Philadelphia, July 2, 1776
Mud-spattered and drenched, still wearing his boots and spurs, Delaware’s Caesar Rodney arrived at the Pennsylvania State House just as his fellow delegates were about to debate the most important issue they would face in their lifetimes.
The forty-seven-year-old member of the Second Continental Congress had endured a night of hard riding through raging thunderstorms, galloping a grueling seventy-five miles from his family plantation just outside of Dover. He may have made the trip entirely on horseback—a lone night rider slashing through the wet, lightning-illuminated countryside—or begun his journey by horse-drawn carriage before abandoning his wheeled transport for the sureness and swiftness of a saddled steed when the roads became thick with mud.
Either way, he arrived in Pennsylvania exhausted and ill, but on time, which was all that really mattered. Rodney and his fellow Delaware delegate Thomas McKean, who had frantically sent for Rodney a day earlier and met him at the front doors when he mounted the statehouse steps, hurried to join the assemblage. Then the doors were closed tight again as members of Congress carried on their work enclosed in a cocoon of secrecy.
The vast majority of Rodney’s colleagues were thrilled to see him; as he entered the room, sopping wet, many delegates gathered around. Rodney encapsulated the reason for their enthusiasm in a letter he wrote to his brother two days later: “I arrived in Congress (tho detained by thunder and rain) [in] time enough to give my voice in the matter of independence.”
* * *
THE DELAWARE STATESMAN AND military leader had served as a member of the colonial militia, a representative in the colonial legislature, and a member of the Stamp Act Congress in 1765. Nonetheless, Caesar Rodney was an unlikely member of the Continental Congress to have completed a heroic sojourn on horseback that some compared to Paul Revere’s midnight ride more than a year earlier in Boston.
First, Rodney suffered from debilitating attacks of asthma, “smart fits,” as he called them; they hindered his breathing and often sapped his strength for hours at a time.
Worse, Rodney suffered from ravaging facial cancer, a particularly horrific form of the disease which would kill him only a few years later. Eight years earlier, he had contemplated sailing to London for surgery to remove an enormous tumor from the side of his nose, until he learned that Dr. Thomas Bond, a renowned physician in Philadelphia, had treated the rare affliction in another man. Before the surgery, Rodney confessed to his brother, Thomas, that the procedure would be a “dreadful undertaking … that will be attendant with great danger.” Thomas expressed his alarm, urging Caesar to give his decision “serious consideration, as your health and even your life may depend on the treatment.” Caesar should not be worried about the medical expenses of surgery, his brother stressed, and if he were unsure about Bond’s skills, he should still consider a voyage to London.
Days later, Caesar Rodney underwent the excruciating and less-than-precise surgery that was standard for his day. When the surgeon extracted the “hard-crusted matter, which had risen so high,” he left a bone-deep hole in Rodney’s face that extended from the corner of his eye to more than halfway alongside the length his nose. While the surgery eased his pain temporarily, the cancer proved to be “extremely obstinate … [and] tedious, as well as a painful business” for the rest of his life. And if his physical discomfort were not enervating enough, Rodney was also deeply self-conscious about his facial disfigurement—he usually wore a green silk scarf as a veil to cover the affected flesh.
Despite his afflictions, and despite reported warnings from his physician that an intense ride at full gallop could prove fatal, Rodney did not hesitate for a moment when an express rider, dispatched by McKean, arrived at Rodney’s plantation on July 1, 1776, with a simple but urgent message: he was needed immediately back in Congress. Rodney had attended the congressional sessions in Philadelphia throughout the spring but had returned to Delaware as part of his militia duties to quell a Tory uprising in his county. Caesar Rodney, like McKean, was a firm believer in the American colonies separating from England and becoming independent, but a large minority of his fellow Delaware residents remained loyal to the Crown. Such sentiments were not unusual in the more moderate middle colonies, even at this late date, even after what Rodney and his allies considered repeated and egregious abuses by the king and Parliament.
The message from McKean was simple and straightforward: unless he made his way back to Philadelphia forthwith, all they had worked for could be in jeopardy.
Caesar Rodney never recorded his thoughts about the ride that would one day make him the subject of flourishing poetry and convince Delaware leaders to issue a coin and erect statues and monuments in his honor. Perhaps his focus was on the struggle to see and breathe as wind and rain lashed his face and his veil, as his horse fought for purchase on slick, mud-clogged trails, as he rode northward through Dover, over Duck Creek to Cantwell’s Bridge (now Odessa), through St. Georges, to Tybout’s Corner, and then through New Castle (then the state capital), Wilmington, Brandywine Village, Upland, and on into Philadelphia.
Yet, as he passed through forests and towns, past sweeping farms and old taverns, as he crossed over swollen rivers and creeks, likely waiting impatiently at delayed ferry crossings while sheets of rain engulfed him, Rodney must have pondered the circumstances that made this journey a necessity that, inexorably, was leading him to a rendezvous with destiny, for Delaware and for the American colonies.
* * *
WHILE WE KNOW THAT the messenger conveyed the urgency with which Rodney was needed, we don’t know how much detail he conveyed about the dramatic events of recent days.
The Continental Congress had debated for most of July 1, and as the afternoon wore on, organized itself into a committee of the whole to “take into consideration the resolution respecting independency.” When a preliminary vote on the issue was taken, it became clear that only nine of the thirteen colonies clearly favored separation from Britain. Four of Pennsylvania’s seven delegates had opposed the motion (much to Benjamin Franklin’s chagrin and to the dismay of popular sentiment in Pennsylvania). New York had abstained, awaiting new instructions from its state legislature—their twelve-month-old previous instructions allowed them to do nothing that would impede reconciliation. South Carolina, which had previously vigorously opposed many of the king’s policies and generally supported the New England colonies’ clamor for independence, surprisingly, voted no. And Delaware, with only two of its three delegates present, was divided—McKean ardently in favor and George Read believing it was too radical a move. The missing Delaware delegate, the state’s most supportive proponent of American independence, was Caesar Rodney.
While the nine colonies in favor of independence—New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia—formed a clear majority, supporters believed that such a monumental step demanded more. It required the kind of unshakeable solidarity that could only be achieved through unanimity or near unanimity. Only such a show of strength would make clear, both at home and abroad, the unshakable nature of their resolve.
