The Committee of Five drafted the Declaration to be ready when Congress voted on independence. John Adams, a leading proponent of independence, persuaded the Committee of Five to charge Thomas Jefferson with authoring the document's original draft, which the Second Continental Congress then edited. The Declaration was a formal explanation of why the Continental Congress had voted to declare its independence from Great Britain, a year after the American Revolutionary War broke out. The Lee Resolution for independence was passed unanimously by the Congress on July 2.
The sources and interpretation of the Declaration have been the subject of much scholarly inquiry. The Declaration justified the independence of the United States by listing 27 colonial grievances against King George III and by asserting certain natural and legal rights, including a right of revolution. Its original purpose was to announce independence, and references to the text of the Declaration were few in the following years. Abraham Lincoln made it the centerpiece of his policies and his rhetoric, as in the Gettysburg Address of 1863.[4] Since then, it has become a well-known statement on human rights, particularly its second sentence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The Declaration Of Independence
Congress next turned its attention to the committee's draft of the declaration. They made a few changes in wording during several days of debate and deleted nearly a fourth of the text. The wording of the Declaration of Independence was approved on July 4, 1776, and sent to the printer for publication.
There is a distinct change in wording from this original broadside printing of the Declaration and the final official engrossed copy. The word "unanimous" was inserted as a result of a Congressional resolution passed on July 19, 1776: "Resolved, That the Declaration passed on the 4th, be fairly engrossed on parchment, with the title and stile of 'The unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America,' and that the same, when engrossed, be signed by every member of Congress."[58] Historian George Athan Billias says: "Independence amounted to a new status of interdependence: the United States was now a sovereign nation entitled to the privileges and responsibilities that came with that status. America thus became a member of the international community, which meant becoming a maker of treaties and alliances, a military ally in diplomacy, and a partner in foreign trade on a more equal basis."[59]
The declaration is not divided into formal sections; but it is often discussed as consisting of five parts: introduction, preamble, indictment of King George III, denunciation of the British people, and conclusion.[60]
Asserts as a matter of Natural Law the ability of a people to assume political independence; acknowledges that the grounds for such independence must be reasonable, and therefore explicable, and ought to be explained.
Other countries have used the Declaration as inspiration or have directly copied sections from it. These include the Haitian declaration of January 1, 1804 during the Haitian Revolution, the United Provinces of New Granada in 1811, the Argentine Declaration of Independence in 1816, the Chilean Declaration of Independence in 1818, Costa Rica in 1821, El Salvador in 1821, Guatemala in 1821, Honduras in 1821, Mexico in 1821, Nicaragua in 1821, Peru in 1821, Bolivian War of Independence in 1825, Uruguay in 1825, Ecuador in 1830, Colombia in 1831, Paraguay in 1842, Dominican Republic in 1844, Texas Declaration of Independence in March 1836, California Republic in November 1836, Hungarian Declaration of Independence in 1849, Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand in 1835, and the Czechoslovak declaration of independence from 1918 drafted in Washington D.C. with Gutzon Borglum among the drafters. The Rhodesian declaration of independence is based on the American one, as well, ratified in November 1965, although it omits the phrases "all men are created equal" and "the consent of the governed".[96][122][123][124] The South Carolina declaration of secession from December 1860 also mentions the U.S. Declaration of Independence, though it omits references to "all men are created equal" and "consent of the governed".
Adams penned defenses of American rights in the 1770s and was one of the earliest advocates of colonial independence from Great Britain. The author of the Massachusetts Constitution and Declaration of Rights of 1780, Adams was also a champion of individual liberty. He favored the addition of the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution.
Drafting the Declaration of Independence in 1776 became the defining event in Thomas Jefferson's life. Despite Jefferson's desire to return to Virginia to help write that state's constitution, the Continental Congress appointed him to the five-person committee for drafting a declaration of independence. That committee subsequently assigned him the task of producing a draft document for its consideration. Drawing on documents, such as the Virginia Declaration of Rights, state and local calls for independence, and his own draft of a Virginia constitution, Jefferson wrote a stunning statement of the colonists' right to rebel against the British government and establish their own based on the premise that all men are created equal and have the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Through the many revisions made by Jefferson, the committee, and then by Congress, Jefferson retained his prominent role in writing the defining document of the American Revolution and, indeed, of the United States. Jefferson was critical of changes to the document, particularly the removal of a long paragraph that attributed responsibility of the slave trade to British King George III. Jefferson was justly proud of his role in writing the Declaration of Independence and skillfully defended his authorship of this hallowed document.
