Chapter 2.0. Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, Introduction

This chapter examines Thomas Jefferson and his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, presenting excerpted and abridged material from Pauline Maier’s book, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Vintage Books, 1997), ch. 3, “Mr. Jefferson and his Editors,” pp. 97-153.

This introductory section provides excerpts from Maier’s opening description of how Jefferson and the “committee of five,” which Congress appointed to draft the declaration on June 11, 1776, began their work (Maier, pp. 97-105). Among other things, this description identifies two key texts that Jefferson used as models for the Declaration, both of which had been inspired by the English Bill of Rights (1689). These two texts are:

1) The Virginia Declaration of Rights, written in June 1776 by George Mason. For more on this text, which served as a model for both the Declaration’s preamble and the later U.S. Bill of Rights, see below, Module 6, Ch. 1, Introduction (M6.1).

2) The draft of the preamble that Jefferson had just finished for the Virginia Constitution. This text served as a model for the Declaration’s list of accusations. (For this text, Jefferson had in turn drawn on his first publication, the Summary View of the Rights of British America, of 1774; see below in the next sub-chapter.)

The Drafting Committee

The committee Congress appointed to draft a declaration of Independence left no minutes of its proceedings, and the account of its work written nearest the event, Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes of Proceed­ings in the Continental Congress,”  is succinct to a fault. Members of the committee, Jefferson said, “desired” or asked him to prepare it; “it was accordingly done, and being approved by them, I reported it to the house on Friday the 28th of June.” Both Jefferson and John Adams later helped flesh out that bare-bones story.

Adams and Jefferson dominate the scene in part because they lived long enough to tell the story to a generation of in­terested younger Americans, but also because they in fact played central roles in the Declaration’s development. They were a curious team, the short, stocky, feisty New Englander, who spoke his mind even more openly on paper than he did in Congress (which is one reason why Adams is eternally quoted), a doer who was well read, particularly on law and politics, and the somewhat younger Virginian, tall and slim; as shy and reserved as Adams was frank and open, and probably more thin-skinned than Adams, with whom he shared a love of read­ing, but on a broader range of topics.

But the other committee members, particularly Con­necticut’s Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston of New York also contributed to the creation of the Declaration. So did Benjamin Franklin, although his involvement was late and brief. In the end, the efforts of these five men produced a workable draft that the Congress itself, sitting as the Committee of the Whole, made into a distin­guished document by an act of group editing.

Jef­ferson did not have the luxury of, say, sixteen or seventeen days to write the Declaration, as one might assume considering the time be­tween the appointment of the drafting committee and its submission of a draft to Congress. He had to sandwich that job in among his var­ious other duties. Fortunately, Jefferson could write quickly. Writers forced to com­plete an assignment under great time pressure often look around for texts they can adapt for their purposes, and Jefferson managed to find two.

One was the draft preamble for the Virginia constitution that he had just finished and which was itself based upon the English Decla­ration of Rights, which, after being passed by Parliament and approved by William and Mary, became the Bill of Rights of 1689. The other was a preliminary version of the Virginia Dec­laration of Rights, which had been drafted for the convention sitting in Williamsburg by George Mason in June, 1776, an older man whom Jefferson knew and respected.

By modern lights, Jefferson’s use of texts by other au­thors might be considered to detract from his achievement. In the eighteenth century, however, educated people regarded with disdain the striving for novelty. Achievement lay instead in the creative adap­tation of preexisting models to different circumstances, and the high­est praise of all went to imitations whose excellence exceeded that of the examples that inspired them.