Art Gottlieb recently delivered an informative, entertaining, and engaging lecture on The Declaration of Independence at Newtown Senior Center. The July 23 presentation was sponsored by Kay Schreiber, a community liaison with Synergy Homecare who regularly provides events for the local senior center and other locations.

The lecture was done without prompts, slides, or photos, yet Gottlieb held the attention of those present with the strength of his research and asides. At least two people purposely followed Gottlieb, who lectures regularly across Fairfield County and many of the state’s shoreline towns, to catch the program. One woman attended after missing it in Monroe, she shared. Another said she’d driven in from Brookfield, knowing how good his programs can be.

Gottlieb’s presentation invited comments and responses to a few questions, and occasional laughter thanks to well placed self-deprecating comments. He opened, in fact, by calling himself “one out of many in Kay’s stable of speakers.” For the most part, however, the room was silent and the audience rapt.

Turning serious, Gottlieb said he would be offering a brief review of the Revolutionary War and a timeline of events leading to the document in question. He offered his first question of the hour, asking those present “why the British North American colonies decided to go to war with the most powerful military and political force on the face of the Earth where, up to that point, we had enjoyed every benefit that the British empire had to give us? Why did we do it?”

After hearing a few suggestions from the floor, Gottlieb said one man’s response — “It was a series of events that snowballed” — was “probably the best answer I’ve ever heard to this particular question.”

He spent the next 60 minutes offering a compressed version of a program he often does as a five-part series, he said. Gottlieb gave the backstory of the French-Indian War, which he called events that led to the onset of the colonies deciding they did not want to be ruled any longer by Britain. He touched upon taxes and stamps, the East India Company, Sons of Liberty, Boston, the Continental Army, the Continental Congress, Thomas Payne, George Washington, and many others, with topics flowing smoothly from one to the next.

Calling the writers of the Declaration “young intellectuals that probably, pound for pound, were so much more prepared, classically educated, and historically informed, than anybody in the world today who are our leaders — I mean across the board, everywhere in the world,” Gottlieb said the men who created the document understood compromise.

All colonies had to agree on what was written, he said, which is why slavery is not included in a document that declares all men are created equal. The reference to slavery had to be removed or those in the south would not have signed the Declaration, he explained.

“It’s clear that if all 13 colonies are not unanimous, by signing this it’s worthless anyway,” Gottlieb explained while discussing the removal of that segment from the original draft. “The original compromise is … they took out the part about slavery, with the assurance that in 50 years’ time, this whole thing — the institution of slavery — was so unpopular, at least in the north, that the whole thing was going to go away anyway.

“But right now the task at hand was our independence, and you couldn’t have independence with that clause about slavery in The Declaration of Independence,” he added.

Gottlieb later called the document “a line-by-line smackdown of King George III.

“Nobody’s ever written anything like this,” he added. “Nobody has ever, in public, taken down a king, let alone a king of the most powerful nation on earth, in front of everyone. … We rip King George III in a way that had never been done up to that point, or since. It’s incredible.”

The one item Gottlieb relied on for his presentation was a copy of the Declaration. He concluded the lecture with a reading of the full Declaration of Independence, which was very enjoyable thanks to the information that had just been shared.

He closed by simply stating: “Everyone who signed this was immediately guilty of treason and subject to death by hanging.”

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Managing Editor Shannon Hicks can be reached at shannon@thebee.com.