Brettany Maurer
September 5, 2014
Period 15
Assignment: Grievance Paper

The Declaration of Independence was written in 1776 by Thomas Jefferson. He and a group of men came together after Britain put them through years of grievances and injustices, taking over their lives and freedom, and they decided they had been through enough. Using ideas devised by thinkers in the enlightenment, they conspired a list of grievances both the King and Britain had put them through, and what they believed they really deserved. One of the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence was unfair taxes being put on the colonists by Great Britain to help pay for the costs of war. Some of these taxes were the Stamp Tax and the taxes on tea, which made the colonists very angry. An Enlightenment thinker named John Locke was known for believing that a government had to be fair and just with the people to be able to be maintained. He also believed that if the government was not doing what they were meant to and were not fair to the people, the colonists had the right to rebel against them. The colonists found these taxes unjust and the King’s acts unfair, so they revolted against Britain, and created the Declaration of Independence. To conclude, the Declaration of Independence was the colonists’ way of rebelling, to try to gain freedom from Great Britain and the King. When he wrote the document, Thomas Jefferson used the ideas of enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Paine and John Locke