As late afternoon approached on July 1, South Carolina’s Edward Rutledge rescued the moment by asking that the final congressional decision be put off until the next day. Why? He implied that his delegation, though it disapproved of the motion, might vote in favor “for the sake of unanimity.” John Adams of Massachusetts, one of the Congress’s most passionate voices for independence, agreed. The rest of the majority concurred. It was at this point that McKean acted “without delay,” dispatching the express rider to Delaware, “at my private expense,” to deliver the urgent message to Caesar Rodney.
* * *
JOHN ADAMS DESCRIBED Caesar Rodney as “the oddest looking man in the world—thin and slender as a reed—pale—his face is not bigger than a large apple,” but the Massachusetts delegate saw something of himself in his Delaware counterpart. For despite Rodney’s strange appearance, Adams was also quick to note that Delaware’s midnight rider had a “sense of fire, spirit, wit and humour in his countenance.”
Adams was among the most jubilant to see Rodney walk into the Pennsylvania State House—one day it would be called Independence Hall—on July 2, 1776. The Massachusetts delegate had worked tirelessly toward this moment. Boston had been at the center of the storm between the Crown and the colonies for several years—feeling the brunt of the Stamp Act, the Intolerable Acts, the Tea Act, the opening volleys of war at the battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775—and Adams had been both a witness and a participant. His experience fueled his philosophy about liberty, freedom, and the role of government. “The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with the power to endanger the public liberty,” he wrote in 1772, one of many diary entries on this topic.
When he arrived in Philadelphia in early February, Adams had been fired with emotion about the potential magnitude of events taking place inside the Pennsylvania State House. But he soon discovered that his grueling, two-week, bone-chilling, 400-mile trip on horseback across treacherous ice-rutted, snow-packed roads and frozen streams proved less arduous than hammering out an agreement these last few months among strong-willed, passionate, quarrelsome, and in most cases brilliant representatives from across the colonies.
Early in their debates, Adams had observed that members of the Second Continental Congress were equally divided three ways in their views about the colonies’ relationship with the mother country: “one third Tories,” who opposed independence from England; “and [one] third timid,” who were too cautious to commit one way or another; and “one-third true blue,” who wanted to declare independence quickly. To his fellow Massachusetts residents whose sympathies fell in the latter category, he implored patience. If the clamor for independence among some was to build to a crescendo among many, it would take time and the power of persuasive arguments—and for supporters of independence, political timing was everything. Proposing independence too soon would likely doom it to failure, and what message would that convey to both the Crown and the colonists? Waiting too long could see any momentum dissipate, an equally unpalatable result.
One by one, events helped Adams and the other independence advocates make their case.
* * *
IN FEBRUARY, WORD HAD arrived in Philadelphia that Parliament, in late December 1775, had voted to prohibit all trade with the colonies “during the continuance of the present Rebellion.”
The measure put American vessels outside the king’s protection, declaring all colonial vessels, whether in harbor or at sea, forfeit to the Crown. Orders issued in the king’s name essentially made American ships, ports, and sailors targets of the British Royal Navy. Further, Parliament denounced as traitors all Americans who did not unconditionally submit to the Crown; every member of the Congress knew the punishment for treason was death by hanging. The Prohibitory Act, as it was known, was a blow to those who sought some kind of negotiated settlement with the mother country. John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, put it succinctly if inartfully: “The making [of] all our Vessells lawful Prize don’t look like a Reconciliation.”
Meanwhile, a pamphlet called Common Sense, by an anonymous author—later revealed as a poor English immigrant named Thomas Paine—was sweeping the colonies with its call for continued war against the Crown and for eventual colonial independence. It attacked the idea of a British monarchy and asked its readers: “Why is it that we hesitate?… The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.… For God’s sake, let us come to a final separation.… The birthday of a new world is at hand.” It was the boldest call in print to date for American independence. Indeed, Paine captured the imagination of many Americans when he said that war had made independence necessary and desirable.
The colonies owed it to the dead militiamen on Lexington Green and army troops elsewhere to discard the idea of reconciliation as a “fallacious dream.” In Paine’s words, the “blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ’TIS TIME TO PART.”
* * *
THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS DROVE its first major stake into the ground on May 15, 1776; coincidentally, so did the colony of Virginia, although the latter’s news would not reach Philadelphia for another two weeks. This one-two punch in favor of independence all but slammed the door on any chance of full reconciliation between Great Britain and the American colonies and laid the groundwork for all that followed.
In Williamsburg, the Virginia Convention approved a resolution instructing its delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to propose that the American colonies declare themselves free and independent, “absolved from all allegiance to, or dependence on, the Crown or Parliament of Great Britain.” The convention then adopted George Mason’s resolves—sixteen articles of freedom known as the Virginia Declaration of Rights—and in the following days and weeks developed a new independent government for Virginia, with Patrick Henry as the newly elected first governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
It was not that the Virginia Convention was the first to take up the issue of colonial independence; other colonies had endorsed the idea. What made the Virginia vote so important was that it was the first such measure to order its delegates to propose independence before the Continental Congress.
Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, congressional delegates, still unaware of the Virginia vote, adopted their own May 15 resolution, drafted by John Adams, recommending that the various colonies assume all the powers of government, “to secure the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular, and America in general.” In a preamble to a resolution that left no room for reconciliation with Great Britain, Adams wrote that the “exercise of any authority” by the Crown should be “totally suppressed” by the colonies in response to the “hostile invasions and cruel depredations” of the mother country. The power and uncompromising nature of Adams’s language left some delegates, even those who generally supported independence, feeling that Congress was acting prematurely. Pennsylvania’s James Wilson asked, after two days of acrimonious debate: “Before we are prepared to build a new house, why should we pull down the old one, and expose ourselves to all the inclemencies of the season?”
Adams was having none of it. His motion was risky, yes, but America had no choice but to proceed with boldness; timidity was a sign of weakness and would only encourage the king to further trample on colonial rights. Thanks to the force of Adams’s will and determination, Congress on May 15 approved the preamble and the resolution. The Massachusetts delegate was elated. Congress, Adams declared immodestly, had “passed the most important resolution that was ever taken in America.”
Other delegates agreed. Caesar Rodney, prior to returning to Delaware, wrote to his brother Thomas of the May 15 vote: “Even the cool considerate men think it amounts to a declaration of independence.” Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry predicted that “a final Declaration … of independency is approaching with great rapidity.” Gerry had also noticed that the mind-set of Pennsylvania residents had switched toward independence. “The spirit of the people is great,” he said.
