Drafting the Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence was not written in a single inspired sitting, nor did it emerge fully formed from a single mind. Its composition was a deliberate, collaborative process that compressed months of political deliberation into roughly three weeks of intensive drafting and revision during June 1776. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author, drew upon a rich intellectual tradition of natural rights philosophy, his own prior writings, and the political language circulating through colonial America to produce a document that his contemporaries recognized as exceptional—even as they substantially revised it.

Jefferson’s Selection as Drafter

When the Committee of Five was appointed on June 11, 1776, to prepare a declaration of independence, the committee’s first task was to decide who would compose the initial draft. John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were the most prominent members, but both deferred to Jefferson. Adams later offered several reasons for this decision: Jefferson was a Virginian, and it was politically expedient for a southerner to take the lead; Jefferson was less unpopular in Congress than Adams himself; and Jefferson possessed a “happy talent for composition.” Franklin, at seventy years old and suffering from gout, was not inclined to undertake the labor. Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston, the other committee members, lacked the literary reputation to carry the assignment.

Jefferson’s qualifications extended beyond his writing ability. He had been a member of the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress since 1775 and had already demonstrated his skill as a political writer. His Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) had articulated many of the arguments that would appear in the Declaration, and his draft preamble for the Virginia constitution, composed in the spring of 1776, contained language and ideas that he would recycle for the national declaration. Jefferson was also widely read in political philosophy, history, and law, giving him the intellectual resources to synthesize diverse sources into a coherent document.

The Writing Process

Jefferson’s Workspace and Method

Jefferson composed the Declaration during the third week of June 1776, working primarily in a parlor on the second floor of a house at Seventh and Market Streets in Philadelphia, rented from a bricklayer named Jacob Graff. He wrote at a portable lap desk of his own design—a hinged mahogany board that could be propped at an angle for writing—which he kept throughout his life and which is now in the Smithsonian Institution.

Jefferson’s working method involved producing a rough draft, revising it, and then preparing a “fair copy” for the committee. He appears to have written at least one preliminary draft before producing the version he showed to Adams and Franklin. The surviving fragments of Jefferson’s drafts, preserved in the Library of Congress, reveal his careful attention to phrasing and his willingness to experiment with different formulations before settling on final language.

Sources and Influences

Jefferson famously claimed in 1825 that the Declaration was not intended to introduce new principles but rather to “place before mankind the common sense of the subject.” He drew upon several identifiable sources:

The most direct textual predecessor was George Mason’s draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette on June 12, 1776, while Jefferson was composing the national Declaration. Mason’s assertion that “all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights” clearly influenced Jefferson’s formulation, though Jefferson’s version was more concise and rhetorically powerful.

John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) provided the theoretical framework for the Declaration’s argument about the purposes of government and the right of revolution. Locke’s language about life, liberty, and property was adapted—though not simply copied—into Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Scholars have debated the extent to which Jefferson departed from Locke in substituting “happiness” for “property.” Some argue that Jefferson was following the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson, who had linked the pursuit of happiness to moral philosophy. Others suggest that Jefferson drew from the writings of the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel, whose Law of Nations (1758) was widely read in colonial America.

The English Declaration of Rights of 1689, which had formalized the settlement of the Glorious Revolution, provided a structural model: a list of grievances against a monarch followed by a declaration of rights. Jefferson was also familiar with the political writings of Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (the Cato’s Letters), and the radical Whig tradition that had shaped colonial political thought throughout the eighteenth century.

Jefferson also drew upon the language of the numerous state and local declarations of independence that had been produced in the preceding months. The Mecklenburg Resolves, the instructions given by various Virginia counties to their delegates, and the declarations produced by towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut all contributed phrases and arguments that Jefferson synthesized into a unified document.

The Committee’s Review

Jefferson shared his draft with Adams and Franklin before presenting it to the full committee. Adams recalled the process decades later:

“We were all in haste. Congress was impatient, and the Instrument was reported, as I believe, in Jefferson’s own handwriting, as he first drew it. I do not remember that I made or suggested a single alteration.”

This recollection, written in 1822, likely understated Adams’s involvement. Franklin made at least one significant change: where Jefferson had written “sacred and undeniable” truths, Franklin substituted “self-evident.” This revision was philosophically consequential. “Sacred and undeniable” grounded the truths in religious authority; “self-evident” grounded them in rationalist epistemology, suggesting that the truths required no external validation because they were apparent to any rational mind. Franklin also reportedly suggested changing “reduce them to arbitrary power” to “reduce them under absolute despotism,” strengthening the rhetorical force of the grievance.

The full Committee of Five apparently made additional revisions, though the precise nature and extent of these changes remain uncertain because the committee’s working papers have not survived. Jefferson prepared a fair copy incorporating the committee’s changes, which was submitted to Congress on June 28, 1776.

