June 23 being a Sunday, Congress continued in its usual adjournment, after an unusual Saturday adjournment. As expected, delegates caught up on correspondence, extending as far back as April – and were often expressing dismay, disappointment, and alarm over the very bad news from Canada, much of which was still pouring in. William Whipple confided to Joshua Brackett that the fiasco was “the disgrace of American arms in Canada” (especially as involving New Hampshire soldiers), and declared that the officers “deserves [sic] the severest punishment that can be inflicted by a Court Martial.”

John Adams caught up with four correspondents:

1. William Gordon, largely on financing matters.
2. John Sullivan, largely on military matters, describing the “[t]he Surrender of the Cedars” as “a most infamous Piece of Cowardice,” the officer in charge [Major Isaac Butterield] as deserving of “the most infamous Death.” Adams, rarely constrained in correspondence, went on to denounce the surrendering of the fort as “the first Stain upon American Arms” and lamented, “We have thrown away Canada, in a most Scandalous Manner.”
3. Cotton Tufts, mainly military matters, but Adams also briefly described Congress’s movement toward “a Declaration that these Colonies [are] free States, independent of all Kings, Kingdoms, Nations People or States in the World….”
4. Finally, John Winthrop, with whom he went into expansive detail about how he envisioned a post-Independence America. This letter is worth quoting at length:

The Advantages, which will result from Such a Declaration, are in my opinion very numerous, and very great. After that Event, the Colonies will hesitate no longer to compleat their Governments. They will establish Tests and ascertain the Criminality of Toryism. The Presses will produce no more, Seditious, or traitorous Speculations. Slanders, upon public Men and Measures, will be lessened. The Legislatures of the Colonies will exert themselves, to manufacture, Salt Petre, Sulphur, Powder, Arms, Cannon, Mortars, Cloathing, and every Thing, necessary for the Support of Life. Our civil Governments will feel a Vigour, hitherto unknown. Our military Operations by Sea and Land, will be conducted with greater Spirit. Privateers will Swarm in great Numbers. Foreigners will then exert themselves to Supply Us with what we want. Foreign Courts will not disdain to treat with Us, upon equal Terms. Nay further in my opinion, such a Declaration, instead of uniting the People of Great Britain against Us, will raise Such a Storm against the Measures of Administration as will obstruct the War, and throw the Kingdom into Confusion.

One might wonder how we have such correspondence to read. Most obviously, many of these letters were properly delivered and then kept by their recipients (and their descendants); and of course, many were not delivered or were not preserved. But in Adams’ case, there is a second explanation: a letterbook. In a June 2, 1776, letter to Abigail, he reported that he had “purchased a Folio Book” for the letters between them – and then for others as well – in which he would hand copy letters he dispatched as a way of keeping track of his own correspondence. It was a method he recommended to her (although she seems not to have gotten far with it).

Many of the Adams letters, therefore, derive from these letterbook copies – and sometimes the letters survive in both forms, as a letter received and as a letterbook copy. Such is the case with the June 23 letter to Winthrop. Let’s see why this is might be important.

In the actual received letter, Adams wrote of Congress’s present business, “A Committee is appointed to prepare a Confederation of the Colonies, ascertaining the Terms and Ends of the Compact, and the Limits of the Continental Constitution, and another Committee is appointed for Purposes as important. These Committees will report in a Week or two, and then the last finishing Stroke will be given to the Politicks of this Revolution. Nothing after that will remain, but War.”

In Letters of Delegates to Congress, editor Paul Smith annotated this second reference this way: “Apparently the committee ‘to prepare a plan of treaties to be proposed to foreign powers,’ of which Adams was a member,” and cited the journals.

However, editor Robert J. Taylor of the fourth volume of the John Adams Papers part of The Adams Papers (a gargantuan, complicated project) annotated this same passage differently, citing Adams’s letterbook: “”LbC [i.e, the letterbook copy] after ‘appointed’ reads: “to draw up a Declaration that these Colonies are free and independent – and other Committees are appointed for other Purposes, as important.”