* * *
AS IF THE SEPARATE but intertwined May 15 events in Williamsburg and Philadelphia did not provide enough drama in the story of the republic’s birth, a third storyline emerged almost simultaneously that would shape the Congress and the country. A thirty-three-year-old Virginia delegate, who had left the Congress the previous December to care for his family, rode into Philadelphia on May 14 after a strained, one-week journey from his beloved home. He returned to Pennsylvania in an “uneasy, anxious state”—mourning the death of his mother who had succumbed to a stroke less than two months earlier; battling debilitating migraines; and struggling with uncertainty about his upcoming role in Congress. He had missed much while he was away.
What lay in store for him?
Thomas Jefferson would soon find out.
* * *
A PHILOSOPHER, A STATESMAN, and a brilliant thinker; a scholar, a slaveholder, and a voracious reader; a gifted writer, a poor public speaker, an insatiable seeker of knowledge—the full complexity of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson would soon be known to the world. The noted lawyer and member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the master of his Monticello plantation, would wield his pen to become the defining voice in the creation of a new nation.
Both an idealist and a pragmatist, Jefferson enjoyed learning and discussing lofty theories of politics, government, science, music, mathematics, philosophy, culture, and the arts, while understanding that the essence of leadership is the ability to translate complex theory into simple and practical solutions. He visualized both the big picture and the devil in the details in ways most men did not and could not. Among the Continental Congress delegates, Jefferson was reputed to be a man of deep political acumen; he was regarded as a champion of colonial rights and individual freedom and a gifted writer able to employ both evocative rhetoric and simple language with great effectiveness.
His most important literary contributions to the colonial cause to this point had come in the summer of 1774. In May of that year, Virginia newspapers announced the passage of the Boston Port Act, parliamentary legislation that closed the city’s port until restitution was made for losses incurred during the Boston Tea Party the previous December. Virginians, including Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, and Patrick Henry, were furious. “We must boldly take an unequivocal stand in line with Massachusetts,” Jefferson said.
He drafted a paper setting out instructions for Virginia delegates who would attend the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, scheduled to begin in September. His nearly 7,000-word treatise, entitled A Summary View of the Rights of British America, was printed in pamphlet form and circulated widely without his advance knowledge. A precursor to future writings, he urged King George not to allow his name “to be a blot in the page of history,” and proclaimed that in no way should “our properties within our territories … be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.” He then added: “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” While Jefferson included a condition of loyalty (“It is neither our wish nor our interest to separate from” Great Britain), for many in 1774, his language remained far too intemperate.
Others, though, concurred with the tone of Jefferson’s message. In August of that year, George Washington bought several copies of what he called “Mr. Jefferson’s Bill of Rights.” John Adams later called the Summary View “a very handsome public paper” that clearly demonstrated Jefferson’s “happy talent for composition.” The work propelled Jefferson into the vanguard of the colonial cause for freedom, placing his intellectual thinking far ahead of many colonists.
After the Battle of Bunker Hill in Boston in June 1775, Thomas Jefferson had written: “As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.”
A year later in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson found himself at the center of the grandest fight of all.
* * *
IT WAS NOT THOMAS JEFFERSON, but another Virginian—delegate Richard Henry Lee—on instructions from his home-colony assembly, who, on June 7, 1776, proposed to the Continental Congress the most profound resolution in American history.
Eight years earlier, while hunting on his property in Virginia, Richard Henry Lee had lost four fingers on his left hand when his musket exploded. After the wounds were cauterized to stop the bleeding, Lee would cover his gnarled hand with a black silk handkerchief. The hunting accident—which resulted in what Lee called an “unhappy wound”—was the beginning of a year of deep despair. In December of that same year, his first wife, Anne, died of acute pleurisy, leaving Richard Henry with four children under the age of ten. Lee remarried a year later (her name was also Anne, she had also lost a spouse, and together the couple would have five children) and also began to strengthen his reputation as one of Virginia’s leading advocates for colonial independence.
As his responsibilities and public persona broadened, Lee discovered that the black handkerchief, a symbol of the physical and emotional pain he suffered in 1768, became an asset during his public speeches, adding a theatrical flair to his gestures, captivating audiences as he punctuated his points with repeated slashes of his gloved hand.
Now, as he rose to speak to his fellow delegates on June 7, 1776, a sunny morning in Philadelphia, forty-four-year-old Richard Henry Lee was about to employ his oratorical skills and gesticulations of the black handkerchief in the most dramatic moment of his public life.
No Continental Congress record exists of any preamble uttered by Lee before he offered his resolution, but it is likely that he did speak, and forcefully so. Just five days earlier, he had written angrily of the Crown: “Contrary to our earnest, early and repeated petitions for peace, liberty and safety, our enemies press us with war, threaten us with danger and slavery … force on his [King George III’s] part & submission on ours is all he proposes.” It should be presumed that many of these sentiments were still top of mind when Lee stood before the delegates on June 7.
Whatever the true content and length of his introductory remarks preceding the motion, the powerful language contained in Lee’s historic resolution is not a matter of speculation; it is contained in the Journals of Congress as the last item the delegates dealt with on June 7. Lee’s motion contained three separate clauses, the first of which, especially, would soon reverberate like a thunderclap far beyond the walls of the Pennsylvania State House:
That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiances to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
Lee’s resolution continued:
That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign alliances.
And:
That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and appropriation.
To no one’s surprise, John Adams quickly seconded the motion. Then, as though to reflect on the momentous nature of Lee’s resolution, the delegates voted to table the proposal until the following day—Saturday—when the debate would begin in earnest. The resolution postponing the debate ordered members to return on June 8 “punctually at 10 o’clock.”
The delegates would have one night to collect their thoughts.
* * *
OVER THE NEXT FEW days, not only did the Continental Congress engage in a spirited debate over Richard Henry Lee’s resolution, but members made their opinions known in letters back to their home colonies. On the first day, June 8, candles were brought into the Pennsylvania State House as the debate continued well past dark. There was no doubt that men such as Adams, Jefferson, Lee, McKean, and a majority of others would be supporting the resolution for independence. But a strong minority—Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson and James Wilson, New York’s Robert Livingston, and South Carolina’s Edward Rutledge among the leaders—opposed the idea, at least initially. Some believed that the colonies needed a confederated government in place before announcing to the world that they were declaring independence from Great Britain. Others, while “friends of the measure,” as Thomas Jefferson recalled years later, were reluctant to vote in favor until “the voice of the people” drove them to it.
As the debate continued on June 8, 9, and 10, it became clear that many delegates from the middle colonies—far more moderate than the New Englanders—were reluctant to vote in favor of independence without additional time to consider the matter, to exchange correspondence with their home-colony assemblies, and to hear directly from the people in their colonies. Thomas Jefferson, in his notes written years later, said they were “not yet ripe for bidding adieu to British connection, but that they were fast ripening, and in a short time, would join the general voice of America.”
On Monday, June 10, Edward Rutledge moved that the vote on Lee’s resolution be delayed for twenty days, until July 1, to allow recalcitrant delegates from the middle colonies—Maryland, Delaware, New York, New Jersey, even Pennsylvania—to further gauge the reaction of their citizens and receive additional instructions. Delegates agreed; even those who favored independence saw the wisdom in a delay to help sway votes. Jefferson even speculated that if Congress had proceeded against the wishes of the moderates, then certain colonies “might secede from the union.”
Still, since it appeared that Congress was leaning toward approving Richard Henry Lee’s resolution when it eventually reconsidered the measure, delegates appointed a five-member committee to draft a declaration of independence. The Committee of Five, as it became known, consisted of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Connecticut’s Roger Sherman. Jefferson was the youngest, at thirty-three; Franklin, at seventy, by far the oldest and struggling with health issues.
It was up to these men to decide the next big questions: What would be the nature of the content of the Declaration? And who would draft the document that the committee would present to the full Congress in less than three weeks?
* * *
DECADES LATER, AS OLD MEN, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson differed widely in their recollections of how the Virginian became the drafter of the Declaration of Independence. The Committee of Five met several times to consider the content of the document, and no one other than Adams and Jefferson was considered as a potential author; Benjamin Franklin was battling a severe attack of gout, and neither Roger Sherman nor Robert Livingston were considered especially gifted writers or lofty thinkers. It is at this point, however, that the divergence occurs between Adams’s and Jefferson’s account of events.
Adams, whose account is by far the more intriguing, maintains that the decision to delegate the writing task to Jefferson had its roots in a private conversation Adams had with delegates almost two years before, at the First Continental Congress. At that point, Adams warned that no one should ever “utter the word independence” because it was too soon, but if and when the time came, Virginia should have the honor of taking the lead in the effort. “It is the most populous State in the Union,” he noted, but more important, “they are very proud of their ancient dominion, they call it; they think they have a right to take the lead, and the Southern States and Middle States too, are too disposed to yield it to them.” Massachusetts, on the other hand, had a reputation as a rabble-rousing state that was too far out front of the prevailing sentiment in the colonies.
An aging Adams recalled that Jefferson urged him to write the Declaration draft, but Adams declined. When Jefferson asked why, Adams responded: “Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the end of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise.”
Was there a third reason? Yes, Adams said to Thomas Jefferson: “You can write ten times better than I can.”
According to Adams, Jefferson replied: “Well, if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.”
Jefferson’s account, well after the fact, maintains that Adams’s advanced age (Adams was eighty-seven when he recounted the story, while Jefferson was eighty) had dulled his memory and led him “into unquestionabl[e] error.” He recalled no such exchange with Adams, remembering only that the committee met and “unanimously pressed” him to write the draft. “I consented; I drew it [up].”
The end result was the same. Thomas Jefferson would draft the Declaration. With the independence issue still not resolved, Adams knew there would be political advantage in a Virginian taking the lead on the document, just as there had been symbolic merit in selecting Virginia’s George Washington to lead the Continental army. In addition, he admired Jefferson’s way with words, which were “remarkable for the peculiar felicity of their expression.” In short, Adams said: “I had a great opinion of the elegance of his pen, and none at all of my own. I therefore insisted that no hesitation should be made on his part.”
* * *
JEFFERSON TOOK ADAMS’S ADVICE.
Alone in his second-floor rooms at the corner of Seventh and Market streets, several blocks from the center city, he worked fast and sure on the draft of the Declaration. He had moved there shortly after his arrival in Philadelphia because it afforded him some relief from the noise and distractions of the center city, yet he could still walk comfortably to the statehouse. And while he complained about horseflies from a nearby stable finding their way through his open window, here he was removed from the horse-and-carriage traffic that clattered along the pebble-stoned streets; away from the story swapping and political arguments of fellow delegates at taverns and coffeehouses; undisturbed by the farmers from the countryside who drove their huge wagons to market to sell produce, chicken, pigs, and cattle; and otherwise oblivious to the noise created by the 30,000 inhabitants who lived in America’s largest and most cosmopolitan city.
Jefferson had thought about independence and liberty for some time and he knew the task at hand. As one historian would later note, Jefferson’s primary purpose was not to declare independence but to proclaim to the world the reasons for declaring it: “it was intended as a formal justification of an act already accomplished,” although a final vote had not taken place. Jefferson described his responsibility to “place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent.”
Jefferson claimed he “turned to neither book or pamphlet” while preparing his draft, though he had formulated similar ideas in his own 1774 Summary View, and in his recently drafted preamble to the Virginia Constitution. He also borrowed liberally ideas about freedom, the dignity of the individual, and the virtues of self-governance that had been propounded by philosophers and documents of times past—John Locke, David Hume, and Montesquieu; St. Augustine and Sir Isaac Newton; Cicero and Aristotle; the Magna Carta—and refined by contemporaries such as Thomas Paine, Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, and his fellow Virginian, George Mason, a strong proponent of individual rights who had embedded the concept into his draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The document was in circulation among the delegates in Philadelphia in early June of 1776 and had attracted wide attention. Jefferson called Mason “one of our really great men, and of the first order of greatness,” making it a near certainty that Jefferson had Mason’s work at the top of his mind as he drafted his own Declaration.
Jefferson made no apologies for drawing on the thinking of others; on the contrary, his intention was to set down ideas with which the colonists had become familiar in the debate of recent years. Making the case for independence—one that would generate support from the delegates, from undecided Americans, and from potential European allies—required a restatement and reemphasis of concepts that the people understood and accepted, at least in principle; introducing radically new ideas would have been risky. His goal was to lay out before the Congress and the world the “sentiments” of independence and the reason for declaring it. It was not originality of principles that was important, he emphasized, but the notion that the Declaration reflected “an expression of the American mind.”
