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 what would become America's 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.

The Committee of Five present their work, June 1776, detail of John Trumbull's 1819 painting Declaration of Independence

The Committee of Five is depicted on the pediment of the Jefferson Memorial in a sculpture by Adolph Alexander Weinman

The Committee

The members of this group were:

Drafting of the Declaration of Independence
Sherman, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and Livingston
Congress Voting Independence, by Robert Edge Pine (1784-1788), depicts the Committee of Five in the center

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 broadside statement to proclaim to the world 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.

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, are contradictory and not entirely reliable.[1]

The first draft

Certainly the committee, after discussing the general outline that the document should follow, decided that Jefferson would write the first draft.[2] With Congress's busy schedule, Jefferson had limited time to write the draft over the ensuing 17 days.[3] He then consulted with the others on the committee, who reviewed the draft and made extensive changes.[4] Jefferson then produced another copy incorporating these alterations.

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".[5]

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".[6]

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.[7]

Last minute arguments

On Wednesday, July 3, the Committee of the Whole gave the Declaration a 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.

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.[8]

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.[9][10]

Fair copy

The draft document as adopted was then referred back to the Committee of Five in order 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.[11]

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. Either way, upon the July 5 release of the Dunlap broadside of the Declaration, the Committee of Five's work was done.[12]

The Dunlap broadside release to the public

Upon the July 5 release of the Dunlap broadside, the public could read who had signed the Declaration. Hancock's sole signature, as President of the Continental Congress, appears on the broadside as attested by Secretary Charles Thomson. 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 neither details of what had actually taken place, nor 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.[13]

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References
  1. Maier, American Scripture, 97–105; Boyd, Evolution, 21.
  2. Boyd, Evolution, 22.
  3. Maier,American Scripture, 104.
  4. "Exhibition - Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents | Exhibitions - Library of Congress". 4 July 1995. Archived from the original on 2016-08-06. Retrieved 2010-02-18., retrieved on October 29, 2013
  5. Locke, John (1988) [1689]. Laslett, Peter (ed.). Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press. Sec. 87, 123, 209, 222. ISBN 052135448X.
  6. Becker, Declaration of Independence, 4.
  7. 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.
  8. Autobiography, by Thomas Jefferson
  9. A New Jersey delegate to Congress wrote to a friend during the early morning of the 4th, explaining Congress' recent editing of the Declaration:
    Our Congress Resolved to Declare the United Colonies Free and 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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 or 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.
  13. Congress may have taken as little as 33 days from the debates of July 1 to the opening of business on August 2, in order 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.
  • Lee Resolution: "The Lee Resolution of June 7, 1776 born of the Virginia Resolve of May 15, 1776".
  • 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".
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