How to Write the Future

Celebrating Jefferson's messy draft of the Declaration of Independence

Sometimes I tell myself that writing—plucking words out of thin air and shaping them into a cohesive, effective whole—is the hardest thing ever. Then I remember wartime presidents, research scientists, Olympic gymnasts, and the people who lay asphalt, and I laugh. A bazillion jobs are harder than sitting in a chair and stringing words together, depending on your frame of reference. More to the point, measurement is meaningless: each of us has our own “harder than anything” challenge in our own body and mind, our own place and time.

Still, whenever I think about it, I’m amazed that Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in July with no air conditioning. Equally impressive is the fact that an editorial committee achieved final consensus with a roomful of sweaty, bewigged, grumpy delegates, each man clamoring to fill his own colony’s agenda. But somehow, they managed it. As Thomas Paine had declared in Common Sense earlier that year:

…the TIME HATH FOUND US.

Crafting our founding document in a state of emergency, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams had no room for either writer’s block or high-minded inflexibility.

Instead of dignified depictions of its authors, I like to look at the mess of it all: the piles of paper, the crumpled discards littering the floor. (I also spare a thought for the women who had to clean up after them.)

Detail of J.L.G. Ferris’s Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776.

Messiest of all were Jefferson’s drafts in progress. Below is a draft with the scratch-outs and scribbles of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.

Page 1 with minor emendations in the hands of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

Jefferson was extraordinarily polite about the critiques, at least in writing. He sent the following note to Franklin, who was suffering from a fit of gout at the time, with a draft in late June:

The inclosed paper has been read and with some small alterations approved of by the committee. Will Doctr. Franklyn be so good as to peruse it and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate? The paper having been returned to me to change a particular sentiment or two, I propose laying it again before the committee tomorrow morning, if Doctr. Franklyn can think of it before that time.

From a 21st-century perspective, not all the revisions were for the good; worst of all, Jefferson’s impassioned anti-slavery passage met the chopping block.¹ Moreover, the equality of women wasn’t even on the table, although intellectual powerhouses like Abigail Adams helped shape the founding ideas behind the scenes.² Abigail famously exhorted her husband in a letter to remember the ladies in their declaration of rights, to no avail.

Yet the most urgent task at the time—without which we wouldn’t be here with the luxury of judging our forebears—was to achieve unity. The delegates had to collectively embrace a set of founding principles, if not their specific applications. If each delegate had been ready to die on his own hill of certainty, the discord would have left the colonies fractured and helpless. British forces were already amassing to suppress dissent by force. As Paine argued so compellingly, the time for collective resolve was now or never.

Speaking of Common Sense, it reminds me that the democratic principles expressed in the Declaration didn’t get plucked out of thin air. As they forged plans for the new nation, the founders had the Iroquois Confederacy as a real-life model of a united confederation of states. They engaged in intense debate and then built momentum through compelling tracts of persuasive writing. We’re incredibly lucky that democracy had writers like Paine on its side.

Youth is the seed-time of good habits as well in nations as in individuals. It might be difficult, if not impossible, to form the Continent into one government half a century hence. The vast variety of interests, occasioned by an increase of trade and population, would create confusion. Colony would be against colony. Each being able would scorn each other's assistance; and while the proud and foolish gloried in their little distinctions the wise would lament that the union had not been formed before. Wherefore the present time is the true time for establishing it. The intimacy which is contracted in infancy, and the friendship which is formed in misfortune, are of all others the most lasting and unalterable. Our present union is marked with both these characters; we are young, and we have been distressed; but our concord hath withstood our troubles, and fixes a memorable era for posterity to glory in.

The present time, likewise, is that peculiar time which never happens to a nation but once, viz., the time of forming itself into a government. Most nations have let slip the opportunity, and by that means have been compelled to receive laws from their conquerors, instead of making laws for themselves. First, they had a king, and then a form of government; whereas the articles or charter of government should be formed first, and men delegated to execute them afterwards; but from the errors of other nations let us learn wisdom, and lay hold of the present opportunity — TO BEGIN GOVERNMENT AT THE RIGHT END.

—Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Not counting ancient Greece, the United States was the first western nation to put the horse before the cart. To that end, Jefferson crafted a radical declaration of rights-based government that later generations could strive to fulfill. The founders also explicitly listed the tyrannies that the new nation would categorically reject. The American Republic, they declared, would have no kings.³

Even more than the final document, the birth pains of its ideas are speaking to me this year. The messiness of the writing process suddenly seems like a synecdoche for American democracy. It’s always going to be hard, and it’s never going to be perfect, but we have to keep trying. Most important, we can’t ever throw out the baby with the bathwater—the essential premises behind almost 250 years of shared effort.

Ben Franklin⁴ reminds me that humor helps, even the gallows kind:

At the official signing of the parchment copy on August 2, John Hancock, the president of the Congress, penned his name with flourish. “There must be no pulling different ways,” he declared. “We must all hang together.” According to the historian Jared Sparks, Franklin replied: “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” — Smithsonian Magazine, “Benjamin Franklin Joins the Revolution”

We have a flawed and fractious Republic, if we can keep it. There are forces hell-bent on pulling it apart, and they try our souls daily. On the bright side, at least we have air conditioning.

1. Jefferson himself would continue to enslave people along with his compatriots.

2. An important female journalist, I just learned, also printed copies of the Declaration in 1777, even signing her name to the bottom of the broadside.

3. After the war when George Washington found himself crowned with laurels and addressed as “His Excellency,” he was appalled. He would reluctantly accept the office of president, but he would not be king.

4. Franklin may or may not have actually said this, but it sounds like him.