that each dissolution only deepened the colonies’ sense of unity and purpose. Massachusetts found support in Virginia. New York’s struggle over quartering echoed in New England and the South. By 1774, the pattern was too clear to ignore. If the King could silence one colony, he could silence them all. And if he could silence them all, then what was left of their rights?
Thus the grievance in the Declaration is not some abstract complaint. It is a summary of lived colonial experience across years and colonies. Legislatures dismissed, elected voices silenced, people forced to improvise new ways to govern themselves. And each time, the people grew more convinced that their liberties could not survive under such a king.
So when Jefferson wrote that “He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly,” it was the echo of Massachusetts’ locked chamber in 1768, Virginia’s shuttered Capitol in 1774, and New York’s suspended Assembly in 1767. It was the echo of taverns filled with determined men who refused to go quietly, who gathered over candlelight and tankards to plot not sedition but self-preservation. That “manly firmness” became the seed of revolution.
Segment 2 – The Empty Chairs of Government
The people’s representatives are gone, but the problems remain.
When a governor dissolves an assembly, the king’s orders may have been obeyed in form, but reality is less tidy. Taxes still need collecting. Soldiers still need supplies. Frontiers still need protection. The world does not stop simply because a royal decree has silenced elected men. Yet this is precisely what happened in colony after colony. The chairs of government stood empty, and the people were left to drift without a rudder.
Take Massachusetts again. In 1774, Governor Thomas Gage arrived with orders to enforce the Coercive Acts. One of those laws, the Massachusetts Government Act, effectively nullified the colony’s charter, giving the royal governor control over town meetings and dissolving the General Court. The legislature tried to meet in Salem that October, but Gage abruptly canceled the session. Delegates showed up to find the doors barred, the chamber silent, the business of the people dead on arrival. Massachusetts was left without a functioning legislature at the very moment troops were landing in Boston and powder was being seized from the countryside. The colony faced the double threat of foreign occupation and domestic unrest—exactly the dangers Jefferson later wrote of.
In New Hampshire, Governor John Wentworth followed a similar script. The Assembly at Portsmouth, frustrated by the news from Massachusetts, attempted to appoint delegates to the Continental Congress. Wentworth refused to recognize them and, in 1774, dissolved the legislature altogether. He then stalled and blocked new elections. New Hampshire was left adrift just as tensions with Native peoples on the frontier demanded careful diplomacy and as the question of how to respond to Britain’s escalating measures loomed. With no recognized representatives, the people began turning to town meetings and informal committees to fill the void. The official government sat empty while crises multiplied.
North Carolina’s story adds yet another example. Governor Josiah Martin dissolved the colonial assembly in 1775 after it declared support for the Continental Congress. His refusal to call another meant that, officially, the colony had no legislative body. Yet British troops were maneuvering along the coast, Loyalist and Patriot factions were preparing to clash in the backcountry, and Indian diplomacy in the interior teetered on the edge of violence. Without a legislature to mediate, to tax, to legislate, the colony spiraled toward chaos. The people answered the power vacuum with their own solution: the creation of Provincial Congresses. But these bodies were extralegal, born not of royal charters but of necessity.
This is what Jefferson meant when he wrote: “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 mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.”
The phrase “incapable of annihilation” is a profound statement of faith in self-government. The colonists believed that legislative power, the people’s right to make decisions through representatives, could not be destroyed. It could only be obstructed. Yet obstruction was dangerous. For months, sometimes years, governors withheld elections. That meant no budgets, no taxes authorized, no legal framework for defense, no provision for frontier relations. It was paralysis at a time when threats were mounting on every side.
Imagine living in a coastal town with British ships visible in the harbor, your militia unarmed because the powder stores had been seized. Imagine being a settler on the frontier, your relations with neighboring tribes uncertain, and your assembly dissolved so that no treaties could be renewed. Imagine the day-to-day frustration of seeing your representatives sent home, the halls of government empty, while crises piled up. It was not just an inconvenience. It was a direct assault on the safety and stability of the colonies.
And it was calculated. Royal governors knew that by refusing elections they could weaken colonial resistance. They gambled that without legal assemblies, disorganization would set in and people would come crawling back to the King for order. But the gamble backfired. Instead of producing submission, it produced improvisation. Committees of correspondence, conventions, and congresses filled the vacuum. In refusing elections, the King only made colonists practice self-government more aggressively, and with greater legitimacy in their own eyes.
Still, the dangers were real. The refusal of governors to allow new elections left the colonies exposed “to invasion from without, and convulsions within.” From without: the constant presence of British troops, blockades, and the looming threat of war. From within: riots over taxes, shortages of food, the conflict between Loyalists and Patriots, and the instability of an ungoverned society. The King’s obstinacy in refusing elections was not just petty; it was reckless. It endangered the lives and livelihoods of thousands.
This grievance in the Declaration, then, is not flowery complaint but hard reality. Colonies without legislatures were ships without rudders, tossed in the storm. The King’s refusal to cause others to be elected showed contempt for the very idea of representation. But it also forced the people to realize something profound: if their governors would not allow elections, they would create their own. If their assemblies were dissolved, they would form congresses. If their legal framework was denied, they would build a new one.
The empty chairs of government became symbols. Each locked chamber, each dissolved body, reminded the people that the King saw their voices as expendable. And each time, the people responded by stepping into that void, claiming for themselves the legislative power that could not be annihilated.
A people without a legislature is a ship without a rudder in storm seas. And yet, in the years before independence, the colonists discovered that if the King would not hand them the rudder, they could seize it themselves. That discovery changed everything.
Segment 3 – Power Returns to the People
If the King will not let them meet, they will meet anyway.
