Declaration of Independence: Track Changes Version

Thomas Jefferson wrote out the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, but he did not do so alone and without guidance. After all, he had been a member of the Continental Congress that summer, listening to the discussions about what a Declaration should say. Jefferson was also part of a five-person committee that also included John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston. After the committee produced a draft, additional changes were made by the Continental Congress before a final version was created.

Back in the 1950s, a professor named Julian Boyd worked back through the documentary record of edits and changes–which include handwritten notes inserted on top of Jefferson’s early draft–to create the “original Rough draught” of the Declaration. These day, of course, one can run the original draft of the Declaration available through the Library of Congress and the final version available from the National Archives through the “Track Changes” command in Word. Some of the changes are just capitalization and punctuation. Some are more meaningful. Here are the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence in Track Changes:

When in the courseCourse of human events, it becomes necessary for aone people to advance from that subordination indissolve the political bands which they have hitherto remained, &connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal & independant station to which the lawsLaws of nature &Nature and of nature’s godNature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the changeseparation.

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable;self-evident, that all men are created equal & independant, that fromthey are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that equal creation they deriveS rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness; thatHappiness.–That to secure these ends, governmentsrights, Governments are instituted among menMen, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, –That whenever any formForm of government shall becomeGovernment becomes destructive of these ends, it is the rightRight of the peoplePeople to alter or to abolish it, &and to institute new governmentGovernment, laying it’sits foundation on such principles & organising it’sand organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness. prudenceSafety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governmentsGovernments long established should not be changed for light &and transient causes:; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. butBut when a long train of abuses &and usurpations, begun at a distinguished period, & pursuing invariably the same object,Object evinces a design to subjectreduce them to arbitrary powerunder absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government &Government, and to provide new guardsGuards for their future security. such.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; &Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to expungealter their former systemsSystems of government.Government. 

OK, maybe you have to work as an editor (like me) to appreciate this kind of stuff. But I do find it fascinating. The first sentence originally refers to “advance from that subordination,” which is changed to “dissolve the political bands.” No admission that Americans were ever subordinate!

The opening sentence of the second paragraph refers to “sacred” truths, but in a time when readers took the connection from “sacred” to the text of the Bible quite seriously,this is altered to “self-evident. ” However, in the first paragraph, “laws of nature” is amended to include “Nature’s God,” which in a way replaces the reference to the “sacred” that was cut. Similarly, Jefferson’s first draft just refers to humans being “created,” which is changed to “endowed by their Creator.” The last sentence of the second paragraph starts with a call to “expunge” the former system of government, which is amended to “alter.”

One of the biggest changes from the rough draft was that in the list of grivances against the King of England, Jefferson included this entry in the rough draft:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

The passage is notable in a number of ways. It shows that there was a considerable anti-slavery sentiment among those attending the Continental Congress. It is a clanging historical irony that a slaveholder like Jefferson was writing fierce moral denunciations of slavery. It’s historically accurate when Jefferson blames the existence and persistence of American slavery in 1776 on King George III and previous kings of Great Britain, who after all had ruled over the area for decades. It’s intriguing that Jefferson mentioned British efforts to weaponize the slave population.

The practicalities of declaring treason against Great Britain ultimately drove the members of the Continental Congress to remove the anti-slavery sentiments. Benjamin Franklin may never have said: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately” — but the sentiment was nonetheless true. It’s unwise to be definitive about counterfactual historical scenarios. But if the northern eight US colonies had insisted on the anti-slavery language, but lost the support of some or all of the southern colonies, and then tried to declare independence on their own, the British would not have had to devote military resources during the Revolutionary War to, say, blockading the harbor at Charleston or dealing with guerilla warfare tactics led by Francis Marion and others across the South. The US Revolutionary War might well have been lost, and at least some of signers of the Declaration could have been imprisoned or executed–and mostly forgotten today by anyone but historians of the period.