Jefferson performed his task brilliantly. His language was a combination of the elegant and the prosaic, a mixture of soaring rhetoric that defined the derivation and essence of human freedom and liberty, and a relentless drumbeat of facts as he built a prosecutor’s case against the king to justify the colonies’ break with England. His dramatic and unique cadence and flourishing literary style provided the appropriate weight and gravitas for the document that would not merely justify rebellion but literally define the ideals of a new American republic.
The ideas about governing and human liberty contained in his draft might not be new, but a nation conceived upon such bedrock principles certainly was.
* * *
IT IS NO ACCIDENT that his draft Declaration was far more than a recitation of grievances against the Crown—though it certainly does contain a lengthy list of such wrongs—but a treatise on the essence of the human condition and the role that freedom and self-government plays in it.
Indeed, if European allies and even American loyalists were to support the document, it needed to convey far more than the colonies’ desire to rebel against the mother country. In fact, such a limited scope would have doomed the Declaration in the eyes of the world; rebellion against the king was most often viewed as treasonous, a crime that could never be sanctioned, especially by those European countries that engaged in trade and commerce with England.
The same worldwide attitude would have prevailed had the dispute between the Crown and the colonies been viewed merely as a civil war within the structure of Britain’s empire. No potential ally would interfere in England’s “internal” affairs.
Thus, Jefferson needed to appeal to a much higher set of ideals, a much broader vision, and a deeper set of principles to define the colonial cause.
For that reason, Jefferson does not mention Great Britain, the king, the colonies, or the specific American rebellion until almost 300 words into the Declaration. His opening arguments focus on laying out essential principles of freedom, the natural order, and God’s law. His draft was more than a declaration to define the American condition; it was a statement declaring the right of any people to seek the most basic rights and live according to the most basic tenets of human dignity.
Jefferson’s long, haunting opening sentence set the tone:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to Separation.
Jefferson structures the remarkable paragraph as a fait accompli of epic importance; neither its premise nor its conclusion seeks approval or concurrence from readers. Jefferson chooses his words carefully, and perhaps the most important word in this opening is “necessary”—it is simply beyond debate and inarguable that the colonies have any choice but to break with England. The wrongs America has suffered require it; it is not “desirable” or “preferable” or “beneficial” to dissolve the connective tissue between the two countries, but “necessary.” Moreover, the freedom to which the colonists are entitled—the “equal Station”—is not bestowed by kings, parliaments, assemblies, or any other political or manmade entity, but by the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Jefferson’s powerful tone-setting opener declares as a given that the people were entitled to a concept of freedom that went far beyond the power of men to grant.
Jefferson’s eloquent and iconic follow-up sentences—those that would be most often quoted, studied, debated, and analyzed in the succeeding centuries—distill the universal truths about the sanctity of the individual, his natural-order right to self-govern, and his central role in his relationship to government. It was individuals—the people—who bestowed any and all powers unto the government, rather than the other way around. Jefferson outlined a general philosophy of government that was universal in tone and scope, a thesis that, as one historian noted, makes “revolution justifiable, even meritorious.” He wrote:
We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable [later changed to “self-evident”], that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Thus, in the first 200 or so words of his draft, Thomas Jefferson clearly and concisely articulated two concepts that had taken previous thinkers and writers thousands of words to explain: the essential reasons that require people to dissolve the ties that bind them to an oppressor and the indisputable right of those newly freed people to govern themselves.
In doing so he elevated the political dispute between the American colonies and England into something far more than a civil war—but rather, an epic battle between the essential dignity of the individual and the power of the state.
* * *
ONLY AFTER THIS PREAMBLE laying out universal principles did Jefferson turn his attention to reciting, point by point, the “injuries and usurpations” inflicted by King George upon the colonies; he referred to them as facts for a “candid world” to consider. In this section, Jefferson assumes the role of prosecutor, laying out the king’s crimes for a worldwide jury. His prose is less elegant here, much harsher, but no less effective: Among the king’s despotic actions that Jefferson hammered home:
He has plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to Civil Power.
A portion of Jefferson’s indictment moves away from the “He has” or “He is” construction and chastises the king:
For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us;
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the World;
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent;
For depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury…”
Immediately after his searing point-by-point attack, Jefferson emphasized that, despite the king’s malfeasance and cruelties toward the colonies, the Americans had tried their best to reason with him and his emissaries along the way, but to no avail:
In every stage of these Oppressions, we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble Terms; Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury.
Jefferson also called the British people to task, pointing out that the colonies had “warned them from Time to Time” of attempts by their legislature to “extend an unwarrantable Jurisdiction over us.” Yet, despite repeated warnings, most British subjects had been “deaf to the Voice of Justice and of Consanguinity.” Under current circumstances, the colonists would hold their British brethren to the same standards as they would hold the rest of the world—“enemies in War, in Peace, Friends.”
Jefferson then reached the crescendo, penning the stirring concluding paragraph to America’s Declaration of Independence, likely the first reference ever to the “United States of America”:
We … the Representatives of the United States of America … solemnly Publish and Declare, that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.
Jefferson closed with the solemn oath that bound him and his fellow delegates together as they embarked on an undertaking that was, at once, a most brazen act of treason and a most noble and risky adventure—the creation of a new nation:
And for the support of this Declaration … we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
* * *
THE COMMITTEE OF FIVE made several edits to Jefferson’s “Rough Draught,” though it is difficult to determine exactly how many and precisely who made them. Perhaps the most important change, small but telling, was the substitution of the words “self-evident” in the second paragraph in place of Jefferson’s original “sacred and undeniable.” The revised sentence thus began, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” The new phrase established the equality clause as indisputable; beyond a matter of political debate and essentially etched into the laws of nature, as undebatable as gravity or the tides.
One other section of Jefferson’s Declaration was bound to cause controversy when the paper was submitted to the delegates. It was the last of his charges against the king, what John Adams called the “vehement philippic against negro slavery.”
As a privileged Virginian, a landowner and a slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson was a product of his time and his geography. Of the 2.5 million people who lived in the American colonies in 1776, perhaps as many as 500,000 were slaves; some 200,000 of those resided in Virginia, the largest slaveholding colony. All members of the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress owned slaves. Throughout his life, Jefferson owned a total of approximately 600 slaves, perhaps as many as 200 at any one time. Later in his life, he would reportedly engage in a relationship with one of his slaves, his late wife’s half-sister, Sally Hemings, with whom he would sire children.
