The plan had come together the previous week when Adams and his allies in Congress introduced a resolution advising all 13 colonies to put in place governments “sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs.” Seemingly harmless, the measure passed the chamber easily on May 10, 1776. Only then did Adams come forward with a proposal for adding a preamble that revealed what he really intended the resolution to accomplish. The text included this line: “It is necessary that the exercise of every kind of authority under the said crown should be totally suppressed, and all the powers of government exerted under the authority of the people of the colonies.” When affixed to the resolution, it was a call for all the colonies to eradicate every last vestige of loyalty to George III and set up governments deriving their power from the people alone.
Furious opposition arose from delegates still favoring reconciliation with Britain. One of them, James Duane of New York, accused Adams of having transformed an innocuous resolution into “a machine for the fabrication of independence.” Adams didn’t deny it. “I said, smiling, I thought it was independence itself,” he recalled.
The evidence suggests that many delegates in the debate recognized that Adams’ words amounted to a declaration of independence. Although Thomas Jefferson of Virginia would receive “all the glory,” as Adams later bitterly put it, for writing the document that Congress adopted on July 4, the man from Monticello missed almost the entire debate over the resolution. He had returned to Philadelphia from a stay in Virginia on May 14, just one day before delegates passed the preamble by a slim majority. “Great Britain has at last driven America to the last step—a complete separation from her, a total absolute independence, not only of her Parliament but of her Crown, for such is the amount of the resolve of the 15th,” Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, a couple days after the vote.