On June 11, 1776, as discussed in last week’s newsletter, Congress appointed a committee to draft a declaration in the expectation that Richard Henry Lee’s motion for independence would pass in a few weeks’ time. Who on the committee would wield the pen was left to the discretion of its five members: John Adams of Massachusetts; Roger Sherman of Connecticut; Robert Livingston of New York; Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania; and the lanky 33-year-old Jefferson, who made a habit of keeping his lips closed and his arms crossed.
There was never any serious thought of Sherman or Livingston writing the declaration. Ditto for the famous Franklin. A bout of gout had confined him to bed. As it happened, the old newspaper editor wouldn’t have agreed to take on the job anyway. “I have made it a rule… whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body,” he later told Jefferson.
As Adams remembered it, the choice came down to him and Jefferson, with each favoring the other. Adams recalled making three arguments for Jefferson: “Reason 1st. You are a Virginian, and Virginia ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason 2d. I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular; you are very much otherwise. Reason 3d: You can write 10 times better than I can.” In truth, Adams’ vast portfolio of committees had already overstretched him and would soon include a taxing new assignment as the head of the Board of War and Ordnance.
For his part, Jefferson remembered that everyone assumed he would do the drafting from the outset. He had established his credentials as both a writer and a staunch patriot in 1774 with a radical pamphlet called A Summary View of the Rights of British America and seemed particularly well prepared for this assignment. He already had a solid start on what would be the Declaration of Independence’s largest section: the list of “injuries and usurpations” committed by King George III. Jefferson had drawn up the list while trying to insert himself into the drafting process for what he believed would prove a more consequential document: the new constitution being written for Virginia in Williamsburg. He would have preferred to be there rather than in Philadelphia.
Entertaining as it is to imagine Jefferson fighting through writer’s block and crumpling up paper as he began work on the Declaration, that’s not the way it went. The drafting process proceeded quickly in the second-floor rooms that Jefferson rented in a brick house in Philadelphia. He wrote on a portable wooden desk that he had custom-ordered. Despite all the speculation about what books he consulted, the answer appears to be none. “I turned to neither book or pamphlet while writing it,” he recalled. He had already read the great philosophers and absorbed their ideas. Had he not done so beforehand (do your homework, kids!), he could never have produced a complete draft in what was said to be a mere “day or two.”