And yet, intellectually if not emotionally, Jefferson possessed a predisposition against the institution of slavery. Early in his career as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, he recalled: “I made one effort … for the permission of emancipation of slaves which was rejected.” His proposed legislation would have given slave owners the right to free their slaves based on “meritorious service,” a bill the House swiftly defeated. Later, in court, he represented the grandson of a mixed-race couple and argued that the man should be free despite a Virginia law requiring that he be held in servitude until the age of thirty-one. On behalf of his client, Jefferson wrote that “everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person and using it at his own will.” In language that would foreshadow similar thinking in his current draft of the Declaration, he added: “This is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because it is necessary for his own sustenance.”
He lost the court case.
Rebuked so early in his career in both the legislature and the courts, Jefferson—who, after those defeats, became reluctant to promote causes that he perceived as unwinnable—refrained from further efforts to abolish or even limit slavery. If abolition were to become a reality in America, future generations would have to take up the torch.
For now, for his draft of the Declaration, Jefferson trained his literary skills against the king and his support of the slave trade with one of his longest and harshest indictments. He began:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating the 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. This piratical warfare … is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain.
Having established the king’s personal responsibility for the slave trade, Jefferson accused England’s monarch of fighting to keep “open a market where MEN should be bought and sold … suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.”
If Jefferson saw any inconsistency in vilifying the king for his support of the slave trade while he and his Virginia neighbors were some of the largest customers of such commerce, an irony that could hardly escape a man of his intellect, he offered no indication or explanation; this passage was his attempt to lead the Congress and the new country into more progressive intellectual territory on the issue of slavery.
This slave trade language was one of John Adams’s favorite passages in the Declaration; he despised slavery and, as a matter of principle, never owned slaves. Yet he was skeptical of the reaction of the Congress to Jefferson’s stinging attack on the king. “Though I knew his southern brethren would never suffer to pass it … I certainly would never oppose [it],” he recalled later. Nonetheless, Jefferson had written his passage on the slave trade and the Committee of Five left it unaltered. How would the full Congress respond?
On Friday, June 28, 1776, Jefferson’s draft, with edits from Adams and Franklin, was reported to Congress. “I was delighted with its high tone and the flights of oratory, with which it abounded,” Adams remarked. Delegates disposed of a number of minor issues and then decided to wait until after the weekend to begin debate on independence and the Declaration document. The brief and uninspiring official journal entry reads: “The committee appointed to prepare a Declaration brought in a draught which was read … Ordered to lie on the table.”
* * *
THE PHILADELPHIA TEMPERATURE WAS already in the steamy low eighties when the Continental Congress convened at 9:00 a.m. on Monday, July 1. By 4:00 p.m., thunderstorms swollen with rain and carried on gusty winds would clear out the heat and refresh the city and the delegates. But in the morning, the statehouse was thick with humidity and tension.
John Adams tingled with anticipation. In an early-morning letter to former delegate Archibald Bulloch, he laid out the stakes: “This morning is assigned for the greatest debate of all. A Declaration, that these colonies are free and independent states, has been reported by a committee … and this day or tomorrow is to determine its fate.” Finding it difficult to contain his enthusiasm, Adams exclaimed: “May Heaven prosper the new-born republic, and make it more glorious than any former republics have been!”
Regrettably, because of the secrecy of the proceedings, we have no official congressional account of the actual debate over independence. No transcription was made, no official notes kept by the secretary or by any delegate. The journals of Congress report only this: after the delegates handled some routine business, they broke into a committee of the whole to “take into consideration the resolution respecting independency.”
However, thanks to subsequent letters from several delegates, thanks to Adams’s autobiography and Jefferson’s notes recorded much later, thanks to documents discovered years afterward, it is possible to piece together the dramatic events of July 1, 1776, the beginning of four of the most meaningful days in all of American history.
* * *
FIRST, PROPONENTS OF INDEPENDENCE heard some bad news: a letter from the Provincial Congress of New York instructing the New York delegates not to vote for independence was read into the record; it was dated June 11, and no further instructions to the delegates had arrived in the interim. The frustration with New York was offset by some good news: just as Congress was about to begin debate, word arrived that the Maryland convention had unanimously instructed its delegates to vote for independence. The news gave John Adams “much pleasure.” He was thankful that “Maryland … behaved well.”
After Congress received these reports, the independence debate began in earnest and took up most of the day. Members wanted their say. Judging from delegates’ recollections in subsequent letters and diaries, Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson, a stalwart opponent of independence at this stage, rose first. Consistently opposed to separation, at odds with the likes of John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Richard Henry Lee, Dickinson spoke powerfully and eloquently. Dickinson’s main thrust was that separation was premature. “To escape the protection we have in British rule by declaring independence would be like destroying a house before we have got another … then asking a neighbor to take us in,” he argued. Further, separating from Britain before the colonies were fully recognized by foreign countries, especially France, would be folly. To go forth with a vote on independence now would be “to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.”
Dickinson knew his stance was unpopular, and that by remaining firm in his principles, he was jeopardizing his career. “My conduct this day, I expect, will give the finishing blow to my once great … and now too diminished popularity,” he wrote. “But thinking as I do on the subject of debate, silence would be guilt.”
* * *
WHEN DICKINSON CONCLUDED, SILENCE filled the hall. Rain had begun to fall outside, so perhaps the delegates heard drops slapping against the windows. For a time, no member rose to answer the influential Pennsylvanian in his own statehouse. Finally, “after waiting some time, in hopes that some one less obnoxious than myself” would respond, John Adams rose, “determined to speak.” He recognized the importance of the moment—all that he had worked for over the past year, as “the author of all the mischief,” would be resolved on this day. He began by saying that this was the first time in his life that he had wished for the “talents and eloquence of the ancient orators of Greece and Rome, for I was very sure that none of them ever had before him a question of more importance to his country and to the world.”
To Jefferson, Adams was “not graceful nor elegant, nor remarkably fluent,” but his Massachusetts colleague spoke “with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.” Years later, he would call Adams “our Colossus on the floor … he was the pillar of [independence’s] support on the floor of Congress, its ablest advocate and defender against the multifarious assaults it encountered.” Adams spoke forcefully, but rebutted Dickinson with a steady stream of facts and suggested that the Pennsylvanian’s call to delay independence until “the time was right” was simply delaying the inevitable. There would be no ideal time to declare independence.
To New Jersey’s Richard Stockton, Adams resembled “the Atlas of American Independence” as he stood and made the case, “the man to whom the country is most indebted for the great measure of independency.”
