By Malcolm Lee Kitchen III | Margin Of The Law

Alter or abolish.

Those three words sit in the Declaration of Independence like a loaded weapon the establishment would rather you forgot existed. They will tell you that resisting their power is anti-American. They have it exactly backwards.

Under the founders’ framework, the right to “provide new guards” is not a passive suggestion. It can rise to the level of obligation. That distinction matters more now than most people want to admit.

FOUNDATION

The Declaration of Independence does not open with a theory. It opens with a statement of purpose. Government exists to protect the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That is the contract. When government fails at that job, or actively works against it, the contract has already been broken by the other party.

The language Jefferson wrote is not subtle:

“Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

That is not a radical fringe position. That is the founding document of the United States of America. If you believe in the country, you believe in those words. There is no version of American patriotism that excludes them.

But the founders were not calling for reckless action. They were precise about this. One act of arbitrary power does not automatically justify revolt.

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.”

That qualifier is real and it matters. The bar is high. It was designed to be. What the founders were describing was not a hair trigger. It was a long fuse attached to an undeniable conclusion.

The problem is that people almost never act when they should. History is a long record of populations enduring what should not be endured because endurance feels safer than confrontation.

“All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

This was not a new observation in 1776. Aristotle documented the same pattern in 350 BC. The people most capable of resisting are typically the last ones to do it.

“Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, for they alone can with reason be deemed absolutely unequal, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.”

Jefferson and his colleagues were not describing their own situation as weakness. They called it patience. Deliberate, documented, exhausted patience.

“Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”

And Thomas Gordon had already explained in Cato’s Letters what happens when that patience becomes permanent.

“That not to resist any man’s wickedness, is to encourage it.”

Patience that never ends is not patience. It is permission.

THE RIGHT

The most consequential sentence in the Declaration does not get quoted at enough dinner tables or town halls:

“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Read that again. Not just a right. A duty.

Jefferson was not inventing a new philosophy when he wrote it. He was documenting what the American people already believed. He said so himself in a letter to Henry Lee.

“Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before.”

“It was intended to be an expression of the American mind.”

The American mind, as John Allen expressed it, included an undisputed right to resist and restrain those who would destroy the law to consolidate their own power.

“Though you cannot prevent the unconstitutional design of the arbitrary power of the British ministry; yet you have an undoubted right to resist and prevent their reigning over you; or ruining you in the Violation of your laws and rights.”

But a legitimate question remained as 1776 approached: where exactly is the line? When does the accumulation of power cross from bad governance into despotism that justifies active resistance?

John Dickinson was honest about it. The law had no clean answer.

“No English lawyer, as we remember, has pointed out precisely the line beyond which, if a king, shall go, resistance becomes lawful.”

But Dickinson did not use that ambiguity as an excuse for inaction. He insisted the line existed even if no statute defined it precisely.

“We assert, a line there must be, and shall now proceed with great deference to the judgment of others, to trace that line, according to the ideas we entertain.”

That is the right posture. The absence of a published threshold does not mean the threshold does not exist. You know when you have crossed it. History knows too.

PATIENCE

Jefferson’s phrase “patient sufferance” was not accidental. Nothing in the Declaration was accidental. He described the document as capturing “the harmonising sentiments of the day.” Shared convictions, stated plainly.

Few articulated those convictions with more clarity than Simeon Howard, whose sermon to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston laid out the religious and philosophical foundation for defending liberty against “external force and constraint.”

It started with the most basic principle in political philosophy: self-defense.

“NOW for men to stand fast in their liberty means, in general, resisting the attempts that are made against it, in the best and most effectual manner they can.”

But resisting does not automatically mean force. Howard was clear that the first obligation is to exhaust every non-violent option. The Americans understood this and took it seriously.

“When any one’s liberty is attacked or threatened, he is first to try gentle methods for his safety; to reason with, and persuade the adversary to desist, if there be opportunity for it; or get out of his way, if he can; and if by such means he can prevent the injury, he is to use no other.”

Arthur Lee of Virginia framed it the same way. The Americans felt a moral obligation to try every available remedy before moving toward confrontation.

“Yet they are too much enlightened not to know, that they cannot be justified in proceeding to extremities, till they have tried every means of obtaining redress in vain.”

That is the standard. Not first resort. Last resort, after documented failure of everything that came before.

And Howard acknowledged the uncomfortable truth that even successful non-violent resistance often only delays the next assault. The worst abuses of power do not stop because people petition against them.

“The experience of all ages has shewn, that those, who are so unreasonable as to form designs of injuring others, are seldom to be diverted from their purpose by argument and persuasion alone: Notwithstanding all that can be said to shew the injustice and inhumanity of their attempt, they persist in it, till they have gratified the unruly passion which set them to work.”

Arthur Lee documented the American record. It was not speculation. It was a documented sequence that lasted years.

“The Americans have in fact exhausted every peaceable means of obtaining redress. For seven years they have incessantly complained and petitioned for redress; their return has invariably been a repetition of injuries, aggravated by the most intolerable insults. There has not been a single instance in which they have complained, without being rebuked, or in which they have been complained against, without being punished.”

Seven years of documented petitions. Seven years of documented rebuke. Not a grievance invented on a slow news day. Not a theory. A record.

That record is what separated legitimate resistance from reckless rebellion in the founders’ framework. The burden of proof was on the people making the case. And the Americans met it.

THE DUTY

Here is where the argument sharpens into something most people are not prepared to sit with.

Simeon Howard did not stop at the right to resist. He pushed further. He asked what happens when every peaceful option has been exhausted and the abuse continues.

“And in this case, what is to be done by the sufferer? Is he to use no other means for his safety, but remonstrance or flight, when these will not secure him? Is he patiently to take the injury and suffer himself to be robbed of his liberty or his life, if the adversary sees fit to take it? Nature certainly forbids this tame submission, and loudly calls to a more vigorous defence.”

Nature forbids it. That is not political rhetoric. That is a statement about what human beings are obligated to do when the alternative is the quiet destruction of everything that makes self-governance possible.

Howard connected the reasoning directly to the principle of self-preservation.

“Self-preservation is one of the strongest, and a universal principle of the human mind: And this principle allows of every thing necessary to self-defense, opposing force to force, and violence to violence. This is so universally allowed that I need not attempt to prove it.”

Jonathan Mayhew extended that principle to its logical endpoint. There is a point where the abuse becomes so clear and the failure to resist so obvious that continued submission becomes a moral failure, not a virtue.

“And it would be highly criminal in them, not to make use of this means. It would be stupid tameness, and unaccountable folly, for whole nations to suffer one unreasonable, ambitious and cruel man, to wanton and riot in their misery. And in such a case it would, of the two, be more rational to suppose, that they that did NOT resist, than that they who did, would receive to themselves damnation.”

That is not an invitation to recklessness. It is a warning against the particular cowardice that hides behind the language of civility while rights are systematically removed.

Samuel Adams brought it to its sharpest conclusion. He did not frame resistance as radical. He framed the failure to resist as the real betrayal.

“The people hold the Invasion of their Rights and Liberties the most horrid rebellion and a Neglect to defend them against any Power whatsoever the highest Treason.”

Read that carefully. In the American founding tradition, the treasonous act is not resistance to tyranny. The treasonous act is failing to defend liberty against those who would destroy it.

That is the inversion the establishment never wants you to make. They have spent considerable effort convincing you that deference to power is responsibility and that resistance to power is extremism. The founders said the opposite. The founding documents say the opposite.

John Locke, whose thinking shaped the entire American framework, identified the most effective way to prevent things from reaching that point.

“The properest way to prevent the evil, is to shew them the danger and injustice of it, who are under the greatest temptation to run into it.”

Make the cost of tyranny visible. Make it unavoidable. Force the calculation into the open. People who understand that there are consequences to the destruction of rights are less likely to pursue that destruction.

That is the purpose of civic vigilance. Not paranoia. Not performance. Documented, grounded, constitutionally rooted attention to what is being done in the name of governance and who benefits from it.

The founders did not write the Declaration for a nation of people who would trust the government to self-correct. They wrote it for people who understood that the price of liberty is exactly what it has always been.

Permanent attention. Documented grievance. Exhausted patience. And when all of that runs out, the courage to act on what you already know is true.

The right to alter or abolish is not a historical curiosity. It is an active principle in a Constitutional Republic where government answers to the people, not the other way around.

That principle does not require your permission to exist.

It never did.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group
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