“A mere draughtsman”: Thomas Jefferson (standing) works on the Declaration of Independence with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, by Jean Leon Gerome (1932)
© UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UIG / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
There are two stories about how Thomas Jefferson came to write the United States Declaration of Independence. The most famous is Jefferson’s own account: “The committee of five met; no such thing as a sub-committee was proposed, but they unanimously pressed on myself alone to undertake the draught.”
The other comes from John Adams, Jefferson’s grumpy, brilliant predecessor both as vice-president and as president of the US. Both men were writing nearly 50 years after the event, but I prefer Adams’s version, which brings back the anxious, chaotic days of July 1776. “We were all in haste, Congress was impatient,” Adams recalled, “and the instrument was reported, as I believe, in Jefferson’s handwriting as he first drew it”—no time for a fair copy.