Why there should be variance between letterbook and actual copies I won’t speculate, but I want to use this moment to point toward a matter – I think – of great significance for the Declaration, viz. its most core purpose. In the letter to Tufts, Adams describes the Declaration’s message as being that “these Colonies [are] free States, independent …”; in the letterbook copy to Winthrop, he echoes this language, “a Declaration that these Colonies are free and independent states.”

In both cases – less than a week before the Declaration draft will be submitted, and, if we are to believe conjectures about Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Benjamin Franklin of maybe June 21, AFTER Adams has already read a Jefferson draft once (and by this time maybe twice) – Adams thinks of the Declaration most essentially in terms of the wording of the Lee resolution for independence, introduced on June 7 and seconded by Adams himself. That is to say, Adams does not describe the Declaration as carefully laying out abstract principles (created equal; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) or a comprehensive catalog of grievances against George III – Adams thinks solely in terms of the wording of the Lee resolution as being THE core mission and message of the Declaration.

And now is a good time for all that to bring us a long neglected pre-submission draft of the Declaration – and a fascinating recent discovery of a Declaration draft fragment – both in the hand of – John Adams! That’s correct – NOT Thomas Jefferson.

In turning, let me begin with an exceptionally bold assertion in the Adams Papers, presumably by editor Taylor: “No member of the congress played a greater role in 1775 and 1776 in bringing about the separation of the American from Great Britain than John Adams.” I would imagine that most polled Americans in 2026 would immediately point to Thomas Jefferson (or, quite  mistakenly, George Washington, who was too occupied in leading troops to be a member of Congress).

Let’s let this matter sit for a while, though, and turn first toward a complete draft of the Declaration, copied by Adams.

You can read a transcription here (itself transcribed from The Adams Papers; you can start with the editorial introduction, or with the document itself; the annotations for the document itself are helpful for seeing how this draft differs from ).

Or you can get a visual fix from the Massachusetts Historical Society, alongside one of the Jefferson correspondence draft versions, the Washburn copy).

I am not going to point very well at the deep textual weeds here, except to point anyone interested to Julian Boyd’s exceptionally careful and detailed The Declaration of Independence: The Evolution of the Text as Shown in Facsimiles of Various Drafts by its Author, Thomas Jefferson (all oversized; first published by the Library of Congress in 1943, then slightly abridged, expanded, and reprinted by Princeton University Press in 1945, and then finally abridged and revised by Gerard W. Gawalt through the Library of Congress – in color – in 1999; the 1943 edition is very rare, the 1999 is helpful for the color photography, but I’d recommend tracking down the 1945 version for the full effect).

Boyd was too much of a Jeffersonophile to give Adams all that much credit, and it would have been all too easy to sell Adams short given the overwhelming predominance and public provenance of Jefferson-related Declaration draft materials against just this one from Adams. Boyd regards Adams as useful but a mere copyist, to be used as means for a clearer picture of Jefferson’s “original Rough draught” (which Boyd characterized “the most extraordinarily interesting document in American history”). Boyd (and the Adams Papers editors following) count either “not more than fifteen” (1943) or “sixteen alterations” (1945) (and then, under Gawalt, back to “not more than fifteen” [1999]). These are mainly wording/phrasing changes, but I’d like to step back and examine the Adams copy from different angles.

I’d note to begin with that Adams clearly and carefully copied this draft – although for what purpose is really unknown – and obviously from a fair copy Jefferson at some point had shared with him (and a fair copy in which Jefferson had already revised “sacred & undeniable” to “self evident”). One of the interesting visual elements is the inclusion of vertical marks – | –  every so often between words. For instance, in the very first line: “When in the Course of human Events it becomes necessary for a People to | advance from that Subordination …” At the end of this paragraph, such symbols precede and follow the closing word, “| Change. |” These seem to cease after the first page? Were they in Jefferson’s fair copy? Are they part of the vocalization system Jefferson may have had in mind when composing, as argued by Jay Fliegelman in Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance(Stanford University Press, 1993)?

Whatever the explanation, seeing these marks also helps us to see that Adams’s copy seems also to reproduce the paragraphing and formatting of what he was copying from. This is especially evident when we get to page 2 and the “He has” listing of grievances against George III (this formatting is lost in the engrossed manuscript on display in the National Archives, but is retained in the Dunlap broadside and in all of Jefferson’s own versions). This becomes interesting when we get to the final grievance on page 3, what is also known as the slavery clause. In all other versions of the clause that I can think of, it is formatted as a single block of text, disproportionate in size and length with the other grievances. Here, however, Adams’s copy breaks it into three separate-but-related blocks, visually making them look more proportionate.

