A blanket of muggy heat hung over the city, a sign that the seasons were shifting, when a striking, if awkward, young man arrived in Philadelphia. Stepping off a coach on May 14, 1776, he stood above six feet, two inches tall, lanky and broad-shouldered, with reddish hair and a soft-spoken manner that could verge on unease.
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After several months back home in Virginia nursing his dying mother and battling migraines of his own, he wasn’t thrilled to return to the provisional capital of England’s colonies in North America. But as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson understood where he was needed.
Though he rarely spoke before Congress, Jefferson attended sessions six days a week, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Afterward, he often dined on ale and pork scrapple with fellow delegates at City Tavern.
Though busy with committee duties and drafting the constitution of the Virginia Commonwealth, he still found time for shopping trips, like buying paper, books and new violin strings for himself, or a doll for his young daughter. She and his wife, Martha, were at Monticello, the plantation he had inherited from his father, while he tolerated cramped quarters in a cabinetmaker’s home. Such was the gravity of the times.
Barely 33 years old, Jefferson was already known as a gifted writer. Trained as a lawyer and drawn to poetry, he was a lifelong student who devoured books and practiced the violin with equal discipline. His 1774 pamphlet “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” which argued that the crown had no legal or moral right to rule here, had reverberated from New York to London, even though Congress had declined to adopt the document.
“Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art,” he wrote. “Kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.”
The independence movement was surging. On June 7, Congress scheduled a vote to that effect and assigned a “committee of five” to draft a supporting statement, in the event the “yeas” should carry. But somebody had to be the author.
Benjamin Franklin, afflicted by gout, was unable. John Adams, the most vocal advocate, deferred to Jefferson, insisting that the Southerner who was respected in Congress and had “a masterly pen” should take the lead. The task was to justify secession and help secure foreign support, but Jefferson was even more ambitious.
He set out to write a piece of literature that would define a nation.
Age of reason
Jefferson was, among many other things, a product of the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that had reshaped science, philosophy and the arts across Europe and its colonies.
In 1687, Isaac Newton published “Principia Mathematica,” which defined the universe as governed by measurable laws. Two years later, John Locke argued in an “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” that the mind began as a “blank slate,” to be shaped by experience. Later, in his “Second Treatise of Government,” Locke introduced an even more radical claim: that all people possessed natural rights which no ruler could take away.
Together, ideas like these questioned common beliefs about the structure of society and the political order that ruled it. They pointed toward a new order, free of monarchy, rooted in reason and self-government. These notions spread quickly, crossing the Atlantic in books, pamphlets and newspapers, accelerated by advances in printing and rising literacy.
Artists also challenged convention, trading Baroque exuberance for Neoclassical symmetry. Composers like Mozart tried to reach wider audiences with shorter melodies. And writers adopted Augustan wit and satire, including the “mock-heroic,” a form that applied conventions of epic poetry to trivial themes.
Jefferson came of age amid this cultural shift. After boarding school, he entered the College of William and Mary at 16, where he received the broad education that Locke had championed. Mentors like the Scottish professor William Small introduced him to Enlightenment philosophy, while the jurist George Wythe trained him in law over five years of study.
In 1771, Jefferson described his ideal “gentlemen’s library” in a letter, listing hundreds of volumes — from Homer and Shakespeare to botany and ancient history — reflecting both his curiosity and the spirit of his time.
By 1776, Enlightenment ideas had permeated colonial life. That January, Thomas Paine distilled many of them into plain language in “Common Sense,” a 47-page pamphlet that made the case for independence. More than 120,000 copies were sold within months.
Across the Colonies, assemblies began issuing resolutions of their own, urging independence. First among them was the Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted by George Mason.
Jefferson encountered a committee draft of that document in the Pennsylvania Evening Post just a few days before he got his most important commission. Along with his own work on Virginia’s constitution, it would become an important model for what he was about to write.
Jefferson at work
After his morning ritual — soaking his feet in cold water, then getting a shave from his barber — Jefferson got to work. His portable writing box, carved from mahogany by his cabinetmaker landlord, unfolded into a compact desk with a slanted surface and compartments for paper and quills.
Sitting in his Windsor armchair, its comb back lined with dark wooden spindles, he dipped his quill in a small inkpot and drafted even lines, his cursive tidy and unhurried. “When in the Course of human events,” he began, writing daily in the hours before Congress convened.
Frustrated by the heat, Jefferson had moved into a newer brick house on the outskirts, renting two second-floor rooms overlooking an open field. Traveling without his library, he relied on memory, drawing among others on Locke’s ideas about natural law and Mason’s argument that “all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights,” which was in turn inspired by the Italian physician Philip Mazzei. As historian Pauline Maier wrote in “American Scripture,” good writing in the 18th century lay in the “imitations whose excellence exceeded that of the examples that inspired them.” But the voice, structure and rhythm were Jefferson’s own.
To organize his argument, Jefferson turned to logic. At just over 1,300 words, the declaration unfolds in five parts: introduction, preamble, grievances, denunciation of the British crown and conclusion. Scholars often describe it as a syllogism, a deductive form that traces back to Aristotle.
The preamble establishes the major premise, that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” The grievances provide the minor premise, a catalogue of Britain’s abuses. Independence follows as the natural conclusion.
It was the first document to call the United States into being and perhaps the first text ever to announce a people to themselves before they existed as one.
Like any compelling narrative, the declaration hinged on a turning point. “To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world,” Jefferson wrote, pivoting from abstraction to accusation.
What follows is a relentless indictment of King George III, charges stacked in order of increasing drama: “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies”; and “He has abdicated Government here”; and “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.” Opposite the monarch stands a collective “us,” a people wronged.
In the original draft, the list culminated with a 168-word condemnation of the transatlantic slave trade. The king, Jefferson wrote, “has waged cruel war” against “a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.”
Jefferson was aware of his hypocrisy. He kept 175 slaves, including at least six of his own children, products of his now-infamous union with Sally Hemings. Her brother served as his personal assistant. Slavery had shaped Jefferson’s life and contributed to his family’s wealth, but he knew in his bones that the practice was wrong and blamed the monarch for the corrupt economy it engendered.
Jefferson appealed as much to moral conscience as to reason. He also shaped the document’s emotional force in subtler ways, using pronouns to transform a complex political dispute into what communication scholar Stephen Lucas called “a simple moral drama” in his essay “The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of Independence,” written for the National Archives in 1990.
By Jefferson’s final paragraphs, “we” stand tall and assured in his prose. “We have warned them from time to time,” he wrote, “of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us.”
He was speaking not only for Congress, but for the people they represented.
The final cut
On Friday, June 21, a package arrived at Benjamin Franklin’s home. He lived in a three-story brick house set within a garden courtyard, a couple blocks from the Pennsylvania Statehouse, where the Continental Congress would meet. Inside, Franklin found Jefferson’s draft, along with a brief note requesting edits from the Colonies’ elder statesman.
Franklin likely carried the pages into his first-floor study and spread them across a table cluttered with lenses, coils of wire and glass tubes, remnants of his electrical experiments. As he read, he marked revisions directly onto the manuscript, though that copy is lost.
What’s known of the committee’s input comes largely from Jefferson’s “Rough draught,” a manuscript he kept, crowded with cross-outs, insertions and boxed phrases. Editing can be a grueling process, particularly for a writer who must now share ownership of his creation.
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Edits strengthened the preamble’s theological language, crediting universal rights to “their creator” rather than “from that equal creation.” The handwriting tells us that Adams changed “his present majesty” to “the present King of Great Britain,” while Franklin is widely credited with switching “sacred and undeniable” to “self-evident.” He also changed “absolute power” to “absolute despotism.”
Congress voted for independence on July 2. The next day, with horseflies buzzing in the sweltering Assembly Room, 56 delegates in starch-powdered wigs and silk stockings took their turn dissecting Jefferson’s work. He might have preferred to call it a vivisection.
Over two days, they made 39 changes, cutting or revising roughly a quarter of the committee’s draft. Much of this pruning tightened the language, softened accusations or removed passages considered too divisive. Congress was determined to make the document as cohesive, and concise, as possible. “It’s sort of like a cover letter,” says University of Chicago English professor Eric Slauter. “You don’t want it to go onto a second page.”
The author watched with growing dismay as his crowning accusation came up for debate. Many in the room, particularly Southern slaveholders like himself, were discomfited by his condemnation of slavery and the hypocrisy it brought to light. Others simply found his language too impassioned. They agreed to strike it.
Jefferson was gutted.
“I think he really had a feeling that this is where the drama is,” Slauter says. “When they cut out (the final grievance), he feels like he’s been robbed of his great dramatic prose.”
In its place, Congress inserted a charge that the king had “excited domestic insurrections amongst us,” a veiled reference to widespread fears of slave rebellions in response to Lord Dunmore’s 1775 proclamation offering freedom to any slaves who fought for the crown. They lumped that in with a brief but now-notorious complaint about Britain’s recruitment of Native American fighters in the ongoing war. Different tribes and groups had fought on each side, but this instance of hypocrisy passed unnoticed.
By this point, Jefferson was struggling to conceal his anger over these “mutilations,” as he would later describe them. Seated beside him, Franklin tried to console his friend with a story from his days as a printer.
A hatter had once commissioned a sign reading “John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats — for ready money.” As friends took turns suggesting edits, the wording was gradually pared down until only “John Thompson” remained.
“I have made it a rule,” Franklin told his younger colleague, “whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body.”
