Richard Burley":kjkoeyfd said:
ftrplt":kjkoeyfd said:
Superb document! Not sure what "Original draft written by Thomas Paine" means. I do believe this magnificent declaration was penned by one Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. Happy 240th, America!! :cheers: FTRPLT
Yeah...I know. The Conventional Wisdom<img class="emojione" alt="
" title=":tm:" title=":tm:" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/emojione/assets/png/2122.png?v=2.2.7"/> says that Jefferson wrote the
Declaration. Technically, that's true; he wrote the final draft. But his contributions were editorial and political (as described below). He was not the author.
On June 10, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed Jefferson to head a committee to create a declaration of the colonies on the subject of independence from Great Britain. The committee comprised John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston.
Back up for some background. When the first armed conflict between the colonists and the Brits occurred at Concord and Lexington (April 1775), there was no revolution. It was a rebellion, and all the colonists wanted was adequate representation in Parliament. Initially, "No taxation without representation" was their principal concern, but other abuses followed (later enumerated in
Common Sense, and then the
Declaration of Independence). But in 1775, there was no talk of separation from Britain. The purpose of the rebellion was redress of grievances.
That all changed
after January 10, 1776, when
Common Sense was published anonymously by Thomas Paine under the name "Cato". No one spoke openly of separation from the Crown before that; it was considered treason to do so. Nevertheless,
Common Sense was second only to the Bible in readership in the 13 colonies. It spread like wildfire, and turned the rebellion into a revolution. And Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams all knew that Paine was its author.
So, back to June, 1776...when the committee to create the
Declaration had to come up with a document in short order, they turned to Paine. He wasn't an aristocrat (landowner), had no political standing, and wasn't a member of the Continental Congress. He knew he wouldn't be credited, but he didn't care. So he wrote the draft.
*
- *Actually, I think he had already been working on it. He had already written the specifications for the Declaration in Common Sense, and much of the content of the Declaration was distilled from more detailed content in Common Sense.
There are two known copies of the original draft: one owned by Adams, and the other by Jefferson. Adams' copy is essentially a "clean copy"—that is, is contains no mark-up. It was the "backup copy". But he didn't write it; there are no workup documents or other drafts in his papers.
Jefferson's copy is identical to Adams' copy, except that it is annotated and edited. But he had no other copy; there are no workup documents or drafts in his papers either. Like Adams, he got his copy from whoever wrote the original draft. As head of the committee, it was his responsibility to produce the final draft document. It was his marked-up content that Hancock transcribed into the finished document that was signed by the members of the Continental Congress.
There is no question that Paine is the original author. Jefferson got the credit, but none of the ideas are his...well, except the changes he made omitting the condemnation of slavery contained in the original draft. (Jefferson was a slave owner, after all. If he were the author, why would he put a condemnation of slavery into the draft in the first place, only to remove it later?) Paine’s prolific writings consistently condemn slavery...and in the same kind of language contained in both the Adams copy and the Jefferson copy of the original draft.
Paine was a Quaker; phrases like "
all experience hath shewn" is Quaker-speak; so is the use of capitalized nouns. There is no such language or syntax anywhere in the writings of Thomas Jefferson.
I won’t list all the other evidence here. No single piece of evidence is conclusive on its own. But when you put it all together, it’s clear that Jefferson could not have been the author. If you really want to find out the facts for yourself, try to find a copy of
Thomas Paine - Author of the Declaration of Independence, by Joseph Lewis (1947 - out of print). If you can't find one, lemmee know. I know someone who has a few copies to sell.
We have a family tradition; every fourth of July, we read the Declaration to remind us of what we were supposed to have...before the Constitution established a political state that took it away from us.