In all, Adams spoke for perhaps two hours and the entire debate lasted nearly nine hours, the delegates exhausted by day’s end. A preliminary resolution for independence was moved, and nine colonies voted in favor. Without new instructions from their assembly, New York delegates, who personally supported the resolution, were forced to abstain. Pennsylvania and South Carolina voted against it, and Delaware—minus Caesar Rodney at this time—was divided.
South Carolina’s Rutledge suggested that the final vote be delayed until the next day, that perhaps, with a night to think about it, his state’s fellow delegates would vote in favor for the “sake of unanimity.” Adams and other supporters of independence agreed, looking to deliver a message of solidarity to the colonists, the king, and the world.
Delaware’s Thomas McKean had already dispatched the express messenger to Dover to fetch Caesar Rodney.
Writing that evening, John Adams believed the independence question would pass on July 2 by a “great majority, perhaps with almost unanimity,” yet he made it clear that he could not promise anything.
Virtually all that could be said on the subject had been. All that remained was a final vote.
* * *
AGAIN, CONSIDERING THE MAGNITUDE of the topic, the official congressional journals for July 2, 1776, are maddeningly sparse, all the more disappointing since they fail to record the comments of delegates on two of the most dramatic occurrences of the entire “independency” process.
The first, of course, was the stunning and timely arrival of Delaware’s Caesar Rodney after his rain-soaked overnight ride from Dover. He would cast the tie-breaking vote that would record Delaware on the side of independence. His eighty-mile trek through booming thunder and crackling lightning, his entrance into the statehouse while still clad in muddy boots and spurs, his face covered with a silk handkerchief to hide his cancerous disfigurement, was emblematic of the relentless spirit of a man who would overcome any obstacle to cast his vote for independence.
The second dramatic event was one of quiet political stagecraft, and just as important as Rodney’s theatrical entrance. Two vacant chairs among the Pennsylvania delegation told the story. John Dickinson and Robert Morris, ardently opposed to independence at this time but recognizing the importance of a unified Congress, had absented themselves from the hall. Of the five Pennsylvania delegates in attendance, a majority—Franklin, Morton, and Wilson—voted in favor of independence. With his absence, Dickinson, especially, had sacrificed his own deeply held personal beliefs for what he apparently believed was the greater good of Congress speaking with one voice.
With Delaware and Pennsylvania on board, Edward Rutledge and his South Carolina comrades remained true to their word and cast their affirmative vote for independence. Again, there is no record of whether they offered remarks before they voted.
Now, twelve colonies had voted in favor, with New York abstaining, still awaiting new instructions from its convention. Of those colonies that had voted, the decision was unanimous. Adams and other proponents could live with that. As much as humanly possible, the delegates had spoken with one voice in Philadelphia.
A war still needed to be won to enforce the political action, but what the Continental Congress accomplished on July 2, 1776, would ring out across America and around the world: the colonies had voted for their independence, dissolving all connection with powerful Great Britain.
With their most important vote ever behind them, the delegates agreed to meet the following day to consider Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence.
* * *
IT WAS A JUBILANT John Adams who wrote to Abigail the day after the historic vote. His reputation for crankiness, impatience, and irascibility notwithstanding, the tired but resolute Massachusetts delegate poured out the depth of his elation to his wife in two long letters, declaring that he and his colleagues had reached a decision on the “greatest question … which was ever debated in America.” In fact, “a greater, perhaps, never was nor will be decided among men,” he wrote to Abigail.
Five months after Adams had arrived in Pennsylvania’s capital city, he and his fellow delegates, men from different regions with markedly different personalities and priorities, had reached consensus on a remarkable Declaration that months earlier had seemed impossible.
“The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America,” the scrappy Adams wrote on July 3 to Abigail, his dearest friend. “I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great Festival.” Indeed, Adams believed July 2 “ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance … solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore.”
Lest Abigail infer that he was “transported with enthusiasm” and had underestimated the perilous road forward, Adams reassured his wife in the same way he had reassured his fellow delegates during the debate. He was “well aware of the toil, and blood, and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States.” Indeed, the explosiveness of the resolution that Congress had approved almost assured that the delegates had placed their own lives, liberty, and families in danger, not to mention their property and other belongings.
What these fifty-six men had done was at once astonishing, risky, brilliant—and treasonous. All were well aware that they had crossed a line from which there was no return, and while most were proud that they had done so, a sense of grave solemnity had settled over the Pennsylvania State House.
Nonetheless, nothing could dampen Adams’s spirit or his resolve on this momentous occasion. Surrounded by the ravages of a violent rebellion being waged by the American colonies against their king, one that would spill additional colonial blood across multiple battlefields, he and his fellow delegates had approved a bold and unprecedented vision for a separate and independent America.
“Through all the gloom,” John Adams confided to Abigail, “I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is more than worth all the means.”
* * *
MUCH TO JEFFERSON’S ANGST, the delegates spent the latter part of July 2, all of July 3, and a portion of July 4 poring over his draft, editing the Declaration in a way that caused him pain, but, remarkably for a committee, shortening and sharpening his work and perhaps making it stronger. Still, the essence of the document—the power of its ideas, the eloquence of its language, the simplicity of its structure—was Jefferson’s and would remain so long after the delegates finished their review.
Again, because the proceedings were shrouded in secrecy, we have no official record of the debates among delegates over the three days that they edited Jefferson’s Declaration. We do know from John Adams’s recollection years later that “Congress cut off about a quarter part of it, as I expected they would,” though as Jefferson would write later, it was Adams who spent the debate “fighting fearlessly for every word.” Adams may have submitted his own edits to Jefferson’s draft, but once the document reached the floor, Jefferson said Adams was “its ablest advocate and defender against the multifarious assaults encountered.”
Like many gifted writers, Jefferson did not take kindly to seeing his work edited. He painstakingly made several copies of his original draft in longhand to send to friends. A few days after the Declaration was adopted, he sent the final congressionally approved version along with his original draft to Richard Henry Lee, and asked him to “judge whether it [his original draft] is the better or worse for the critics.”
