Congress Taps Jefferson: Declaration Committee Formed

Five men received the task that would define American independence. On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston to a committee charged with drafting a formal declaration explaining the colonies' break from Britain. The resolution for independence itself, introduced by Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee on June 7, was still being debated. The committee's job was to prepare the document that would justify it to the world. Jefferson, at thirty-three the youngest member, was chosen to write the initial draft. Adams later recalled declining the task himself, telling Jefferson he should write it because "you can write ten times better than I can." Jefferson worked in a rented room on the second floor of a house at Market and Seventh Streets in Philadelphia, producing a draft in roughly seventeen days. He drew on Enlightenment philosophy, particularly John Locke's ideas about natural rights, Virginia's Declaration of Rights drafted by George Mason, and his own earlier writings. The committee reviewed Jefferson's draft and made relatively few changes. Franklin softened a few phrases, most famously changing "we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" to "we hold these truths to be self-evident." Adams made minor edits. When the full Congress took up the document on July 2-4, the revisions were far more extensive. Congress removed roughly a quarter of Jefferson's text, including a passage condemning King George III for the slave trade, which delegates from Georgia and South Carolina opposed. The approved Declaration, signed initially on August 2, 1776, transformed a colonial tax revolt into a philosophical statement about human rights that influenced revolutions from France to Latin America to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.