Declaration of Independence

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 4 July 1776. Momentum in favor of the idea of independence was building during the winter and spring of 1776. Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, published on 10 January 1776 and widely read, increased popular acceptance of severing political ties to Britain. Several states had already expressed sentiments that amounted to independence, but Congress was more cautious. The Virginia convention forced the issue on 15 May 1776 by instructing its delegates to offer in Congress a resolution declaring the colonies to be independent. The Virginia delegates laid the resolution before Congress on 27 May, at the same time that the North Carolina delegates indicated that they had instructions to vote for independence. The next eleven days were spent in building a consensus in Congress. Then, on 7 June, Richard Henry Lee, a delegate from Virginia, offered the following resolution: "Resolved, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved."

Following two days of debate, on 11 June 1776 Congress postponed consideration of the resolution for three weeks (to allow wavering delegates to get instructions from home) and simultaneously appointed a "Committee of Five" to draft a statement that would present to the world the case for independence. Four committee members—Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert R. Livingston of New York—delegated the fifth, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, to prepare a draft declaration. Although only thirty-three years old, Jefferson had a reputation for political writing that made him a logical candidate to be the drafter. Perhaps more to the point, of the five delegates he was the one least busy with other congressional business. The document about which so much historical fuss has been made was regarded as nothing more than routine work at the time.

Congress reconvened on 1 July to consider Lee's resolution. Voting by colonies, the resolution received nine affirmative votes. Pennsylvania and South Carolina voted in the negative, New York abstained, and Delaware's two delegates deadlocked. Taking advantage of Edward Rutledge's intimation that South Carolina might change sides, the advocates of independence, who dearly desired unanimity on such an important measure, agreed to retake the vote the next day.

The events of 2 July demonstrated the lengths to which advocates of independence would go to achieve unanimity. John Adams worked tirelessly to sway his colleagues, leading the difficult battle for greater consensus. Under the influence of Rutledge, South Carolina now joined the majority. Two conservative Pennsylvania delegates—Robert Morris and John Dickinson—deliberately absented themselves, allowing the remaining delegates to vote three-two in favor. And, most dramatically, Caesar Rodney, alerted by Thomas McKean that his vote would be needed to break Delaware's deadlock, rode eighty miles through the night in a thunderstorm from Dover, Delaware, to cast his tie-breaking vote for independence. The final tally was twelve votes for independence, with the New York delegates still awaiting instructions from their newly elected assembly back home.

With Lee's resolution approved, Congress now turned to Jefferson's draft Declaration, which Franklin and Adams had changed slightly. Jefferson drew on many sources in constructing his draft; as James Madison later commented, "The object was to assert, not to discover truths." In general, his words reflected the influence of political philosophers beginning with the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, including most notably ideas found in John Locke's writings from the late seventeenth century. That cache of notions about the proper role of government, and especially what to do when an established government became abusive or tyrannical, had become a common element in American political discourse since the start of the imperial crisis, and would have made ready sense to politically aware people who were active in government at the local and colony level. Jefferson's phraseology suggests that he had before him on his drafting table a copy of the preamble he had written for the recently adopted Virginia state constitution of 1776 and copies of the first three sections of George Mason's Declaration of Rights. The introductory sections of his draft of the Declaration asserted that independence was now an unavoidable step, an action based on principles that his readers would readily understand as "self-evident." When the established government had engaged in "a long train of abuses and usurpations," it was the right of a people "to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security." The bulk of the Declaration provided the particulars needed to indict and convict George III of tyranny, and asserted that all means of redress short of independence had been denied. In words that echoed Lee's resolution of 7 June, the Declaration concluded that "these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states." Modern scholarship has demonstrated that, although the Declaration retained much of Jefferson's literary style, linguistic cadence, and political thinking, because the draft was edited by Congress as a committee of the whole the Declaration deserves to be regarded as the product of the collective wisdom of delegates from all the colonies, who labored into the late afternoon of 4 July to produce and approve the final document.

The committee had the Declaration printed at the shop of John Dunlap, Congress's official printer, on the night of 4-5 July, for distribution to the army, state assemblies, conventions, and committees of safety. The printed document was headed, "In Congress, July 4, 1776. A Declaration by the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled," and entered into the journal of Congress under the date 4 July, a circumstance that gave rise to the legend that the Declaration was signed on 4 July. (John Trumbull's painting in the Capitol rotunda, The Signing of the Declaration of Independence, also propagates this error.) Its first public reading occurred on 8 July, when Colonel John Nixon was appointed by the sheriff of Philadelphia to read the Declaration on the steps of the Statehouse. Congress received news on 11 July that the New York convention had voted for independence two days earlier. On 19 July it ordered the Declaration to be engrossed (written out on parchment in a large, clear hand, by Timothy Matlock, an assistant to Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress) as "The unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America." The engrossed copy was ready on 2 August, when it was signed by all fifty delegates present (six delegates signed later). After John Hancock had signed as president of Congress, the New Hampshire delegates began the list of signatures below and to the right of the text. The other delegates followed in geographical order from north to south, in six columns that went from right to left across the parchment. The Georgia delegates signed last.

The significance of the Declaration, which merely gave official notice of the course on which the states and Congress had already embarked, was to destroy any lingering possibility of conciliation and to make it possible for foreign powers to ally themselves with the new nation.

SEE ALSO Independence; Jefferson, Thomas; Signers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Becker, Carl L. The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas. Rev. ed. New York: Knopf, 1942.

Boyd, Julian P. The Declaration of Independence: The Evolution of the Text as Shown in Facsimiles of Various Drafts by Its Author, Thomas Jefferson. Rev. ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1945.

Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Knoph, 1997.

Ferris, Robert G., ed. Signers of the Declaration: Historic Places Commemorating the Signing of the Declaration of Independence. Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1973.

Goff, Frederick R. The John Dunlap Broadside: The First Printing of the Declaration of Independence. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976.

Hutson, James H., ed. A Decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind: Congressional State Papers, 1774–1776. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1975.

Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Malone, Dumas. The Story of the Declaration of Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954.

Rakove, Jack N. The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretative History of the Continental Congress. New York: Knopf, 1979.

                         revised by Harold E. Selesky