The Declaration of Independence

The Slow Road to a Fast Decision

By the spring of 1776, war had already been raging for a year. Shots had been fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775; Bunker Hill had already been fought and lost. Yet the colonies had not yet declared themselves independent — many delegates in the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia's Pennsylvania State House, still hoped for reconciliation with King George III. It took months of debate, and mounting evidence that the king had no intention of listening, before the Congress was ready to act.

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia stood in Congress and proposed a resolution: 'That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.' The resolution was debated fiercely and then set aside for three weeks so delegates could seek instructions from their home colonies. In the meantime, Congress appointed a Committee of Five to draft a formal declaration in case the vote for independence succeeded: Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert R. Livingston of New York.

The Man, the Room, and the Pen

The committee asked thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson to write the first draft, partly because of his gift with language and partly, by John Adams's own account, because Adams believed Jefferson could write ten times better than he could. Jefferson retreated to a rented set of rooms on the second floor of a bricklayer's house at Seventh and Market Streets in Philadelphia, and over roughly two weeks in June 1776, he drafted the document largely alone, at a small portable writing desk of his own design.

Jefferson drew on a wide well of sources — English political philosophy, the Virginia Declaration of Rights that George Mason had written just weeks earlier, and his own broad reading of natural law. But he also drew, consciously or not, on a moral framework saturated in Scripture, the framework nearly every literate colonist of his generation had been raised inside. Franklin and Adams made small edits to Jefferson's draft before it went to the full Congress. The committee's most consequential contribution may have been theological rather than literary: it was Franklin who is believed to have suggested changing Jefferson's phrase 'the sacred and undeniable truths' to the sharper, more absolute 'We hold these truths to be self-evident.'

What Congress Cut, and What It Kept

When Jefferson's draft reached the full Congress on July 1–4, 1776, it was debated line by line and trimmed by roughly a quarter. Congress removed Jefferson's lengthy passage condemning the King for perpetuating the slave trade — a passage too controversial for delegates from slaveholding colonies to accept, and a painful contradiction that would not be resolved for another eighty-nine years. What Congress did not touch, however, was the document's theological spine. The references to God survived every round of editing, unanimous and untouched.

The vote for independence passed on July 2, 1776 — the date John Adams believed history would actually celebrate. The wording of the Declaration itself was formally adopted two days later, on July 4, 1776. Most of the fifty-six signers affixed their names on August 2, 1776, though a few, including Thomas McKean, did not sign until later — one account suggests as late as 1777.

God in Every Layer of the Text

The Declaration invokes the divine four separate times, and each invocation carries a different theological weight:

This first mention grounds the colonies' right to separate itself not in human law but in a moral order authored by God — meaning no king's decree could override it, because no king had authored it.

This is the theological center of the entire document. Rights are not granted by government and therefore cannot be revoked by government — they are 'endowed by their Creator,' meaning they exist prior to and independent of any state. This is Genesis 1:27 translated into political philosophy: because every person is made in the image of God, every person carries a dignity and worth no earthly authority has the power to erase.

Near the close of the document, the signers appeal directly to God as witness and judge of their own honesty:

And in the very last sentence, the signers pledge everything they have — not to each other's cause alone, but under God's providence:

Fifty-six men signed a document that was, by British law, an act of treason punishable by death. They did so believing that divine Providence, not merely their own courage, was what would carry them through. This was not decoration. It was the actual foundation on which they were staking their lives.

The Weight They Carried

Consider what it meant to sign that page. These were not radicals with nothing to lose — many were among the wealthiest and most respected men in their colonies: judges, planters, merchants, physicians. Several would lose their fortunes in the war that followed; some would lose their homes, their health, or their lives. They signed anyway, and the language they chose to explain why was not political calculation. It was conscience before God. John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that he was certain posterity would celebrate the day 'with pomp and parade... solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty' — Adams could not conceive of the nation's birth being remembered rightly without worship attached to it.

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Looking Ahead

The Declaration announced a break. It did not yet build a government. That work — first weak, then strong — was still to come, beginning with a wartime union stitched together under desperate circumstances: the Articles of Confederation.