After the Continental Congress set a date to decide whether to declare independence, they appointed five men to draft a formal declaration that could be published to the world. They wanted to be ready ahead of time so that they could move quickly if the decision was made. One of those five was Thomas Jefferson.
The other members of the committee — John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston — chose Jefferson to be the writer. During the month of June, he worked on writing a declaration that would show to the world why they were deciding to become independent. At the same time, he was working on a constitution for Virginia, and of course he had other Congressional duties as well.
After he finished writing it, the document was reviewed by the other members of the committee. Adams and Franklin made some minor changes. The committee reported to Congress on Friday, June 28, and the declaration was “laid on the table”.
On July 2, after voting for independence, the Congress as a whole started reviewing the wording of the declaration. It took them two days, and they made a number of significant changes. Among other things, they removed Jefferson’s harsh criticisms of the slave trade and the British people. Jefferson wrote:
The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of many. For this reason those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offence. The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. 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.
Jefferson himself didn’t take part in the debate:
I thought it a duty to be, on that occasion, a passive auditor of the opinions of others, more impartial judges than I could be, of it’s merits or demerits. During the debate I was sitting by Dr. Franklin, and he observed that I was writhing a little under the acrimonious criticisms on some of it’s parts; and it was on that occasion that, by way of comfort, he told me the story of John Thompson the Hatter, and his new sign.
John Thompson, as Franklin’s story went, was a hatter (i.e., hatmaker) who thought up a sign for his shop: along with a picture of a hat, it would say, “John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money”. But his friends thought that everything could be taken out except the name “John Thompson” and the hat.
Jefferson remained proud of his composition, and he thought that the parts that had been taken out were important. “As the sentiments of men are known not only by what they receive, but what they reject also,” he put together a copy that showed what had been added, removed, or changed by Congress. Here are a couple of major sections that were removed. In the first one, Jefferson accused King George III of perpetuating the slave trade despite some of the colonists’ efforts to stop it:
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
In this one, he tore into the people of England for being unjust to the colonies:
when occasions have been given them, by the regular course of their laws, of removing from their councils the disturbers of our harmony, they have, by their free election, re-established them in power. at this very time too they are permitting their chief magistrate to send over not only souldiers of our common blood, but Scotch & foreign mercenaries to invade & destroy us. these facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unfeeling brethren. we must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind enemies in war, in peace friends. we might have been a free and a great people together; but a communication of grandeur & of freedom it seems is below their dignity. be it so, since they will have it. the road to happiness & to glory is open to us too. we will tread it apart from them…
But most of the changes made by Congress were fairly small and didn’t really change the overall meaning of the declaration. Most of what remained was Jefferson’s own words.
Source
- “Notes of Proceedings in the Continental Congress, 7 June-1 August 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0160. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 1760-1776, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, pp. 299-329.]