Immediately on learning that the Virginia Convention had called for independence on May 15, 1776, Jefferson, a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, wrote at least three drafts of a Virginia constitution. Jefferson's drafts are not only important for their influence on the Virginia government, they are direct predecessors of the Declaration of Independence. Shown here is Jefferson's litany of governmental abuses by King George III as it appeared in his first draft.
On June 11, 1776, anticipating that the vote for independence would be favorable, Congress appointed a committee to draft a declaration: Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Robert R. Livingston of New York, and John Adams of Massachusetts. Currier and Ives prepared this imagined scene for the one hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
");msgWindow.document.write("");msgWindow.document.write("");}The Final Text of the Declaration of Independence July 4 1776IntroductionOn June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee introducedinto Congress a resolution,(adopted on July 2)which asserted that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, feeand independent States. While this resolution was being discussed,on June11 a committee,consisting of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R.Livingston , and Roger Sherman was appointed to draft a Declaration of Independence.In his Autobiography written in 1805,Adams states that the committee of five decided upon "which the declarationwas to consist", and it then appointed Jefferson and himself to form asubcommittee to really write them down. Now Jefferson and Adams have twocompletely different versions of what happened then. Adams says:Jefferson proposed to me to make the draught, I said I will not; You shall doit. Oh no! Why will you not? You ought to do it. I will not. Why? Reasonsenough. What can be your reasons? Reason 1st. You are a Virginian and aVirginian ough to appear at the head of this business. Reason 2nd. I amobnoxious, suspected and unpopular; you are very much otherwise. Reason 3rd.You can write ten times better than I can. 'Well", said Jefferson, 'if you aredecided I will do as well as I can'. Very well, when you have drawnit up wewill have a meeting.Jefferson's version is completely different. In a letter to Maddison of 1823he writes:Mr. Adams memory has led him into unquestionable error. At the age of 88 and47 years after the transactions, . . . this is not wonderful. Nor should I . .. venture to oppose my memory to his, were it not supported by written notes,taken by myself at the moment and on the spot. . . The Committee of 5 met, nosuch thing as a sub-committee was proposed, but they unanimously pressed onmyself alone to undertake the draught. I consented; I drew it; but before Ireported it to the committee I communicated it separately to Dr. Franklin andMr. Adams requesting their corrections;. . . and you have seen the originalpaper now in my hands, with the corrections of Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adamsinterlined in their own handwriting. Their alterations were two or three only,and merely verbal. I then wrote a fair copy, reported it to the committee, andfrom them, unaltered to the Congress.The draft was presented to Congress on June 28 andadopted by Congress on July 4,after a number of changes had been made. There are no journals on the debatesand the amendments. The most important of these were theexcision of a passage indicting the slave trade anda number of passages were reworded in a more pious form..A formal parchment copy of the Declaration, adopted in Congress 4 July 1776, was available for signing onAugust 2, and most of the 55 signatures were inscribed upon it on thatdate.The intention of the Declaration, Jefferson later wrote, was not saying some-thing new, but to place before mankind the common sense of thesubject, interms so plain and firm as to command their assent... Neither aiming atoriginality of principles or sentiments, nor yet copied from any particularand previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the Americanmind.Draft version of the Declaration of Independence, June 28,1776There is still another version of the text, the so-called Lee-version. Thisis the text that Jefferson sent to Lee. This may be a better version of thedraft. See Carl L. Becker, The declaration of independence. Astudy in the history of political ideas (New York, 1922) page 174.One of the inspirations for the American Declaration of Independence was the Plakkaat van Verlatinghe of 1581 in which the Dutch abjured the King of Spain as their sovereign. 2ff7e9595c
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