Spoken words
On the afternoon of July 4, Congress approved the final text. Local printer John Dunlap worked through the night to produce about 200 broadsides of the Declaration of Independence on large sheets of cotton-fiber paper set in crisp Caslon type. These were sent across the Colonies.
The document was read to crowds outside the Statehouse — now called Independence Hall — and in town squares, taverns and military encampments. Its words were met with ringing bells, flaming effigies set ablaze and even a mock funeral for the now-former king in Savannah, Georgia. Often, the grievances struck deepest, giving voice to years of mounting resentment.
Dunlap’s broadsides preserved the visual structure of Jefferson’s draft to sharpen their impact. Each complaint appeared on its own line, separated by generous spacing that guided a speaker’s pacing so each phrase would land with a pause.
“They’re stacking one on top of the other to create an edifice of grievance to build this case,” says Zara Anishanslin, an art history professor at the University of Delaware and author of “The Painter’s Fire.” “That was Jefferson’s idea. He was thinking like a lawyer.”
Yet Jefferson also wrote the declaration to be performed — closer to a speech, even a piece of music, than a legal brief. He blended Thomas Paine’s plainspokenness with the more lyrical 18th-century “style périodique,” composing sentences clause by clause, building toward a final point. The opening paragraph — a single, sweeping sentence — gathers tension like a coiled spring. The preamble follows a similar arc.
“To listen to it,” Anishanslin says, “would have felt like you were listening to a piece of music that was swelling at the beginning and the end, and building in the middle with all these staccato bits.”
With rhythm and cadence as his guiding principles, he paid close attention to syllables, often arranging phrases in triads that resolve in sonorous endings like “the pursuit of happiness.” He even marked the manuscript with small ticks to signal pauses for the reader (Dunlap initially mistook them for quotation marks).
Of course, it was still a legal document. “There’s a way to look at the declaration (as) a contract,” says Pepperdine English professor Michael Ditmore, author of “Texting the Nation.” “However you think you’re going to read it, there’s a commitment we all feel bound to.”
It also functions as what rhetoricians call a “speech act” — language that brings the reality it names into existence. It was the first public document to call the United States of America into being — replacing “the United Colonies” — and perhaps the first text ever to announce a people to themselves before they fully existed as one.
“There’s a way to look at the declaration as a contract. However you think you’re going to read it, there’s a commitment we all feel bound to.”
Unity was crucial, and Jefferson walked the line. He hand-copied the committee’s draft and sent it to at least four friends, but that was his only effort to preserve his masterpiece. For all the fervor that greeted the declaration that summer, it receded from public attention after his new country won its independence, treated as a wartime congressional document.
Republicans would later embrace it in their debates against Federalists, and early abolitionists would draw power from its language even as they exposed its contradictions. But for decades, few Americans even knew Jefferson was its author.
A nation’s blueprint
Paris was burning in 1789, and Jefferson was there to see another revolution unfold, inspired in part by his own ideas. In his fifth year as his young country’s minister to France, around the time the Bastille was stormed, he received a letter from a group of Americans who also lived in Paris, including the poet Joel Barlow.
They had celebrated the Fourth of July in writing, thanking the man “whose dignity, energy and elegance of thought added a peculiar lustre to that declaratory act which announced to the world the existence of an empire.” Jefferson saved the letter.
He returned often to questions of authorship in his correspondence, grappling with a dilemma familiar to any writer. What becomes of a text once it passes out of the author’s hands?
His seminal piece has traveled far, resurfacing in movements from Seneca Falls and the fight for women’s suffrage to independence movements around the globe. Today, it is revered for its political and moral ideals but often overlooked as a feat of writing. Yet it was Jefferson’s literary ingenuity — his ability to absorb ideas and recast them into language that felt urgent and riveting — that gave shape to those ideals.
With the declaration, Jefferson inspired a new literary tradition. His language rippled into the imaginations of writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, each breaking from European models in search of a distinctly American voice.
He also inspired a national rhetoric grounded in the belief that the written word, once spoken, could move history. Two of America’s greatest orators, Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., returned to the declaration in their most famous works. Both treated Jefferson’s words the way we treat the most enduring works of literature, as living texts that continue to speak long after their moment has passed.
Jefferson also served as America’s third president, but that title does not appear on his gravestone. In 1825, a year before his death, he left instructions for his epitaph in a letter, specifying how “I wish most to be remembered.”
The first line: “Author of the Declaration of American Independence.” He was rightly proud, but a letter he wrote that same year reveals a man who did not put himself above his people. Writing the declaration, he explained, wasn’t an act of creativity or even emulation.
Rather, it was “an expression of the American mind.”
This story appears in the July/August 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine under the headline “Jefferson’s version.” Learn more about how to subscribe.
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