Congressional Revision

The Editing Process

Congress debated the draft Declaration on July 2, 3, and 4, sitting as a committee of the whole. The delegates subjected Jefferson’s text to line-by-line scrutiny, making numerous changes that, taken together, deleted roughly one-quarter of the original draft. Jefferson sat through this process in evident distress. Adams later wrote that Jefferson was “not a good speaker” in debate and “could not address the assembly” effectively in defense of his own work. Franklin, seated beside him, reportedly offered consolation, telling a story about a hatter who had his signboard progressively edited by friends until nothing remained.

Congress made several categories of changes. Some were stylistic improvements: tightening Jefferson’s occasionally verbose prose, eliminating redundancies, and sharpening the rhetorical force of particular passages. The phrase “amount of their salaries” was changed to “amount and payment of their salaries,” adding specificity. “In every stage of these oppressions” became “in every stage of these usurpations,” a stronger legal term.

Some changes reflected political sensitivities. A passage criticizing the British people for their failure to support the colonial cause was substantially shortened, perhaps because Congress did not wish to alienate potential British sympathizers. References to “Scotch and other foreign auxiliaries” were removed to avoid offending Scottish-born residents of the colonies and potential Scottish allies.

The Deleted Slavery Passage

The most consequential deletion was the removal of Jefferson’s extended condemnation of the slave trade. In the original draft, Jefferson had written:

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”

Jefferson went on to blame the king for blocking colonial attempts to restrict or end the slave trade, calling this “piratical warfare” the work of “the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.” He also included an oblique reference to the king’s encouragement of enslaved people to flee to British lines, characterizing this as the king “exciting those very people to rise in arms among us.”

This passage was removed at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia, whose economies depended heavily on enslaved labor. The New England delegates, whose merchants had been active participants in the transatlantic slave trade, did not strenuously object to the deletion. Jefferson, though privately dismayed, did not publicly protest. The deletion illustrated the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Revolution: the colonies’ most eloquent statement of human liberty was produced by a political body that could not afford to confront the institution of slavery directly.

The irony was compounded by the fact that Jefferson himself was a slaveholder who owned more than six hundred enslaved people over the course of his life. His condemnation of the slave trade, while genuine in its moral outrage, was directed at the British role in the trade rather than at the institution of slavery as practiced in the colonies. This selective moral vision would characterize much of the revolutionary generation’s approach to slavery, as explored further in discussions of the Revolution’s relationship with slavery.

The Final Text

The version adopted by Congress on July 4, 1776, was leaner and in many respects stronger than Jefferson’s original draft. The congressional edits had tightened the prose, eliminated some of Jefferson’s more ornate phrasing, and removed the passages that threatened to fracture the fragile coalition supporting independence. What remained was a document of remarkable rhetorical power and philosophical coherence.

Jefferson, however, remained dissatisfied with the revisions for the rest of his life. He sent copies of his original draft to friends, including Richard Henry Lee, with the deleted passages marked, making clear that he considered the congressional edits to be mutilations rather than improvements. In his Autobiography (1821), he reproduced both his original draft and the adopted version side by side, implicitly inviting readers to judge which was superior.

The Question of Plagiarism

Scholars have occasionally raised the question of whether Jefferson plagiarized portions of the Declaration. The most frequently cited parallel is a passage in Jefferson’s draft that closely resembles language from John Locke’s Second Treatise. Jefferson’s response to such accusations was that the Declaration was not intended to be original but rather to express the consensus of the American mind. In a letter to Henry Lee in 1825, Jefferson wrote that the Declaration’s object was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of” but to express “the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain, firm, and comprehensive as to command their assent.”

This defense is consistent with eighteenth-century literary conventions, which did not regard the adaptation of admired passages as plagiarism in the modern sense. Jefferson’s genius lay not in originality of thought but in synthesis and expression—in the ability to distill a vast body of political philosophy and colonial grievance into a document of extraordinary clarity and force.

Preservation and Legacy

Jefferson retained his working drafts of the Declaration, which eventually became part of his papers at the Library of Congress. The “original Rough draught,” with its interlinear corrections and marginal additions, provides an invaluable record of the document’s evolution. Scholars have used these drafts to reconstruct the editorial process and to understand the choices that Jefferson and his editors made.

The process by which a thirty-three-year-old Virginia planter, working under intense time pressure and drawing upon centuries of political thought, compressed that inheritance into three weeks of drafting illustrates both the power of individual creativity and the collaborative nature of revolutionary politics. The document’s evolution from Jefferson’s initial draft through committee revision and congressional editing demonstrates how the Declaration was, from its inception, a collective product—a statement not of one man’s philosophy but of a political community’s shared convictions and strategic calculations.

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