As an exasperated Jefferson listened to the debate about his carefully crafted words, Benjamin Franklin related an anecdote to him about the collective ruthlessness of an opinionated group of editors. A hatter named John Thompson was about to open a shop and decided to have a signboard produced. He composed it with the words: JOHN THOMPSON, HATTER, MAKES AND SELLS HATS FOR READY MONEY, and included a picture of a hat. One by one, his friends edited Thompson’s work. The first suggested he remove the word “hatter” since the phrase was redundant—“makes and sells hats” clearly demonstrated that he was a hatter. Another said to remove the word “makes,” because his customers would not care who made the hat. A third suggested removing “for ready money,” since it was not the custom at the time to sell hats on credit. Finally, still another editor asked why he needed “sells hats” on the sign. After all, no customer would expect John Thompson to give the hats away, and the word “hats” was unnecessary since a picture of a hat was already painted on the board. Thus, Franklin related to Jefferson, “his inscription was reduced ultimately to ‘John Thompson’ with the figure of a hat subjoined.”
* * *
JEFFERSON’S EDITORS WERE NOT quite as tough as Thompson’s, nor did the document suffer because of them. Congress made a total of about eighty edits, most of them minor. However, delegates did cut two large and significant passages from Jefferson’s draft.
First, they made wholesale deletions to Jefferson’s excoriation of the English people, including exorcising his language declaring that Americans must “renounce forever these unfeeling brethren” and “endeavor to forget our former love for them.” The Congress thought too controversial Jefferson’s passage that said America must “hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends” or his harsh “we might have been a free and a great people together, but a communication of grandeur and of freedom, it seems, is below their dignity.”
Not surprisingly, delegates also struck Jefferson’s entire passage condemning the king for perpetuating the slave trade. Jefferson surmised years later that it was eliminated “in complaisance with South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wanted to continue it.” But it wasn’t just the objections of Southerners, Jefferson noted. “Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures, for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
Both observations have merit, but Congress also no doubt recognized the hypocrisy of blaming the king for the slave trade and, by extension, for slavery itself in the American colonies. John Adams, who utterly opposed slavery, said the slave-trade passage was his favorite in the entire draft, but even he must have understood that Jefferson’s language actually weakened the colonies’ cause since it almost embarrassingly shifted responsibility for slavery away from those who should have borne it completely: American slave owners themselves. Blaming King George for American slavery was ridiculous: Adams knew it, as did the rest of the delegates. Jefferson, brilliant as he was, must have recognized it, too; his slave-trade passage was a misdirected effort to address the most glaring inconsistency of the entire Declaration—American slave owners espousing freedom and equality for all men. Jefferson’s reluctance to address the subject head-on may have also been influenced by his previously unsuccessful efforts in Virginia to change the public mind-set on slavery.
Moreover, a stronger denunciation of slavery could have put congressional adoption of the entire Declaration in jeopardy, and neither Adams nor Jefferson was willing to risk it. While both men, and many other delegates, would renounce slavery later—Adams would one day call it “an evil of colossal magnitude”—it is clear that neither man believed July of 1776 was the appropriate time to join the battle, nor was the debate over the Declaration the precise moment. During his retirement at Monticello following his presidency, Jefferson would recall of the revolutionary era that the “public mind would not yet bear the proposition [of emancipation], nor will it bear it even at this day.” Prophetically, he added: “Yet the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.”
But for now, with Congress’s deletions, the Declaration of Independence would not mention the issue of slavery.
Congress made one other notable change, this one to Jefferson’s stirring close, adding, “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,” to the concluding paragraph, which in its final form thus read:
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
* * *
JUST AS IMPORTANT AS their edits was the agreement by the delegates on which sections should be left untouched, which sections Jefferson captured beautifully—most notably the eloquent second paragraph, the heart of the Declaration, the core language that would define its essence, and the nation’s, in the years and decades to come.
Not even Jefferson, a lover of words, a connoisseur of ideas, a voracious reader, could have foreseen the long-term impact of this daring passage, one that would, from 1776 on, define America’s spirit, pride, philosophy, policies, politics, culture, responsibilities, ideals, civic duty, and sense of purpose. Especially because of this passage, the Declaration of Independence would become one of the most influential documents in the world, and the most revered in all of American history. Americans would cite this iconic second paragraph, especially, to both defend and criticize their nation, to seek better lives, to right injustices, to define their place in the world, to create and build and dream and dare. It would one day form the underlying foundation of the American Constitution, and its message would influence later independence movements and revolutions in Europe, Asia, and South America.
One of Jefferson’s fellow committee members, Adams or Franklin, likely added the sturdy and incontrovertible “self-evident,” but the full Congress made no changes to the passage. Jefferson’s fellow delegates recognized the power and timelessness of his words. The thirty-three-year-old from Virginia, sitting alone in his upstairs room in a Philadelphia boarding house, had written what would become the most important single paragraph in American history:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed.
* * *
THURSDAY, JULY 4, 1776, BROKE COOL and pleasant in Philadelphia, but even before they arrived at the statehouse, delegates felt the intensity of this day. While war raged in the colonies, while colonial forces were retreating from superior British regulars in Canada, while Britain’s General Howe was advancing toward New York with a large force, America had voted for its independence. Now, wrote New Jersey delegate Abraham Clark, “a declaration for this purpose, I expect, will this day pass Congress.”
Congress had toiled on the Declaration for most of the day on July 3 and began July 4 with other matters. When members resumed their discussion of the Declaration, the Journals of the Continental Congress once again remained silent on the nature of the debate. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson wrote not a word about the proceedings inside the statehouse on that day. The secret journals of Congress do not even contain an entry for July 4. It appears that sometime in the late morning members finished their work on the draft and voted to approve the Declaration. Once again, as they did on July 2, twelve colonies voted in favor and once again New York abstained. Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson was again absent. In addition to approving the document, a record of which is contained in the journals, Congress also ordered the Declaration authenticated and printed immediately.
By early afternoon, it was done. The Declaration of Independence, the first document of the new republic, had become a reality.
Appropriately, it was Delaware’s Caesar Rodney, who had arrived just in time to take the vote on independence two days earlier, who recorded the July 4 moment in a letter to his brother that afternoon. “We have now Got through with the whole of the Declaration, and ordered it to be printed, so that you will soon have the pleasure of seeing it,” he wrote to Thomas Rodney. “Handbills of it will be printed, and sent to the Armies, Cities, County Towns, etc. To be published or rather proclaimed in form.”
Days later, Thomas Jefferson’s friend, John Page, one of the recipients of Jefferson’s recopied original drafts, captured the drama of the accomplishment and the fight that lay ahead, both for the Congress and the fledgling nation. “I am highly pleased with your Declaration,” Page wrote to Jefferson. “God preserve the United States. We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?”