Committee of Five

The Committee of Five of the Second Continental Congress was a group of five members who drafted and presented to the full Congress in Pennsylvania State House what would become the United States Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776. This Declaration committee operated from June 11, 1776, until July 5, 1776, the day on which the Declaration was published.

John Trumbull's 1818 painting of the Committee of Five presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia

The Jefferson Memorial depicts the Committee of Five on a pediment sculpture by Adolph Alexander Weinman.

The committee was composed of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman.

The Committee of Five

The members of this committee were:

• John Adams, representative of Massachusetts, who later became the second president of the United States^[1]
• Thomas Jefferson, representative of Virginia, who later became the third president of the United States^[2]
• Benjamin Franklin, representative of Pennsylvania, known as one of the most famous intellectuals among the Founding Fathers, whose academic writings and press publications had a very significant influence in the American Revolution, the only person to sign the Declaration of Independence, Treaty of Alliance with France, Treaty of Paris, and U.S. Constitution
• Roger Sherman, representative of Connecticut, the only person to sign all four of the U.S. state papers: the Continental Association, the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution^[3]
• Robert Livingston, representative of New York, who later served as the first United States Secretary of Foreign Affairs, administered the presidential oath of office at the First inauguration of George Washington and negotiated the Louisiana Purchase as the minister to France.^[4]

Drafting of the Declaration of Independence

 

From left to right: Sherman, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and Livingston

 

Congress Voting Independence, by Robert Edge Pine (1784–1788), depicts the Committee of Five in the center

 

Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776, Jean Leon Gerome Ferris' idealized 1900 depiction of (left to right) Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson of the Committee of Five working on the Declaration.

The delegates of the Thirteen Colonies in Congress resolved to postpone until Monday, July 1, the final consideration of whether or not to declare the several sovereign independencies of the Colonies, which had been proposed by the North Carolina resolutions of April 12 and the Virginia resolutions of May 15. The proposal, known as the Lee Resolution, was moved in Congress on June 7 by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia. During these allotted three weeks Congress agreed to appoint a committee to draft a statement to outline the reasons for the Colonies seceding from the British Empire. The actual declaration of "American Independence" is precisely the text comprising the final paragraph of the published broadside of July 4. The broadside's final paragraph repeated the text of the Lee Resolution as adopted by the declaratory resolve voted on July 2.^{[citation needed]}

On June 11, the Committee of Five was appointed: 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, vary in some respects.^[5]

The first draft

After discussing the general outline of the document, the Second Continental Congress decided that Jefferson would write the first draft.^[6] With Congress's busy schedule, Jefferson had limited time to write the draft over the ensuing 17 days.^[7] He then consulted with the others on the committee, who reviewed the draft and made extensive changes.^[8] Jefferson then produced another copy incorporating these alterations.^{[citation needed]}

Among the changes was the simplification of what Jefferson had termed "preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" to the more succinct and sonorous phrase familiar to all today, “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. This shares some similarities with, but is distinct from, John Locke's prior description of private property as a natural right, in the phrase "life, liberty, and estate".^[9]

Jefferson's first draft also considered a scathing criticism of Great Britain's use of slavery, which was later removed in order to avoid offending slaveholders.^[10]

Presentation of the draft

On June 28, 1776, the committee presented this copy to the "Committee of the Whole" Congress, which was commemorated by Trumbull’s famed painting. The title of the document was "A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled".^[11]

 

The Committee of Five presents their work to the Continental Congress on June 28, 1776. Painting by John Trumbull (1819)

The signing

Although not officially noted, the estimated time was 6:26 p.m. (18:26 LMT) for the recording of this historic vote. The Congress then heard the report of the Committee of the Whole and declared the sovereign status of the United Colonies the following day, during the afternoon of July 2. The Committee of the Whole then turned to the Declaration, and it was given a second reading before adjournment.^[12]

