Beginning this Friday through Aug. 1, the New York Public Library’s Fifth Avenue branch will display one of only two surviving handwritten copies of the Declaration of Independence — a window into our nation’s history and the ulcer of Thomas Jefferson. The author had forwarded his finished draft on July 1, 1776, but a number of deletions, additions and changes were made to the text before its ratification July 4. Jefferson sent about six copies to friends, and, as seen here, he underlined passages that were changed to his annoyance. Here’s a peek at the famous ode to freedom, with notes from Rod Gragg’s history “The Declaration of Independence.”
1. Jefferson’s original version was edited by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin before he presented it to the Continental Congress. Knowing Jefferson’s sensitivity to editing, Adams made few changes to the draft. “I was delighted with its high tone and flights of oratory,” Adams would say, though he did feel Jefferson’s charges against the king were “too much like scolding.” Franklin, who was nursing gout at the time, made mostly stylistic changes.
2. Jefferson was the first to call the 13 “united colonies” a name — the United States of America.
3. Jefferson was unhappy with the editing and sat glumly in his seat throughout the process. He later said his work had been defaced by “mutilations.” Franklin tried to cheer him up with a story about a hat maker who made a sign for his business that read: “John Thompson, Hatter, Makes and sells Hats for Ready Money.” By the time his friends had edited it, it was reduced to the words “John Thompson” with a picture of a hat, but it worked, Franklin said.
4. When Philadelphia printer John Dunlap printed the Declaration of Independence for distribution, he substituted the word “unalienable” for Jefferson’s original “inalienable” so that the final version reads: “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights . . .” He also added a new heading to the document: IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776.
5. In an earlier draft, Jefferson had used more florid prose, for instance writing “sacred & undeniable” truths. He later replaced it by the simpler “self evident” truths, which was approved by the Continental Congress.
6. Despite being a slave owner himself, Jefferson intensely disliked slavery. Although he knew the passage was likely to be stricken, he included the following paragraph at the end of a long list of grievances against George III: “[The King] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
These lines were excised primarily to appease the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina.