Architect of liberty
Founding Father’s work, the Declaration of Independence, guides us still
IN early June of 1776 the Continental Congress named 36-year-old Thomas Jefferson to a committee to write a justification for the colonies’ declaring their independence from Britain. It is possible that other committee members suggested the basic outline of the document. But Jefferson may have already decided, before the committee even formally met, on a three-part structure, involving a brief philosophical preamble or introduction, a list of grievances, and a brief statement of the united colonies’ right to join the established nations of Europe as a full-fledged nation-state.
In any event, within several days of starting, Jefferson had produced a draft, which he apparently showed to the other committee members, except for (Benjamin) Franklin, who was too ill to attend meetings. The committee made some suggestions (we have no record of the specifics), and after addressing them, Jefferson sent the revised version to Franklin. We do not know what changes Franklin made, if any, though it has been suggested — with no actual proof — that the phrase “self-evident” in the preamble was his. Jefferson submitted the cleaned-up copy, incorporating the suggestions of the committee, to Congress on Friday, June 28. On Tuesday, July 2 … congressional consideration got underway. Acting together, Congress made thirtynine changes, mainly excisions, shortening the document by a little over a quarter. Even so, a full 90 percent of the words in the final Declaration of Independence were Jefferson’s. He is rightly credited as its author.
How did Jefferson approach his task? Whether or not the committee had helped shape the document, he had ready material at hand. Jefferson was a student of political philosophy and legal history, and for him, as for many of the delegates, the basic ideas of John Locke, Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (authors of the essays in Cato’s Letters), and other writers were ingrained in his mind. Jefferson had effectively rehearsed the application of these ideas to the American situation in his A Summary View and, more recently, in his proposed constitution for Virginia. And fresh in his memory were the newspaper reports of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, [ the work of George Mason.] Given this background, Jefferson fashioned in very short order the document the committee approved and, after revisions, the Congress accepted on July 4 as the Declaration of Independence. …
Jefferson’s preamble made more elegant and memorable the content of Mason’s clauses: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Congress retained almost every word, except for one salutary revision: “inherent and inalienable” became “certain unalienable.” Various reprintings of the declaration have ended the sentence with the word “happiness.” Jefferson had not done so; he did not intend his text to limit the selfevident truths in this way. To him, the clauses that followed were also self-evident: that governments derive their powers from the consent of the people, that governments are instituted to promote the people’s basic rights, and that, if they fail to do so, the people have the right to alter or abolish them. With consummate artistry, Jefferson summarized years of thinking and political philosophizing in about two hundred words. The whole is
organized as a rational argument. In view of the unalienable rights of the people and the fact that governments are supposed to promote those rights, it logically follows that when governments do not, they deserve to be changed.
… Jefferson next turned to a lengthy enumeration of the injustices the colonies had suffered and now justified the people’s right to reject British governance. Jefferson understood that the colonies, founded at different times, for different purposes, and now boasting different economies and religions, nevertheless constituted a unitary “people.” He drew on his proposed draft of the Virginia constitution, rearranging and adding to the list of grievances, which he offered in order of ascending degree of egregiousness. Jefferson wrote in essence as a lawyer, marshalling the best evidence to advance his purpose to a jury made up of a “candid world.” …
The last drew a long harangue from Jefferson that unfairly blamed the king for the spread of slavery into the colonies. Jefferson labeled the transportation of human beings from Africa to the colonies a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating [the] most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people.” Jefferson assumed that slaves — African men and women — had rights identical to those of the rest of the American people. Moreover, when he later referred in this passage to enslaved men and women using the generic word “men,” he clearly meant both genders, as he did in writing earlier that all “men” are created equal. He was referring to the equal possession of inherent rights, not equality of any other kind.
In his autobiography Jefferson complained that Congress struck the section on slavery “in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia” and also in deference to some northern colonies involved in the slave trade. But Congress might have removed the passage in recognition of the contradiction inherent in slaveholding colonies clamoring for liberty for themselves while ignoring the plight of their bondspeople, not to mention the colonists’ role in slavery’s rise and continuance. Had the passage on slavery remained, it could have supported Jefferson’s later attempts to promote abolition and the colonization or resettlement of the freed people.
John Adams, the colonies’ foremost constitutionalist, preferred Jefferson’s original draft and felt that Congress “obliterated some of the best of it.” Most scholars, however, agree that the congressional edits improved the Declaration of Independence.
In addressing the conclusion of Jefferson’s draft, Congress added new language, essentially reprinting the congressional resolution of July 2 declaring the colonies absolved of the former allegiance to Britain. The delegates — on the whole more explicitly religious than Jefferson was at this time — also added “appealing to the supreme judge of the world” to the first sentence of the last paragraph and “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence” to the final sentence, resulting in a total of four references to God in the document. The first, in Jefferson’s language, referred to “Nature’s God” and the second to the unalienable rights with which people were “endowed by their Creator.” The last insertion concerning divine providence was the only change to the soaring language at the end of Jefferson’s masterwork: “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.”
Thus the Declaration of Independence was neither entirely the work of one person, nor primarily a committee project, nor the result of congressional deliberation — it was the result of all these, with Jefferson playing an essential role; the document’s basic argumentative strategy and literary elegance show his hand. It represented a remarkable synthesis of the delegates’ and much of the public’s views. No delegate sought originality of thought. Rather, as Jefferson wrote more than a half century later, “the object” was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject. It was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day.”