Last minute arguments

On Wednesday, July 3, the Committee of the Whole gave the Declaration the third reading and commenced scrutiny of the precise wording of the proposed text. But for two passages in the Committee of Five's draft that were rejected by the Committee of the Whole the work was accepted without any other major changes. One was a critical reference to the English people and the other was a denunciation of the slave trade and of slavery itself.^{[citation needed]}

Jefferson wrote in his autobiography, of the two deleted passages:

The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with still haunted the minds of many. For this reason, those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offense. The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under these censures, for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.^[13]

As John Adams recalled many years later, this work of editing the proposed text was largely completed by the time of adjournment on July 3. However, the text's formal adoption was deferred until the following morning, when the Congress voted its agreement during the late morning of July 4.^[14][15]

Fair copy

 

The Committee of Five, pictured on an 1869 U.S. Postal Service 24-cent stamp; the same image also appears on the present two-dollar bill.

The draft document as adopted was then referred back to the Committee of Five to prepare a "fair copy", this being the redrafted-as-corrected document prepared for delivery to the broadside printer, John Dunlap. And so the Committee of Five convened in the early evening of July 4 to complete its task.^[16]

Historians have had no documentary means by which to determine the identity of the authenticating party. It is unclear whether the Declaration was authenticated by the Committee of Five's signature, or the Committee submitted the fair copy to President Hancock for his authenticating signature, or the authentication awaited President John Hancock's signature on the printer's finished proof-copy of what became known as the Dunlap broadside.^{[citation needed]} Either way, upon the July 5 release of the Dunlap Broadside of the Declaration, the Committee of Five's work was done.^[17]

The Dunlap broadside release to the public

Following release of the Dunlap broadside on July 5, the public could read who had signed the Declaration. Hancock's signature, as President of the Continental Congress, appears on the broadside, as does that of Continental Congress Secretary Charles Thomson in an attest. Memories of the participants proved to be very short on this particular historic moment. Not three decades had elapsed by which time the prominent members of the Committee of Five could no longer recollect either detail of what had actually taken place, or their active participation, on July 4 and 5 of 1776. And so during these early decades was born the durable myth of one grand ceremonial general signing on July 4, by all the delegates to Congress.^[18]

See also

• Founding Fathers of the United States
• Committee of Detail, drafted the United States Constitution

References

1. "John Adams". The White House. Retrieved June 10, 2021.
2. "Thomas Jefferson". The White House. Retrieved June 10, 2021.
3. Mangan, Gregg (October 10, 2020). "Roger Sherman, Revolutionary and Dedicated Public Servant". Connecticut History, a CT Humanities Project. Retrieved June 10, 2021.
4. Beagle, Ben (February 23, 2021). "Livingston County marks 200 years". Livingston County News. Retrieved June 10, 2021.
5. Maier, American Scripture, 97–105; Boyd, Evolution, 21.
6. Boyd, Evolution, 22.
7. Maier,American Scripture, 104.
8. "Exhibition – Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents | Exhibitions – Library of Congress". Library of Congress. July 4, 1995. from the original on August 6, 2016. Retrieved February 18, 2010., retrieved on October 29, 2013
9. Locke, John (1988) [1689]. Laslett, Peter (ed.). Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press. Sec. 87, 123, 209, 222. ISBN 052135448X.
10. Williams, Yohuru. "Why Thomas Jefferson's Anti-Slavery Passage Was Removed from the Declaration of Independence". HISTORY. Retrieved November 19, 2020.
11. Becker, Declaration of Independence, 4.
12. For verification of the afternoon July 2 date of this vote of Congress, see Harold Eberlein & Cortlandt Hubbard, Diary of Independence Hall (J.B. Lippincott Co., 1948), entry: Tuesday, July 2, 1776, pp. 171–72. See also John M. Coleman, THOMAS MCKEAN; Forgotten Leader of the Revolution (American Faculty Press, 1975), Chapter 11: Independence 1776, p. 174. See also Jane Harrington Scott, A Gentleman As Well As a Whig: Caesar Rodney and the American Revolution (University of Delaware Press, 2000), Chapter 15: Independence is Declared, p. 117 therein. Speculatively, an estimated time moment interval of 14:00 LMT up to 18:00 LMT appears to be the period during which this day's historic events reached completion by the vote in Congress and the newspaper report of independence declared.
13. Autobiography, by Thomas Jefferson
14. A New Jersey delegate to Congress, Abraham Clark, wrote to his friend Elias Dayton during the early morning of July 4, explaining Congress' recent editing of the Declaration:

