But, beyond all his influences and all that he borrowed, Jefferson was, of course, not the only author of the Declaration of Independence. Once he’d written the draft, he gave it to Adams and Franklin (“the two members of whose judgments and amendments I wished most to have the benefit”), who made suggestions in their own handwriting. It is widely believed that Franklin changed Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable” to “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” which was tidier, less captious, and more secular. Then, on July 2nd and again on July 3rd, Congress met as a committee of the whole to revise the draft submitted by the Committee of Five. Thus began every writer’s nightmare.
The Declaration of Independence is not brief. If you were to cut it down to the length of the shortest short story—“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”—you’d get something like “Hear ye! Men are free! Mostly!” Congress struck out a few hundred words from Jefferson’s rough draft, but it never got as short as that.
The dozens of edits that Congress made have been minutely examined by historians and literary scholars. Pauline Maier, the author of “American Scripture,” lauded those congressional edits, which included swapping “neglected utterly” for “utterly neglected” and “a people who mean to be free” for “a free people” and changing the description of the injuries committed by the King from “unremitting” to “repeated.” But Jefferson found the experience of sitting there while lesser writers messed with his prose unbearable. He wrote to Richard Henry Lee, sharing both his original and Congress’s revision, to ask “whether it is the better or worse for the Critics.” He was sure it was worse.
Congress’s biggest change was to eliminate a paragraph that blamed George III for the institution of human bondage from which Jefferson’s own wealth was derived, and that charged the King with having “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither,” and with having defeated the colonists’ “every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.” If included, this passage would have been the twenty-eighth grievance, and the longest in the document. Jefferson maintained that the deletion was made at the behest of delegates from South Carolina and Georgia; historians have suggested that it was necessary because the passage was so patently hypocritical as to be embarrassing. But it was also, as the historian David Armitage has remarked, the climax of the story Jefferson’s draft told—the worst thing of which he accused the King. And its erasure marked the beginning of centuries of political attempts to pretend that slavery never happened. (Eleven years later, delegates to the Constitutional Convention used all manner of circumlocution to avoid putting the words “slave” or “slavery” into the nation’s frame of government.)