Drafting the Documents:
Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence
in Philadelphia behind a veil of Congressionally imposed secrecy
in June 1776 for a country wracked by military and political uncertainties.
In anticipation of a vote for independence, the Continental Congress
on June 11 appointed Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin,
Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston as a committee to draft
a declaration of independence. The committee then delegated Thomas
Jefferson to undertake the task. Jefferson worked diligently in
private for days to 
compose
a document. Proof of the arduous nature of the work can be seen
in the fragment of the first known composition draft of the declaration,
which is on public display here for the first time.
Jefferson then made a clean or “fair”
copy of the composition declaration, which became the foundation
of the document, labeled by Jefferson as the “original Rough
draught.” Revised first by Adams, then by Franklin, and
then by the full committee, a total of forty-seven alterations
including the insertion of three complete paragraphs was made
on the text before it was presented to Congress on June 28. After
voting for independence on July 2, the Congress then continued
to refine the document, making thirty-nine additional revisions
to the committee draft before its final adoption on the morning
of July 4. The “original Rough draught” embodies the
multiplicity of corrections, additions and deletions that were
made at each step. Although most of the alterations are in Jefferson's
handwriting (Jefferson later indicated the changes he believed
to have been made by Adams and Franklin), quite naturally he opposed
many of the changes made to his document.
Congress then ordered the Declaration
of Independence printed and late on July 4, John Dunlap, a Philadelphia
printer, produced the first printed text of the Declaration of
Independence, now known as the “Dunlap Broadside.”
The next day John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress,
began dispatching copies of the Declaration to America's political
and military leaders. On July 9, George Washington ordered that
his personal copy of the “Dunlap Broadside,” sent
to him by John Hancock on July 6, be read to the assembled American
army at New York. In 1783 at the war's end, General Washington
brought his copy of the broadside home to Mount Vernon. This remarkable
document, which has come down to us only partially intact, is
accompanied in this exhibit by a complete “Dunlap Broadside”
— one of only twenty-four known to exist.
On July 19, Congress ordered the production of an engrossed (officially
inscribed) copy of the Declaration of Independence, which attending
members of the Continental Congress, including some who had not
voted for its adoption, began to sign on August 2, 1776. This
document is on permanent display at the National Archives.
On July 4, 1995, more than two centuries
after its composition, the Declaration of Independence, just as
Jefferson predicted on its fiftieth anniversary in his letter
to Roger C. Weightman, towers aloft as “the signal of arousing
men to burst the chains...to assume the blessings and security
of self-government” and to restore “the free right
to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.”
From the Library of Congress.