    Our Congress Resolved to Declare the United Colonies Free and the Independent States. A Declaration for this purpose, I expect, will this day pass Congress, it is nearly gone through, after which it will be Proclaimed with all the State & Solemnity Circumstances will admit. It is gone so far that we must now be a free independent State, or a Conquered Country.

    So wrote Abraham Clark to Elias Dayton, in of Delegates to Congress, Vol. 4 May 16, 1776 – August 15, 1776, p. 378.

15. For verification of the late morning July 4 time of Congress' agreement to the text of the Declaration, see Paul H. Smith, "Time and Temperature: Philadelphia, July 4, 1776", in The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, Vol. 33, No. 4, October 1976, p. 296. See also Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), Chapter III: Mr. Jefferson and His Editors, p. 150. Speculatively, an estimated time moment interval of 10:30 LMT up to 11:00 LMT appears to be the least unlikely period during which the voted adoption of the precise wording of the text of the Declaration was completed.
16. For corroboration of time (16:45 to 18:35 LMT) of the completion of the 'fair copy' of the Declaration by the Committee of Five, see Edward Channing, A History of the United States. (N.Y: The MacMillan Co., 1912), Volume III: The American Revolution, 1761–1789; Chapter VII: The Declaration of Independence, pp. 182–209, wherein July 4th, p. 205. See also Edward Channing, A Short History of the United States. (N.Y: The MacMillan Co., 1908), Chapter V-15: The Great Declaration and the French Alliance, p. 146.
17. The Congress left no record of when, during the night of July 4/5, President John Hancock affixed his authenticating signature to either the Committee's fair copy of the Dunlap broadside master copy (the printer's proof-copy). On the extant original copies of the printed broadside, one finds this: "Signed by Order and in Behalf of the Congress, JOHN HANCOCK, President." For a scholarly appraisal of this national tragedy of the absent record of Hancock's signature moment, see Julian P. Boyd, "The Declaration of Independence: The Mystery of the Lost Original", in The Pennsylvania Magazine. Vol. C, No. 4, October 1976, pp. 438–67.
18. Congress may have taken as little as 33 days from the debates of July 1 to the opening of business on August 2, to establish "THE unanimous DECLARATION of the thirteen united STATES OF AMERICA", being the revised-format edition of the July 4 Declaration. This 'unanimous thirteen' edition remains on permanent public display, enshrined in the rotunda of the National Archives at Washington, D.C. For a partially successful effort to piece together the fragmented record of the genesis of the Declaration's creation during this 33-day interval, see Wilfred J. Ritz, "The Authentication of the Engrossed Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776", in the Cornell Law School's Law and History Review. Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1986, pp. 179–204. See also, Herbert Friedenwald, The Declaration of Independence: An Interpretation and an Analysis. (MacMillan & Co., 1904), pp. 138–51.

External links

• : "The Lee Resolution of June 7, 1776, born of the Virginia Resolve of May 15, 1776"^{[dead link]}.
• Dunlap broadside: The Dunlap broadside of the Declaration of Independence, as first published on July 5, 1776, entitled "A DECLARATION By The Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA In General Congress assembled".
• Goddard broadside: The Goddard broadside of the Declaration of Independence, as first published on January 31, 1777, entitled "The unanimous DECLARATION of the Thirteen United States of AMERICA".