As all of us know, the Declaration of Independence we celebrate this holiday was written by the great patriot and president, Thomas Jefferson, more or less. While it is true the bulk of the stirring words were Jefferson’s, he didn’t just scribble it onto the parchment in a moment of inspiration. As writers learn, a first draft, crafted with hours of toil and thought, inevitably falls into the hands of writers’ natural enemies – editors.
In “American Scripture”, Pauline Maier’s detailed and wonderfully readable history of this Founding Document, she follows the creation of the Declaration step-by-laborious step. It is a familiar story to writers of all kinds, and not for those faint of heart. Jefferson did pen the spirited and arguably longwinded prose of that first sacrificial lamb of text, but he was not above …umm, “borrowing” passages from similar declarations that had issued from state legislatures and phrases from fellow delegates, occasionally with permission.
He also had the magnificent gift of soaring eloquence and a seemingly endless supply adjectives and adverbs. The early result was a declaration a tad longer than what we know today, at least a third or more.
The most chilling part is his work was first submitted not just to an editor, but a committee, all with firm opinions of their own writing judgement. To be fair, they did correct and tighten up the petition for the better, maybe, but for Jefferson every minor deletion was an amputation, every change of phrase a desecration. And just when you think the process could not have been more painful, the entire Congress sat as a committee of the whole to continue to fiddle with those precious paragraphs for hours.
Perhaps wisely, there is no definitive documentation of Jefferson’s first draft. Likewise, the sausage-making details of Congress’s mass proofreading were not recorded either. The composition of the Declaration might be best compared to one person painstakingly assembling a difficult jigsaw puzzle while passersby sporadically crowd in, mess with the careful sorting, and force in pieces from other puzzles. Maybe it is a miraculous document.
Here’s wishing you happy Fourth of July. We’re hoping ours is rained out.