One other important overlooked matter. In the second paragraph where Jefferson laid out the abstract rights and principles, Adams’s copy is worded in this way:

We hold these Truths to be self evident; that all Men are created equal and independent; that from that equal Creation they derive Rights inherent and unalienable; among which are the Preservation of Life, and Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness …

It is one long sentence that strings together an unfolding sequence of propositions, and should be all too familiar to anyone acquainted with the Declaration’s wording – with some changes. “and independent” (probably taken from the Virginia Declaration of Rights) was dropped at some point in the process from “created equal”; “inherent and” is dropped from “unalienable”; etc. But let’s look at the PHRASING here – “that from that equal Creation they derive Rights inherent and unalienable” is really so not much like the final version, “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” What is the difference? What happened?

My theory is that somewhere in the drafting process before the final submission, Jefferson – whether on his own or on the advice of the committee – rearranged the syntactical order to bring the whole sequence into a single grammatical parallel – and passive voice – form:

all men are created equal

[all men] are endowed by their creator

governments are instituted

Doing so brought stylistic and rhetorical unity and order to this section – there was also some pruning that focused the prose – but it did so with a curious effect. Passive voice constructions leave identifying the agent (the doer in a sentence) optional. In this case, the agent – “their Creator” – is clearly identified (although not so in the first clause) – but does that agent also apply to the third clause? In other words, who/what institutes governments? Their Creator? Them? Both?

I’ll leave that to readers to wrangle with, yet I will note that, in my view, this revision masked the articulation of agency in this section – the section, of course, that is all important to most Declaration readers.

But a few more matters about the Adams copy. As I noted, we don’t know why he made such a copy or even exactly what he did with it. John H. Hazelton (in the immensely important The Declaration of Independence: A History, Dodd, Mead, 1906) concluded that Adams had sent it – this particular unique copy – to Abigail (p. 349), based on a letter of hers on July 14. If so, Adams’s letter to Abigail is not recorded in his letterbook or elsewhere, unless the copy was enclosed, unalluded to, in either his July 3 or 5 letters to her. Perhaps he was being especially secretive?

But presuming Hazelton’s theory to be correct, the odder thing is that Adams seems to have forgotten that he made such a copy. He makes no reference whatsoever to it at any point later in his writings. In fact, the first direct reference made to it was by his grandson Charles Francis Adams in volume 2 of the 1850 edition of The Works of John Adams, and then only as a descriptive footnote. The actual text showed up for the first time, somewhat ironically, in Paul Leicester Ford’s 1893 edition of The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (vol. 2, pp. 42-58) in the first of three parallel columned texts of the Declaration (as First Draft [for Adams], then Reported Draft and Engrossed Copy). Next, it appeared in an appendix in Hazelton’s Declaration as one of seven parallel Declaration texts (pp. 306-42). It made its first facsimile appearance (in grayscale) only with Boyd’s 1943 Declaration (item 4, not paginated) – and then, finally, in a more critically edited form in The Adams Papers, Papers of John Adams, vol. 4, pp. 345-51 (now available on Founders Online).

In later years, Adams sometimes expressed some bitterness and indignation over the way that he felt Jefferson had seized credit for the mantle of authoring American independence, especially since Adams felt he had been working extremely hard on behalf of independence well before he had even met Jefferson. Despite the popularity of David McCullough’s biography and the ensuing HBO series (with the superb performance by Paul Giamatti), history – that is, us – has not always been kind to Adams (at least in the estimation he had of himself). I think I’d have to agree – despite his unfiltered crankiness and overbearing personality.

In closing, as we approach THE 250th, if you’re looking to find the Declaration in its cleanest and earliest form, may I recommend that you read through a copy of Adams’s copy? Among other things, it will help you later to see the kinds of revision that Congress performed on the document. 

Countdown to Semiquincentennial: Number 17, June 23
By Michael G. Ditmore