Committee of Five - Drafting of The Declaration of Independence

Drafting of The Declaration of Independence

On the Monday afternoon of June 10, 1776, the delegates of the United Colonies in Congress resolved to postpone until Monday July the 1st the final consideration of whether or not to declare the several sovereign independencies of the United Colonies, as proposed by the North Carolina resolutions of April 12 and the Virginia resolutions of May 15, and moved in Congress on June 7 by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia; henceforth the Lee Resolution. During these allotted three weeks Congress agreed to appoint a committee to draft a broadside statement to proclaim to the world the reasons for taking America out of the British Empire, if the Congress were to declare the said sovereign independencies. The actual declaration of "American Independence" is precisely the text comprising the final paragraph of the published broadside of July 4. In the broadside's final paragraph is repeated the text of the Lee Resolution as adopted by the declaratory resolve voted on July 2. Hence, "American Independence", of these "Free and independent States", was actually declared in the Congress on the afternoon of July 2 and reported as such afterwards, unofficially in a local newspaper that very evening and officially in the published broadside dated July 4.

On June 11, the members of the Committee of Five were appointed; they were: John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert Livingston of New York, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. Because the committee left no minutes, there is some uncertainty about how the drafting process proceeded—accounts written many years later by Jefferson and Adams, although frequently cited, are contradictory and not entirely reliable. What is certain is that the committee, after discussing the general outline that the document should follow, decided that Jefferson would write the first draft. Considering Congress's busy schedule, Jefferson probably had limited time for writing over the next seventeen days, and likely wrote the draft quickly. He then consulted the others, made some changes, and then produced another copy incorporating these alterations. The committee presented this copy to the Congress on June 28, 1776. The title of the document was "A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled."