Thomas Jefferson: The Reluctant Revolutionary Who Almost Wasn’t There
Kids in school learn that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. What they are rarely told is how close we came to having someone else write it, and how the document Jefferson actually produced was nearly gutted before it saw the light of day.
Jefferson did not want to be in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776. His mother had just died. His wife, Martha, was sick. His home in Monticello needed him. He kept writing to Virginia, begging to be replaced in the Continental Congress. He felt the real revolution was happening back home, where Virginia was writing its own constitution, and wanted to write that document instead.
However, God and John Adams had other plans. When the Committee of Five was appointed to draft a declaration, Adams maneuvered Jefferson into the role of principal author. Jefferson later recalled Adams making the case with typical bluntness: Jefferson was a Virginian — and Virginia's support was essential. Jefferson was also a far better writer than he was, which Adams admitted.
Jefferson sat in his rented rooms at 7th and Market streets in Philadelphia and wrote. He used no books, he claimed, no other documents — only “the harmonizing sentiments of the day.” Scholars have since identified numerous influences, from John Locke to George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights, but the writing was Jefferson's own. He worked quickly. The draft was done in about two weeks.
Then Congress got hold of it. Over two and a half days, the delegates hacked at Jefferson's work. They removed roughly one quarter of the text. Jefferson sat in agony, saying nothing, while Benjamin Franklin, who sat next to him whispered jokes to ease the tension. The most significant cut was Jefferson's long condemnation of the slave trade, which he blamed entirely on King George. Southern delegates, particularly from South Carolina and Georgia, refused to accept it. The section was eliminated.
Jefferson never forgave their actions. For the rest of his life, he circulated his original draft alongside the final version, letting readers see what Congress had taken away. It was, he seemed to say, the truest version of his intentions.
What survived was enough to shake the world. The self-evident truths Jefferson enshrined that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights were not legal code. They were a moral contract, a standard that America would spend centuries trying to meet.
The man who nearly skipped the Continental Congress to go home and write a state constitution instead gave us all its most quoted statement of human dignity. It seems that God had His own opinions about Thomas Jefferson's summer plans.
Sources
Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Meacham, Jon. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. New York: Random House, 2012.
Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1785. Reprint, New York: Penguin Classics, 1999.
Becker, Carl. The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.
Boyd, Julian P., ed. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950.
