Augusta Declaration

The Augusta Declaration, or the Memorial of Augusta County Committee, May 10, 1776, was a statement presented to the Fifth Virginia Convention in Williamsburg, Virginia on May 10, 1776. The Declaration announced the necessity of the Thirteen Colonies to form a permanent and independent union of states and national government separate from Great Britain, with whom the Colonies were at war.

When the Fifth Virginia Convention assembled on May 6, 1776, independence was a leading issue. Several of the delegates had already been instructed by their counties to pursue independence, and others had come with resolutions for independence in hand. The Augusta Declaration was the first official statement on the subject, being introduced by Thomas Lewis, on behalf of the Augusta County, Virginia Committee of Safety on May 10. Five days later, on May 15, the Convention declared Virginia wholly independent of Great Britain, and called for state papers (a declaration of rights and constitution), foreign alliances, and a confederation of the colonies. These resolutions were forwarded to the Second Continental Congress and introduced as the Lee Resolution, which initiated the drafting of the United States Declaration of Independence, the Model Treaty (foreign policy), and the Articles of Confederation (the first U.S. constitution), respectively.

While legislation from various American counties and colonies had called for or emboldened independence from Great Britain, none had done so while proposing either a formal union of the colonies as states or a national government. The Augusta Declaration called for both, which the colonies would go on to adopt in the creation of the United States of America under the Articles and, ultimately, the United States Constitution. Virginia history scholar Hugh Blair Grigsby states the Augusta Declaration "deserves to be stereotyped as the Magna Charta of the West" for its precedent in calling for this governmental mode.^[1]

The document is presumed to be a lost work, with only an abstract surviving in the notations of the official journal of the Fifth Virginia Convention.