Chapter 2.0. Congress’s Declaration
In this last section of her chapter on the drafting of the Declaration, Maier discusses how Congress edited Jefferson’s draft (pp. 143-53). It completed this work on July 4, 1776. For a version of the text of the Declaration that tries to show both Jefferson’s draft and Congress’s final version, see below, ch. 2.1.
Congress’s Declaration
On July 2, after unanimously affirming that “these United Colonies are, and of right, ought to be, Free and Independent States,” the Continental Congress resolved itself into a Committee of the Whole to consider the draft declaration of Independence submitted by the Committee of Five. At that point the official record of Congress’s proceedings falls silent…, leaving no official record of their proceedings beyond its fruit-the Declaration that, reconstituted as the Continental Congress, they finally adopted…
Some of its changes were verbal. These are perhaps the most moving testament to the delegates’ determination to make the Declaration as good as possible. They left most of the well-worked-over opening paragraphs untouched, except Jefferson’s “inherent and inalienable rights” became “certain inalienable rights” [paragraph B] which was better. (“Inalienable” seems to have become “unalienable” only later, in the course of printing the documents.) At Jefferson’s reference to “a long train of abuses and usurpations, begun at a distinguished period & pursuing invariably the same object,” the delegates cut out “begun at a distinguished period &” [paragraph B], which was meant to emphasize that the King’s actions had occurred over a long period of time…, but the phrase made the sentence cumbersome.
More often, however, the delegates cut back or eliminated the more extreme and untenable assertions in the committee draft. In the statement that necessity forced the Americans to “expunge” their former systems of government, the delegates substituted “alter” for “expunge” [paragraph B]. There were, after all, some parts of their former governments worth keeping–representative assemblies, for example–so “alter” was more accurate. Where Jefferson had accused the King of “unremitting” injuries, the delegates charged him with “repeated” injuries, which was easier to prove, and then cut out the assertion that there appeared in the King’s conduct “no solitary fact to contradict the uniform tenor of the rest” [paragraph B]. They also crossed out the phrase “for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood” from the end of that paragraph, so it ended simply “to prove this let facts be submitted to a candid world” [paragraph B]… The change made the connection between that and the next section of the document, and so the Declaration’s overall structure, more emphatic, which was all to the good.
What adjustments the committee made in the individual charges against the King were, with one exception, of the same sort. The exception concerned the King’s “transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries” to America [charge 16]. There the delegates, reflecting the outrage of their constituents, made Jefferson’s denunciation even harsher, describing the act as “scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages” and inserting “totally” before Jefferson’s statement that it was “unworthy the head of a civilized nation.” Everywhere else they moderated Jefferson’s claims.
Where the draft declaration accused George III of dissolving houses of representatives “repeatedly & continually,” the delegates crossed out “& continually,” which went too far [charge 5]. They tightened up the statement that the King “has suffered the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these states by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers,” so it said he “obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent” [charge 8]. The complaint, remember, was mainly North Carolina’s, so the reference to “some of these states” served curiously not to modify the charge but to reduce its accuracy. And the administration of justice there had not “totally” ceased since a political compromise allowed the inferior courts to continue functioning; only the superior courts were closed. The revised text was nearer the truth.
The delegates took the “‘our” out of the charge that the King had made “our judges dependent on his will alone,” perhaps again for accuracy’s sake [charge 9]. Judges, after all, had been Crown appointees, and so servants of the King. The delegates also cut the words “and ships of war” from the charge that the King had kept armies in the colonies without the permission of their legislatures [charge 11], probably because the jurisdiction of those legislatures over the sea was open to dispute. In the end, the King stood accused of depriving the colonists of trial by jury “in many cases,” not universally [charge 13.5]; he was not charged with withdrawing governors who had in fact often been forced from office [charge 14], and he was said simply to have abdicated government by declaring the colonists “out of his protection” – which recalled the Prohibitory Act – “and waging war against us.”
Above all, however, the delegates eliminated entirely Jefferson’s long passage on the slave trade [charge 18]. In the notes he kept of Congress’s proceedings, Jefferson said that change was made “in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia,” which had never tried to restrain the slave trade and, indeed, wanted it to continue, with the consent of ”Northern brethren” who had few slaves but were sensitive on the issue because they had been “pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
Maybe so, but the very acknowledgment that colonists had been in the past or were at present willing participants in the slave trade undermined the assertion that “the Christian king of Great Britain” was alone responsible for that outrage on humanity. The Americans were destined to receive criticism enough for asserting the “inalienable” rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” while themselves owning slaves. Some people recognized the contradiction and were ready to move toward greater consistency between principle and practice, but so monumental a change as the abolition of slavery could not be accomplished in a moment. For 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.
The delegates did not, however, eliminate all reference to Lord Dunmore’s effort to turn slaves against their masters [In Nov., 1775, Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s royal governor, issued a proclamation that offered freedom to any slaves who left masters that were in rebellion against British authority; tens of thousands of slaves did so in the early years of the Revolution]. As the state and local resolutions testified, [this action] had powerfully alienated many colonists from British rule, and to which Jefferson referred at the end of his long passage on the slave trade. After omitting that charge and another, which accused the King of inciting “treasonable insurrections of our fellow citizens,” the delegates inserted into the seventeenth charge [renumbered as charge 18], which castigated the King for turning Indians against the people of the frontiers, an accusation that he had “excited domestic insurrections among us,” which covered both slaves and Loyalists.
The final Declaration therefore included not twenty-one but nineteen charges against the King-surely enough to demonstrate a “long train of abuses” and a “history of repeated injuries.” Moreover, having eliminated the old eighteenth charge on “treasonable insurrections” with its reference to “our fellow citizens,” the delegates were free to use that phrase in place of “others” in the next charge, so the King was accused of constraining “our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country” [charge 17].
By then the delegates seem to have built up steam, and really ripped into the rest of the document. And, indeed, it badly needed editing; Jefferson had probably lacked time to work over the final portions of the document with the same care he devoted to its opening. His reference to the Americans as “a people who mean to be free” became “a free people” [charge 19]. Much better… Then out went the strained assertion that “future ages will scarce believe” that one man had “in only twelve years” attempted to found so “broad and undisguised” a foundation for tyranny over a people “fostered and fixed in principles of freedom” [charge 19]. Again, less was more.
On that same principle, Congress reduced Jefferson’s overlong attack on the British people to a more lean and constrained statement. Out went his claim that the Americans had settled the country without any British help; the remaining assertion that “we reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here” then became more justifiable [paragraph C]. From the beginning of the conflict, the colonists had insisted that in coming to America their ancestors had yielded none of the rights of Englishmen: That could be construed as reminding the British people of the “circumstances of our emigration.”
Out went the detailed references of the British people’s returning the parliamentary “disturbers of our harmony” to power and to their allowing the King to send mercenaries “to invade and destroy us.” It was enough to say that they proved “deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity,” and that “we must therefore acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation” – cutting out the “eternal” before “separation” – to which the delegates added, “and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends” [paragraph C]. Those words were Jefferson’s, but their grace was lost in his own draft, buried as they were in the midst of false stops and restartings.
This was no hack editing job: the delegates who labored over the draft Declaration had a splendid ear for language. Jefferson, however, did not see it that way. The changes in the passages on the British people were made, he said, because “the pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England still keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of many.” But the rewritten section remained severely critical of the British people. The language, however, was more restrained; the conclusion more eloquent, and the whole more in keeping with the economy of Jefferson’s opening paragraphs.
Finally, Congress substituted the words of its own July 2 resolution – the composition of another Virginian, Richard Henry Lee – for much of Jefferson’s conclusion, and eliminated his troubling suggestion, so out of keeping with the increasingly orthodox American conception of the Empire as a collection of otherwise independent communities bound together under the Crown, that the Americans might once have had a more direct political connection with the people or Parliament of Britain [paragraph C].
It also added two references to God, which were conspicuously missing in Jefferson’s draft, where God appeared only as the author of nature’s laws and the endower of natural rights, and honor alone was “sacred.” At the start of the final paragraph Congress inserted an appeal to “the supreme judge of the world” to affirm “the rectitude of our intentions,” which echoed similar provisions in several state and local resolutions on Independence, and nearer the end of the document it also referred to the delegates’ “firm reliance on the protection of divine providence” [paragraph D]. Americans held strong religious beliefs in 1776, and the Declaration was meant to state the convictions of the country’s “good people.” The delegates retained, however, Jefferson’s concluding sentences, including its memorable mutual pledge of “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
The more alterations Congress made on his draft, the more miserable Jefferson became. He had forgotten, as has posterity, that a draftsman is not an author. What generations of Americans came to revere was not Jefferson’s but Congress’s Declaration, the work not of a single man, or even a committee, but of a larger body of men with the good sense to recognize a “pretty good” draft when they saw it, and who were able to identify and eliminate Jefferson’s more outlandish assertions and unnecessary words. The delegates managed to make the Declaration at once more accurate and more consonant with the convictions of their constituents, and to enhance both its power and its eloquence.
FINALLY on July 4, the Committee of the Whole reported that it had agreed upon a Declaration. Congress’s journal says that the text was then read and that Congress accepted it, ordered it to be authenticated and printed under the supervision of the drafting committee, and provided for its distribution and proclamation.
The Journals of the Second Continental Congress say that on July 19, after New York’s approval became known, Congress resolved “that the Declaration passed on the 4th, be fairly engrossed on parchment, with the title and stile of ‘The unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America,’ and that the same, when engrossed, be signed by every member of Congress,” and that on August 2 “the declaration of independence being engrossed and compared was signed,” although some members added their signatures at later times.