Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

Allen continues her brief foray into the Declaration’s historical background with a return to the work of John Adams and Richard Henry Lee. While Jefferson lodged outside the city, Lee and Adams met frequently to discuss political and practical questions raised by the beginning of armed conflict between the colonists and Great Britain. Their first crisis occurred after New Hampshire’s royal governor fled to British protection in the fall of 1775. He left a significant power vacuum behind, as governors handled virtually all political, legal, and military aspects of colonial life. New Hampshire’s citizens sent a delegation to the Continental Congress to ask for advice about their situation. In October 1775, Lee, Adams, and three others formed a committee to chart a course of action for the colony.

The national political situation was equally complicated: Congress was still waiting for a response to its petitions to the king, including an official “olive branch” offering an end to hostilities. At the same time, the Royal Navy was attacking colonial ships and firing repeatedly on coastal towns from Virginia to Maine. The Continental Congress inferred from this that their diplomatic overtures had been rejected, and the New Hampshire committee worked with this view in mind. After heated debate that frustrated Adams, the committee finally advised New Hampshire to form a new government—the first such effort in the colonies. Soon after, official news from England declared that the king saw the colonists in “open and avowed rebellion” (55), and he declared his intention to pursue foreign alliances to end their activities. Virginia’s governor offered formal emancipation to any indentured servant or enslaved person who fought for the British.

Adams and Lee then grappled with the philosophical and practical questions facing their movement: how to explain and defend the rightness of their cause, and how to replace British institutions with new ones. Lee considered the problem and decided that George III’s determination to seek foreign alliances against the colonists effectively dissolved his governmental authority: “[I]ndependence had, in short, been forced on them” (57). In a letter to Lee, Adams turned his attention to how to best replace colonial structures, advising the establishment of executive, legislative, and judicial branches of equal weight. Adams also provided very specific details to reassure his audience, down to the kinds of seals that could be used to make the new government’s acts official. Together, Adams and Lee argued for the necessity of revolution due to the absence of government and provided blueprints for their replacement. Both men hoped that Virginia would quickly adopt their strategy so that the other colonies would take the same steps. Lee produced a poster version of their correspondence, while Adams ultimately wrote a pamphlet, Thoughts on Government. Adams “began with a preamble laying out the purpose of government” (60), asserting that happiness for the greatest number of citizens was essential.

In May 1776, Virginia’s leaders held a political convention to discuss the possibility of forming a new government for themselves and also proposing a general declaration of independence to Congress in Philadelphia. While this was underway, British troops attacked Philadelphia, and Adams and Lee proposed that all the colonies should adopt new governments. Adams’s resolution passed, and Congress then asked that he further explain his reasoning. Adams reiterated that the king’s rejection of peace overtures and decision to pursue foreign allies for his attacks made support for the British government untenable, and he called for new administration where the colonists would pursue “the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular, and America in general” (63). The preamble passed on May 15, the same day Virginia asked Congress to declare independence for all the colonies. One task remained for Adams: writing and propagating a formal declaration of independence. He would share this work with Jefferson.

After the colonies resolved to set up new governments, leaders like Jefferson began to consider the problem of drafting new constitutions. Jefferson wanted to attend Virginia’s constitutional convention but was ordered to remain in Philadelphia.

Early that summer, Lee put forward a resolution in support of full independence for all the colonies, including pursuit of foreign allies and a new government. When it became clear that support for this resolution was not unanimous, Congress decided to give the delegates more time to confer with their constituents and to appoint a formal committee of five to draft a declaration of independence. Adams ensured that Jefferson would head the committee. Benjamin Franklin and a New York lawyer named Robert Livingston also came aboard, together with Connecticut farmer Roger Sherman, who had worked with Lee in the past. Jefferson was the least burdened committee member; others were in charge of pursuing foreign alliances or drafting articles of confederation for the new nation. As a result, he did much of the early work on the Declaration. At the same time, he continued to follow Virginian politics closely, especially George Mason’s publication of a Declaration of Rights. Mason focused on the goal of government to protect citizens and ensure their happiness and on the right of citizens to establish new governments if their old ones failed. These themes, together with others introduced by Adams, would reach new articulation in the Declaration of Independence.

Congress voted for independence on July 2 and approved the Declaration on July 4. The document was edited and discussed extensively in these two days, and the writing process continued far beyond Adams’s triumphant letter to his wife, Abigail, that declared the colonies independent states.

Allen describes the process of group editing—how the members of Congress trimmed, cut, and polished Jefferson’s original text. She notes that the famous phrase “we hold these truths to be self-evident” was originally set out as “sacred and undeniable” (75), and she imagines the hours of debate and conversation that produced the words we now know. Many passages were cut, including a long section about the evils of slavery, and another about the colonies’ relationship to the British people. There were also significant additions, including references to “divine Providence” as a source of support and justification for independence.

The next stage came after New York formally voted for independence, and Congress asked that the document be inscribed on parchment and titled “The Unanimous Declaration of Independence of the United States of America” (75). This task was given to a calligrapher named Timothy Matlack, while other versions of the document were printed on a poster and published as part of the official congressional record. The Declaration itself was to be printed and sent to all the new states, a task given to a Baltimore printer named Mary Katherine Goddard. Goddard and Matlack, too, became authors of the text. This was largely due to the absence of formal standards for punctuation and capitalization, which allowed personal preference and regionalisms to drive these choices. Goddard was devoutly Catholic and capitalized all references to God in her version. She also imitated Adams’s habit of capitalizing keywords, rather than Jefferson and Matlack’s practice of only capitalizing the start of sentences. These versions, then, show who was likely present as they were crafted. Matlack’s parchment version was signed by the delegates throughout that summer and has become the standard reproduction in the National Archives.

Allen describes the large number of committees the members of Congress served on, emphasizing that they were “constantly talking to one another” (79). She catalogs just some of these meetings, noting the number of votes required to affirm independence, approve the Declaration, and inscribe it on parchment. She writes, “Agreement, whether through consensus or majority vote, had to be achieved in more than fifty separate instances at a minimum. If we focus on this list of conversations, we cannot avoid seeing that the Declaration has as much to do with process as with product” (81). In Allen’s view, Jefferson’s chief accomplishment was creating a draft that could sustain such deep periods of debate, engagement, and discussion. Even as Allen appreciates the accomplishment, she admits that democratic writing is imperfect—after all, group discussion removed the Declaration’s criticisms of slavery. She insists, however, that democratic writing is essential to human “collective happiness” and invites the reader to engage with the text “slowly” (82).