American Scripture

Maier explains there are nearly no contemporaneous records from the Congressional committee appointed to draft the Declaration. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams provided conflicting accounts of the committee’s drafting process decades later, which means that Maier must compare the two men’s stories and check their accuracy against evidence from the 1770s; like a detective, Maier gathers clues with which she can build a fact-based narrative about the Declaration’s drafting, while she’s aware that some clues are misleading, and other clues have yet to surface.

The Declaration of Independence was created in a series of drafts and edits by many individuals. The process began with the drafting committee, in which Adams and Jefferson were the dominant figures. The other committee members were Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, and Benjamin Franklin, and they all had a hand in composing the draft submitted to Congress. The final draft was the result of Congress’s collaborative editing of the document. Thomas Jefferson’s contribution to the process is central to this story because he wrote most of the draft; however, the document’s evolution shows that it was the result of adaptation and collaboration, and that Jefferson wasn’t the only person involved in its creation.

1. The Drafting Committee

The drafting committee, also called “the Committee of Five,” was appointed on June 11, with John Adams insisting that Jefferson be the draftsman. Jefferson was a Virginian, so his appointment would show that support for Independence wasn’t confined to New England; he was an uncontroversial figure in Congress, whereas Adams was unpopular with most of his fellow Congressmen; and Jefferson was the best available writer.

Jefferson recalled in 1823 that he submitted his draft to John Adams and Benjamin Franklin for their comments. Drafting committee members were simultaneously occupied with other committees and tasks, and Jefferson thus had little time to draft the declaration, but he was a fast writer. He also employed the common practice in the 18th century of adapting other texts to create his own. Jefferson’s textual foundations were his draft preamble to the Virginia constitution, which had its roots in the English Declaration of Rights, and a draft of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights by fellow Virginian George Mason. Ultimately, the draft the Committee of Five submitted to Congress was “Jefferson’s draft.” Congress edited the draft, more so than the committee did, and the edits changed more of the text than Jefferson liked.

2. Jefferson’s Draft: The Charges Against the King

It was expected in 1776 that declarations seeking regime change, whether English or American, list the king’s transgressions. Jefferson himself wrote such a list in his draft preamble to the Virginia constitution; he used the list in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, but with some alterations. The purpose of listing charges against King George was to provide evidence: “Independence was justified only if the charges against the King were convincing and of sufficient gravity to warrant the dissolution of his authority over the American people” (105). Jefferson wrote his charges in a way that would prove the King was a tyrant, but many of the charges were so vaguely expressed that contemporary readers, such as the document’s critics, had difficulty identifying the specific actions those charges signified. Thomas Hutchinson and John Lind, both Loyalists, wrote critiques of the Declaration in which they expressed scorn for Jefferson’s opaque charges against the King (106).

Unlike the state and local declarations, which limited their charges to the worst of King George’s transgressions, Jefferson’s draft contained a detailed list of accusations, which Maier divides into three groups. The first group, which Maier calls “the most obscure and problematic,” was Jefferson’s adaptation of the first eight charges he compiled in his preamble to the Virginia constitution—he added four more charges, changed the order in which he listed them, and altered some of the language to fulfill more than one rhetorical aim (107-08). The English Declaration of Rights influenced Jefferson’s charges, despite his effort to put distance between his Declaration and the English one through a simple alteration in phrasing: He began each new charge with the words “he [the King] has” rather than the word “by,” which was the word used in the Declaration of Rights and in Jefferson’s Virginia preamble. The repetition of “he has” emphasized the King’s responsibility for his misdeeds. Jefferson also embellished the language of his preamble “to emphasize further the King’s infamy” (108). Thomas Hutchinson, in his Strictures upon the Declaration of Congress at Philadelphia, criticized the charges for being too generalized, but Jefferson’s broad strokes were consistent with the tradition established in the Declaration of Rights, with its generalized charges against James II. The charges in the English document, however, referred to events that were nationally reported, whereas Jefferson’s opening charges referred to events that involved the King’s abuse of power in particular colonies—and knowledge of these events wasn’t widespread.

Jefferson added the four charges at the request of other colonists, primarily other delegates, who wanted their colonies’ grievances acknowledged: John Adams on behalf of the Massachusetts House of Representatives; the North Carolina superior courts; judiciary controversies in Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts; and the American Board of Customs Commissioners in Boston. Jefferson used vague language when he wrote the new accusations because the events behind them were nuanced, and more details might reveal that their ill effects were exaggerated. Hutchinson and Lind understood some of the details, and they ridiculed Jefferson’s new charges for being melodramatic.

