"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it" (Jefferson). Written by Thomas Jefferson and approved by the Second Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence defines the very tenants of democracy that the United States of America was constructed upon. It was these tenants that Henry D. Thoreau and later, Martin L. King, Jr. based their arguments against tyranny of the majority and the device to eliminate such a situation: civil disobedience. Thoreau's essay "Resistance to Civil Government," written seventy-five years after the Declaration, opposed slavery in Mexico, and justified disobeying unjust laws, so deemed by a contradiction with an individual's own moral laws. One-hundred years after Thoreau, King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" was written during the 1960s...