When in the Course of Human Events: Creating the Declaration of Independence
December 10, 2025
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Most Americans know that we celebrate the Fourth of July, but few realize that John Adams spent much of his life insisting we had picked the wrong date. Adams was certain that July 2nd, 1776, the day the Continental Congress voted for independence, would be remembered forever with “pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.” He got the festivities right but missed the date by two days. Americans chose instead to commemorate the moment when Congress adopted the document explaining their decision, a text drafted primarily by a quiet 33-year-old Virginian named Thomas Jefferson.
The path to that document began in earnest with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in January 1776. Second only to the Bible in popularity, Paine’s pamphlet made a case that went beyond protesting British overreach. He argued that the very structure of monarchy contradicted natural equality. “For all men being originally equals,” Paine wrote, “no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever.” His sardonic jab at hereditary rule still stings: if nature wanted us to have kings, she wouldn’t so frequently give mankind “an ass for a lion.” By spring, the colonies were debating independence in their legislatures.
On June 7, 1776, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee stood before Congress and proposed that “these United Colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.” Rather than vote immediately, Congress appointed a committee of five men to draft a document justifying this momentous break. The selection reflected careful geographic balance: John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert Livingston of New York.
Jefferson’s inclusion raised eyebrows. He was young, relatively unknown, and hardly the most vocal member of Congress. But several factors worked in his favor. Virginia, the largest and wealthiest colony, needed representation on the committee. Jefferson had earned a reputation as an excellent writer through his Summary View of the Rights of British America, which had circulated in pamphlet form months earlier. Perhaps most practically, he had time. Adams was drowning in committee work, taking meetings in his quarters until ten at night just to keep up.
Years later, Adams and Jefferson would disagree about how Jefferson ended up doing the actual drafting. Adams remembered being quite direct about it: “Reason first, you are a Virginian and Virginia 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 10 times better than I can.” Jefferson recalled it differently, insisting the entire committee pressed the task upon him. Either way, Jefferson accepted the job.
For 17 days in the Philadelphia summer, Jefferson labored in his small lodging near a stable. The heat was oppressive. Flies buzzed. The smell of manure drifted through the windows. He worked at a portable writing desk, crafting what would become one of history’s most consequential documents. Jefferson later claimed he wasn’t copying from any particular source but rather capturing “the sentiments that were in the air.” Still, he had George Mason’s recently written Virginia Declaration of Rights at hand, and he had drafted his own preamble to a Virginia constitution that listed grievances against the king.
When Jefferson finished, he sent his draft to Adams and Franklin for comments. Franklin made four or five suggestions, tightening the language and sharpening the precision. Where Jefferson had written “power,” Franklin suggested “despotism.” There’s debate over whether Franklin changed “sacred and undeniable” to “self-evident” in the famous opening, though the edit appears in Jefferson’s handwriting. Franklin, suffering from a painful gout attack in his big toe, may have made these suggestions from home rather than traveling to meet in person.
On July 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, Congress took up Jefferson’s draft. What followed was, from Jefferson’s perspective, an agony. Congress cut roughly 25 percent of his carefully crafted text. He sat dying a thousand deaths, as he later put it, watching his words get “mutilated.” Franklin, sitting beside him, tried to ease the pain with a story about a friend who wanted to hang a sign for his hat shop. By the time the friend’s advisors finished editing the proposed text, nothing remained but the man’s name and a picture of a hat.
The largest deletion struck at the heart of a profound moral question. Jefferson had included an entire paragraph condemning the slave trade, calling slavery “cruel war against human nature itself” and a violation of “the sacred rights of life and liberty” of African peoples. He criticized King George for vetoing colonial attempts to ban the importation of enslaved people and referred to the trade as “pyratical warfare.” Most tellingly, Jefferson emphasized that the king was determined to keep open “a market where men should be bought and sold,” stressing the word “men” to make clear he meant all human beings, not just white males.
Congress deleted the paragraph. Jefferson and Adams agreed on why: South Carolina and Georgia wanted to continue the slave trade, and some northern delegates had financial stakes in it. The moment wasn’t right to unify all the colonies against slavery. First, they needed independence.
Congress did add a few phrases, including two references to God: “appealing to the supreme judge of the world” and “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence.” These invocations gave the document a more religious character than Jefferson might have chosen on his own.
The vote on July 4th wasn’t quite unanimous. New York’s delegates abstained, lacking permission from their state legislature. The word “unanimous” wouldn’t appear on the Declaration until later, after New York received authorization to join the other states.
The next day, printer John Dunlap produced about 200 broadside copies. The Declaration spread rapidly across the remarkably literate American colonies. It was read aloud on the steps of public buildings and reprinted in newspapers. George Washington had it read to his troops almost immediately. By August, it had reached England, then Spain, the Netherlands, and Austria. The document achieved one of its primary goals: proclaiming to the world that America deserved recognition as an independent nation and warranted international support. French military aid, which proved crucial to American victory, followed.
Near the end of his life, Jefferson reflected on what he had tried to accomplish. The Declaration wasn’t meant to be original, he explained, but rather “an expression of the American mind,” capturing widely held sentiments in language “so plain and firm as to command their assent.” In his final letter before death in 1826, Jefferson expressed hope that the Declaration would be “the signal of arousing men to burst the chains” of tyranny everywhere. He rejoiced that by the 1820s, other nations were having their own revolutions and embracing principles of natural rights and self-government.
Jefferson’s vision proved prophetic. More than a hundred nations now have declarations of independence of their own, many echoing the language and principles Jefferson articulated in that sweltering Philadelphia room in the summer of 1776.