The original eight accusations from the first group were connected to a document Jefferson wrote in 1774, a draft of instructions for Virginia’s delegates in the First Continental Congress. It wasn’t adopted in Congress, but it was published that year under the title A Summary View of the Rights of British America; it instructed Congress to send George III an appeal for redress of grievances. Maier emphasizes the earlier document contained the same eight charges against the King that Jefferson included in his preamble, and in the same order (112). Jefferson framed the eight charges within a theory about empire, governance, and the history of British colonialism in North America. He concluded that Parliament’s interference in the colonies’ affairs was wrong, and he requested the King to reclaim the monarch’s former power to veto laws harmful to a separate territory in the empire (112-13).

Jefferson also described instances in which King George abused his power—Maier connects particular complaints to the eight charges in Jefferson’s preamble, but even these were not always detailed. The grievances Maier identifies as precursors to Jefferson’s charges included the King’s interfering in or outright harm of American legislation, property ownership, trade, population growth, and civil authority. The grievances that Jefferson included in the Declaration of Independence—which first appeared when he wrote as a loyal subject in A Summary View, and when colonists weren’t clamoring for Independence—served a different purpose than the specific lists of transgressions found in state and local declarations: Jefferson’s grievances were meant to establish in broad terms that George III was an unjust ruler and that revolution was justified. Although the grievances lost explanatory details in their adaptation to accusations against the King, they didn’t lose “historical foundation”; in fact, Jefferson’s generalizations, even in descriptions of identifiable events from one colony or another, signaled that Americans shared in each other’s suffering, which “confirmed their identity as a people” (115). Nevertheless, the first group of charges in the Declaration were puzzling to many readers, and this left them open to criticism by people like Hutchinson.

The second of the three groups of charges originated from the ninth clause of Jefferson’s Virginia preamble; it explained how King George worked with Parliament to tyrannize the colonies. The charges refer to well-known events, which were acts that Parliament, according to Jefferson, had no right to enforce in a separate jurisdiction. Maier matches each item on the list with its corresponding act or acts. The nine charges in Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration don’t appear in chronological order, but rather “in order of increasing political atrocity, […] to build rhetorical momentum” (119). Jefferson organized the third group of charges similarly, beginning with the Prohibitory Act, which resulted in every other transgression that exemplified the King’s tyranny. Some of Jefferson’s charges were perplexing, most notably number 21, in which he accused George III of enabling and perpetuating the slave trade. His melodramatic rhetoric made the charge “patently unbelievable”; additionally, the accusation insinuated that Jefferson was an abolitionist when that wasn’t the case (122). John Adams liked Jefferson’s language here, but he knew the southern delegates wouldn’t allow the passage to stand. What Adams didn’t approve of was Jefferson calling the King a tyrant—Maier thinks that if Jefferson’s draft hadn’t persuaded Adams into thinking of King George as a tyrant, then it failed in its intended purpose (123). Like its state and local counterparts, Jefferson’s Declaration was a justification for Independence, only it listed colonists’ grievances differently. The document’s approach, as well as other factors, distinguished its list from lists in other declarations, both English and American.

3. Jefferson’s Draft: A Revolutionary Manifesto

Maier focuses on Jefferson’s preface to the charges against the King, his Declaration’s preamble. Modern historians have eschewed analyzing the charges in favor of discussing the preface and its ideological foundations in 18th-century European thought. Even Jefferson’s contemporaries, like Richard Henry Lee and John Adams, had ideas about intellectual and stylistic influences in the draft declaration. Jefferson indeed relied on other sources to form his draft quickly, but it can also be true that he took the opportunity to insert his own beliefs into the document.

Jefferson most likely synthesized the texts that influenced him from memory, a skill that served him throughout his life. He possessed physical copies of two documents while he drafted his Declaration of Independence: his draft preamble to the Virginia constitution, which he adapted into his charges against the King; and a draft of George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, modified by a Virginia Convention committee, which he used to develop the opening of his Declaration (126). Both documents were themselves “direct descendants” of the English Declaration of Rights. Mason’s document was a radicalized version of its namesake’s account of the people’s rights and liberties, beginning with the equality of all men, the people’s control of the government, and the duties of the people’s government, including the people’s right to replace the old government should it fail in its duties. The Virginia Declaration of Rights had other similarities to the English Declaration, and sometimes it copied exact phrases with minor grammatical changes; it also incorporated phrases from works familiar to colonists, like Cato’s Letters. Jefferson’s draft Virginia constitution bore greater similarities with the English Declaration, but his statement of rights was more radical and his syntax more forceful than what Mason and the Virginia committee produced.