That is the story of the American colonies in the final years before independence. The grievance Jefferson set down in the Declaration—“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…”—was not theoretical. It was not a clever turn of phrase or some piece of political philosophy dreamed up in Philadelphia. It was a reflection of what had already happened on the ground. Time and again, royal governors tried to silence representative bodies by dissolving assemblies and withholding elections. And time and again, the colonists simply made their own governments, meeting without permission, creating institutions outside the royal framework. The people did not wait. They acted.
Take Massachusetts. After Gage canceled the meeting of the General Court in October 1774, the elected representatives did not simply go home. They gathered anyway, first at Salem and then at Concord. There, they declared themselves the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, claiming to speak for the people in defiance of both governor and king. They raised taxes, appointed committees, organized militia. They began stockpiling arms and powder, setting the stage for Lexington and Concord the following spring. It was a direct act of self-government, born not of charter or crown, but of necessity. The legislative power had indeed returned to the people.
Virginia offers another dramatic example. When Lord Dunmore dissolved the House of Burgesses after the fast day resolution in May 1774, the Burgesses met in the Raleigh Tavern. They formed an association, pledged non-importation, and called for a Continental Congress. By August, Virginians held their first convention, an extra-legal body that assumed legislative authority. These conventions would continue year after year, eventually drafting Virginia’s own Declaration of Rights and Constitution in 1776. Dunmore may have locked the doors of the Capitol, but he could not lock Virginians out of politics. The people simply walked across the street and carried on.
In New Hampshire, when Governor Wentworth dissolved the Assembly in 1774, towns sent delegates to Exeter. That meeting, the New Hampshire Provincial Congress, quickly assumed the functions of government. They organized militia, collected funds, and even began issuing currency. By January 1776, New Hampshire would formally establish its own constitution—the first of the thirteen colonies to do so—explicitly because the King had refused to let elections proceed. The people stepped into the vacuum and built their own framework of government.
North Carolina tells the same tale. Governor Josiah Martin dissolved the Assembly in 1775, furious that it had endorsed the Continental Congress. The people responded by forming Provincial Congresses. These met repeatedly, creating committees of safety, raising regiments, and eventually instructing their delegates in Philadelphia to vote for independence. The royal government evaporated in North Carolina, but political life did not. It simply shifted into new, people-driven forms.
These Provincial Congresses, conventions, and committees were not small affairs. They were not shadowy gatherings of radicals in back rooms. They were broadly attended, often by men who had served in the official assemblies. They claimed legitimacy not from a royal commission but from elections held in towns and counties. They were rough, imperfect, and sometimes chaotic, but they embodied Jefferson’s claim that legislative power could not be annihilated. If the King refused elections, the people would make them anyway. If the King shut down assemblies, the people would build new ones.
This was the revolution before the Revolution. By the time shots were fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, many colonies were already functioning under governments of their own creation. Provincial Congresses were levying taxes, raising troops, and negotiating with other colonies. They had, in essence, declared independence long before the formal vote in July 1776. The King’s refusal to permit representation had pushed them into inventing their own.
And this is the philosophical heart of Jefferson’s grievance. Government does not flow from the King down to the people. It flows from the people up. Representation is not a privilege granted by the Crown, but a right inherent to freeborn men. When that right is blocked, people do not cease to govern themselves. They simply govern without the king.
Liberty! 250 – Modern Echoes of a King’s Grievance
Jefferson once accused the King of dissolving representative houses for opposing his invasions on the rights of the people.
That was 1776.
But listen closely, and you might hear that echo today.
We don’t need a monarch to silence the people’s voice anymore. We can do it ourselves.
When voters stop showing up, when cynicism replaces conviction, when we decide that our vote no longer matters, we have already done what George the Third once did. We have dissolved our own assemblies.
Then power moves. It migrates to the places where people still want it. Corporations write the laws. Bureaucrats write the rules. Lobbyists buy the outcomes. The buildings still stand, but the foundation has shifted.
And now, voices that challenge authority face a new kind of muzzle. It is not a soldier at the door; it is an algorithm deciding who gets heard and who vanishes. Silencing has gone digital.
Every age finds its excuse. Emergencies. Crises. Fear. Each becomes a reason to rule by decree instead of debate. The royal proclamation has become the modern executive order. No vote, no argument, just the quiet certainty that someone else knows best.
In too many countries, elections still happen, but they no longer mean anything. The ballot is counted, but the winner was chosen long before. The people’s assembly becomes a stage prop. It looks like democracy, but the script is already written.
And here at home, we have our own quieter version of the grievance. Lines on a map are drawn to make sure the outcome never changes. Gerrymandering does not dissolve legislatures with force; it dissolves competition with precision. The King could not have been more efficient.
All of it builds to the moment we are living in right now. The government is shut down. The doors of representation are locked, not by royal order, but by dysfunction that feels no less arrogant. The people’s representatives are gone, but the problems remain. Bills are unpaid, workers sit idle, and the nation drifts. The King may not have dissolved the house, but our own divisions have.
Jefferson warned of this. He said that legislative powers, the authority to govern, are incapable of annihilation. They do not disappear; they only move. If the people’s representatives will not act, someone else will. The power goes to the executive, to the courts, or to the mob.
That is the danger, and that is the promise. When power fails above, it awakens below. The colonists in 1774 met in taverns, barns, and church basements because the King locked their doors. They did not wait for permission. They met anyway. They acted anyway. They governed themselves anyway.
Maybe that is the lesson we need right now. When the government shuts down, when politics stalls, when the halls of power grow silent, free people must remember that the power never really belonged there in the first place. It has always belonged to us.
The King’s voice is gone, but his lesson remains. The people’s voice must never be.
DAVE DOES HISTORY 
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