[It’s impossible to think about our ongoing 250th anniversary without engaging with the frustratingly Trumptastic American250 Commission, and I’ll write about such current events in my weekend post. But at the same time, I refuse to let that nonsense overshadow the complex and crucial histories themselves, so this week I’ll first AmericanStudy a handful of them!]
On a shorter-term and longer-term way to contextualize the drafting (and subsequent revisions) of the Declaration of Independence.
For a July 4th, 2018 installment of my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, I discussed (among other topics related to slavery, race, the Declaration, and the Revolution) the paragraph blaming King George for slavery that Thomas Jefferson included in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, but that was cut by the full Continental Congress before they voted to approve the document. I still believe that’s by far the most important (if also the most fraught and complicated) aspect of the Declaration’s drafting and revision, so would ask you to check out that column and then come on back for short- and long-term contexts that highlight additional layers to those processes.
Welcome back! In that column I more or less implied, as have many of the things I’ve read over the years about the Declaration of Independence, that Thomas Jefferson was the document’s sole author; that’s an understandable move, as Jefferson’s epitaph on his tombstone starts (at his request) with the phrase “Author of the Declaration of Independence,” but it’s not entirely accurate (or at least it’s far from the whole story). On June 11th the Congress appointed a Committee of Five to draft the Declaration, a body which included Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, New York’s Robert Livingston, and Connecticut’s Roger Sherman. According to multiple reports both Jefferson and the Committee overall preferred Adams to draft the document, but Adams pushed them to choose Jefferson instead. Jefferson did then spend 17 days drafting it by himself, but when he brought it to the Committee they suggested revisions which were incorporated into the document that was brought to the Congress overall (with the slavery paragraph still present). And then Congress significantly edited down the Declaration, shortening it by a quarter to produce the version that would be published and publicized. This was a communally written document in many ways, is what I’m getting at.
If that’s an important short-term context for the Declaration’s drafting, there’s also a much longer-term one which helps us reframe the document’s origins: the many examples, across multiple years, of local and state declarations of independence that served as inspirations for and influences on the national version. That list goes back at least to the Sheffield Declaration (or Sheffield Resolves) of January 1773, a Massachusetts document that would become most striking as it was drafted in the home of the man (Colonel John Ashley) who was Elizabeth Freeman’s slaveowner. And it includes a significant number passed in the months leading up to the Declaration of Independence, from North Carolina’s influential Halifax Resolves (April 12th) to the Rhode Island legislature’s vote to renounce allegiance to England (May 4th) among many others. Each and every one of those documents and moments helped prime the pump for the national Declaration, and reminds us that no individual historical document or moment, just like no historical figure, exists outside of the contingent context of countless additional details and layers. Not even—indeed, especially not—ones as prominent as Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence.
Next 250th anniversary post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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