The Declaration of Independence differed from other documents with its addition of a preface. It was a practice in Congress to write prefaces to resolutions; Jefferson drafted one such document long before he drafted the Declaration of Independence. The preface was a device to hook the intended audience, and in the case of Congress’s Declaration, the intended audience was potential allies in Europe, particularly France. When Congress sent a copy to its emissary in France, it was lost for months; it finally arrived when the French Court had already heard the news from North America, so the emissary had to smooth some ruffled feathers. Congress also sent copies to individual state and local governments, and to commanding officers of the Continental Army, which indicates that the Declaration’s intended audience was mostly the American people. France agreed to be an ally due to the country’s rivalry with Great Britain rather than to the Americans’ cause. The Declaration was more useful in the United States because it informed the people about Congress’s decision and its reasons, and it inspired civilians and soldiers to support the cause.

The Declaration also spread through public readings. He filled his copy with markings for stops and pauses, like sheet music, and he intentionally used rhetorical devices that would both look and sound well. His opening sentence in the draft was an improvement on openings in similar documents—it “immediately conveyed a sense of epic importance” (132). The draft that the Committee of Five submitted to Congress on June 28, 1776, was a product of countless rhetorical choices that Jefferson made in consultation with Adams and others and with reference to previous declarations and petitions. Maier pronounces the draft:

[A] mixture of beautifully crafted passages, some of which had begun with previously written prose, and others that remained overstated or overlong and so gave evidence of both its draftsman’s feelings and the ‘haste’ with which the draft had been written (143).

4. Congress’s Declaration

Congress’s official record from July 2 to July 4 didn’t include details about the editorial process; neither did delegates’ correspondence. The only known record of Congress’s editing of the draft declaration exists in Thomas Jefferson’s contemporaneous notes. Historians must speculate about the Committee of Five’s editorial contributions and the practicalities involved in the process for the Committee of the Whole, meaning the entire Congress. There was an urgent need in Congress to disseminate a formal declaration, which explains why it edited the draft, to hasten the process.

Many alterations were syntactical, which bothered Jefferson, but more changes were deletions of parts that seemed too extreme or problematic. When Congress reached the charges against the King, it continued to alter and delete all except one charge, the hiring of foreign mercenary soldiers, to which it added stronger language to reflect constituents’ feelings (145). Congress’s edits mostly improved the draft’s tone and accuracy. One passage, however, was completely crossed out: The slave trade passage was too contradictory, so “[f]or the time being, it was wise at least not to call attention to the persistence of the slave trade and to the anomaly of American slavery” (146-47). Congress did keep the part about Lord Dunmore trying to turn enslaved people against their enslavers. Once the process was finished, the draft declaration had 19 charges instead of 21.

The remainder of the document needed heavy editing and the delegates in Congress did a good job doing it. Jefferson didn’t think so, as evidenced in his notes. Congress substituted language from Richard Henry Lee’s resolution for Jefferson’s conclusion, added references to God, and left the final sentences alone. Jefferson grew more miserable with every well-considered change because he forgot his role was draftsman, not author, and the declaration was “a public document, an authenticated expression of the American mind,” not a creative writing endeavor (149). He wrote that Benjamin Franklin told him a funny editing story to cheer him up, but it didn’t change his belief that his version was better than Congress’s version, the official Declaration of Independence. Some friends, like Richard Henry Lee, agreed with Jefferson about which version was better. In the end, Congress’s Declaration became the document Americans know, although they incorrectly believe Jefferson wrote it all. Maier applauds Congress’s achievement, which wouldn’t have been possible without Jefferson’s draft.

On July 4, Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, which every delegate signed, except John Dickinson, according to Jefferson’s notes. There’s confusion surrounding the accuracy of the date, and added to that is the question of why the delegates signed the document since it wasn’t a traditional practice in English politics. Congress seemed to pick and choose other documents to sign but didn’t indicate the reason. Historians had to study the documents in question to glean a reason or reasons (151-52). The Declaration of Independence was signed most likely because the document constituted a pledge. Congress was cautious about sharing it, however; it wasn’t until January 1777 that Congress sent “authenticated copies” with the delegates’ names to every state (153).