Philadelphia was a red-brick Quaker metropolis of 34,000 about to be turned into an armed camp. Military companies of all sorts drilled and practiced in factory yards and open fields. The Second Continental Congress – sixty-five men from all thirteen colonies - had been in session six weeks when Jefferson arrived. He quartered his horses with Jacob Hiltzheimer and found rooms with a cabinetmaker named Benjamin Randolph. The next morning, June 22, 1775, he presented his credentials to Congress and was seated as a certified member. At dinner the previous night, he had heard his fellow Virginians describe the leaders from other states. Now he looked them over to see if he agreed with his friends’ judgments.

There sat Samuel Adams, the chief liberty man from Massachusetts, his hands palsied and his voice quavering. Near him was his solemn cousin John Adams, already disliked by many for his sharp tongue. Witty Caesar Rodney of Delaware was there, too, his face not much bigger than a large apple. Rodney wore a bandage over one cheek to conceal what was whispered to be a cancerous growth. Dressed in silk and lace, the Rutledge brothers from South Carolina personified their state’s pride and wealth.

But the man Jefferson sought out first was Benjamin Franklin, a newcomer to the Pennsylvania delegation. As America’s leading scientist, he was a hero to Jefferson, who was deeply interested in the subject.

Jefferson soon discovered that Congress was badly divided. A moderate faction, led by wealthy John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, had clashed with the coalition of New Englanders and southerners who favored a defiant stand. Over protest from John Adams, Congress voted unanimously to give Dickinson his way and send another humble petition to the king. John Adams nominated George Washington to take command of the army of New Englanders besieging the British on the outskirts of Boston. The next day - Friday, June 23 - Jefferson rode out with most of Congress to say goodbye to the new general and wish him Godspeed.

Little more than three hours after Washington galloped off, a dispatcher rode into Philadelphia with more bloody news from Massachusetts. On June 17, the day Congress had chosen Washington to take charge, militiamen from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island had fought a battle with the best of the British army. The regulars had attacked the Americans in fortifications erected on Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill, a neck of land known as Charlestown Heights overlooking the city of Boston.

Bunker Hill was no running skirmish begun by reckless shots; it was a fierce, formal battle. Four hundred Americans died or were wounded; nearly three times that number of British regulars fell before the steadier guns of the American defenders. In the village of Charlestown, at the foot of Breed’s Hill, some 300 fine houses were burned to the ground by cannon shot fired from British warships. The Americans were driven out of their entrenchments and back to their siege lines around Boston, priming their guns for another British assault. This, Jefferson told his brother-in-law, Francis Eppes, meant “that the war is now heartily entered into, without a prospect of accommodation.”

The news jolted Congress into action. The next day brought acrimonious debate concerning a declaration on the causes of America taking up arms. Knowing his oratorical limitations, Jefferson said little on the floor of the Congress. But John Adams later wrote that Jefferson, “though a silent member in Congress . . . was so prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive upon committees and in conversations not even Samuel Adams was more so that he soon seized upon my heart.”

For the first time, Jefferson displayed another political gift - an ability to win and hold the friendships of men with opposite beliefs. Jefferson was on the best of terms not only with John Adams but with amiable Benjamin Harrison of Virginia, whom the stiff-necked Adams described as “another Sir John Falstaff . . . his conversation disgusting to every man of delicacy or decorum.”

During his first weeks in the Continental Congress, Jefferson demonstrated his tolerant spirit. His draft of the declaration of the causes of taking up arms was strongly criticized by the cadaverous John Dickinson. “He still retained the hope of reconciliation with the mother country,” Jefferson recalled later, “and was unwilling it should be lessened by offensive statements. He was so honest a man and so able a one that he was greatly indulged, even by those who could not feel his scruples. We therefore requested him to take the paper and put it into a form he could approve. He did so, preparing an entire new statement and preserving of the former only the last four paragraphs and half of the preceding one. We approved and reported it to Congress, who accepted it.”

Jefferson demonstrated that he had learned well the lesson taught him in the House of Burgesses - the necessity “not to go too fast for any respectable part of our body.”

But he also remained grimly realistic. “The present crisis is so full of danger and uncertainty that opinions here are various,” he told the Virginia Convention. He urged his fellow legislators to “reflect on the propriety of being prepared for the worst events and . . . to be guarded against probable evils at least by doing everything in their power to make Virginia militarily strong.” Jefferson’s study of history made it clear to him that force was the only answer to those who try to impose their political power at the point of a gun.

The Continental Congress put Jefferson on a committee charged with drawing up an answer to Parliament’s so-called Conciliatory Proposal. The proposal was an offer to redress American grievances, but only if the colonies negotiated with the British government one at a time. Its real purpose was to create American disunity. Jefferson was flattered when Benjamin Franklin, already famous as a writer, asked him to draft the reply.

Jefferson’s carefully controlled anger against British injustice smoldered beneath the dignified tone of his statement, which was swiftly approved by Congress. “We do not mean that our people shall be burthened with oppressive taxes, to provide cynosures for the idle or the wicked, under color of providing for a civil list.”

Jefferson achieved a sonorous, almost majestic defiance in his conclusion: “When it (the world) considers the great armaments with which they have invaded us, and the circumstances of cruelty with which these have commenced and prosecuted hostilities; when things, we say, are laid together, and attentively considered, can the world be deceived into an opinion that we are unreasonable, or can it hesitate to believe with us that nothing but our own exertions may defeat the ministerial sentence of death or abject submission?”

Yet, Jefferson still abhorred the thought of all-out war. When Virginia Attorney General John Randolph, his friend and distant cousin, decided he was still loyal to the king and was going “home,” as Virginians of his generation called England, Jefferson wrote: “I hope the returning wisdom of Great Britain will, ere long, put an end to this unnatural contest. There may be people to whose tempers and dispositions contention is pleasing, and who, therefore, wish a continuance of confusion. But to me it is of all states, but one (death), the most horrid.”

To this he added a statement, which announced for the first time, the deep reluctance with which this shy, studious man left his family for the brawling world of war and politics. “My first wish is a restoration of our just rights; my second, a return of the happy period when, consistently with duty, I may withdraw myself totally from the public stage, and pass the rest of my days in domestic ease and tranquility, banishing every desire of ever hearing what passes in the world.”

Congress temporarily disbanded to escape Philadelphia’s summer heat. When they reconvened on September 5, Jefferson was absent. Little Jane, eighteen months old, had died, and Martha was grief stricken. Unable to leave his wife alone at Monticello, Jefferson took her to her brother Francis at his estate at Eppington and then departed for Philadelphia, arriving on September 25.

There, he did nothing but fret over his wife’s health. He wrote frantic letters home, asking why she did not write to him. He worried, too, about Lord Dunmore. The governor established a base at Norfolk and began recruiting a loyalist army. Jefferson urged Martha to retreat to their plantation at The Forest in Bedford County, deep in the interior of Virginia.

On November 9, Congress learned that George III had refused John Dickinson’s “olive branch” petition. More than two months earlier, on August 23, 1775, the king had proclaimed the colonies to be in “open rebellion.” The king’s contemptuous attitude deeply affected Jefferson. Like many Americans, he had still hoped that the quarrel was between America and the greedy politicians in Parliament, not with George III himself. Now he saw that Parliament and the king were of one mind.

“It is an immense misfortune to the whole empire to have a King of such disposition at such a time,” he told John Randolph. “We are told and everything proves that it is true, that he is the bitterest enemy we have. To undo his empire there is but one truth more to learn, that after colonies have drawn the sword there is but one step more they can take. That step is now pressed upon us by the measures adopted as if they were afraid we would not take it.”

Jefferson meant independence. “Believe me, dear sir,” he wrote, “there is not in the British Empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do. But by the God that made me, I will cease to exist before I yield to a connection on such terms as the British Parliament propose and in this I think I speak the sentiments of America.”

Not long after writing these words, Jefferson received permission from the Virginia delegation to return home for almost four months. He was concerned for Martha’s health. Without him, she sank into depression, making her listless and weak. He didn’t return to Philadelphia until May 13, 1776, as both the political and military aspects of the crisis neared a climax.

The military news was both good and bad. Washington had driven the British out of Boston, but the understaffed, undersupplied American army, having fought a winter campaign to bring Canada into the union, was all but destroyed by disease and a stubborn British defense. They were now in alarming retreat before a revived and reinforced British Army of the North.

On the political front, a new author had exploded into print with Common Sense, a pamphlet that changed many American minds about independence. The author, Thomas Paine, was a rough, blunt, English-born freethinker known for not wasting his words. He called George III a brute and boldly summoned America to a rendezvous with history as a nation in her own right. Tens of thousands of Americans agreed. Jefferson’s friend John Page wrote him a letter in which he said, “For God’s sake, declare the colonies independent at once and save us from ruin.”

On June 7, 1776, in the humid Pennsylvania State House where Jefferson sat each day alongside his fellow congressmen Richard Henry Lee, he laid out an historic resolution:

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 connections between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign alliances.

That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective colonies for their consideration and approbation.

An exultant John Adams leapt to his feet and seconded the motion. But the anti-independence men in Congress were by no means ready to surrender. For the next two days, the proposition was debated ferociously. Jefferson was keenly aware of the momentous nature of the occasion and took more voluminous notes than anyone else, even Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress.

The opponents of independence argued against the timing of the declaration. They pointed out that the people of the middle colonies – Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York - were undecided about independence. Better to wait for them to ripen, lest they secede and weaken the union. Adams, Lee, and their supporters argued that the declaration was merely stating an existing fact. “The people wait for us to lead the way,” they said, arguing that a majority supported the measure even though their local representatives hesitated to approve it. Above all, they reasoned, it “would be vain to wait either weeks or months for perfect unanimity since it was impossible that all men should ever become of one sentiment on any question.”

In the end, both sides agreed to postpone further debate for three weeks, giving the fence sitters time to write home to their local assemblies for instructions. Meanwhile, there was no reason not to draw up a possible declaration of independence. Everyone agreed that such a vitally important document should not be thrown together hurriedly. Committee nominations were accepted, and in a matter of minutes, Charles Thomson noted “[t]he members chosen: Mr. Jefferson, Mr. I. Adams, Mr. Franklin, Mr. Sherman and Mr. R.R. Livingston.”

Ben Franklin was incapacitated by an attack of gout. Ten days after the committee was formed, he wrote to Washington explaining that his health had kept him “from Congress and company almost ever since you left us, so that I know little of what has pass’d there, except that a declaration of independence is preparing.”

Neither Roger Sherman nor Robert Livingston had a literary reputation, leaving the question of who would draft the declaration to either John Adams or Thomas Jefferson. Years later, Adams recalled that Jefferson offered the job to him, and he promptly replied: “I will not.”

“You should do it!” Jefferson insisted.

“Oh no!” Adams replied.

“Why will you not? You ought to do it.”

“I will not,” Adams said. “Reasons enough.”

“What can be your reasons?”

“Reason first you are a Virginian and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third you can write ten times better than I can.”

“Well, if you are decided, I will do as well as I can,” Jefferson finally gave in.

“Very well, when you have drawn it up, we will have a meeting.”

Jefferson no longer resided in Ben Randolph’s home, having moved into a fine, three-story brick house on the southwest corner of Market and Seventh Streets, where he took two rooms on the second floor.

Before leaving Randolph, Jefferson purchased a piece of the cabinetmaker’s handiwork, a portable desk. Made to Jefferson’s specifications, it was “plain, neat and convenient.” Taking no more space than a book, it opened out to become a small desk. In his sunny second-floor parlor, Jefferson set up this self-designed writing box, bought a supply of paper, inks, and pens, and went to work on what was to become one of the most important political documents in the history of the world.