Having appointed the Declaration drafting committee, Congress turned to pending business. Under war conditions, there was no “business as usual,” and with the still forming relationships among the colonies/states, there was much unsettled and in need of formation. Charles Thomson’s minimalist record-keeping is valuable to keep track of matters, but it also makes those matters appear to be more orderly than they must have been on the ground.  On this day, Congress considered privateer prize money, elected (and funded) a deputy paymaster for the eastern department, reached a resolution concerning a “riffle” regiment, redirected some troops as well as muskets. Relative to Lee’s June 7 resolution, they also appointed 12 delegates to prepare “the form of a confederation” – what would become the Articles of Confederation – and then another five delegates to “prepare a plan of treaties.”

In terms of the Declaration’s drafting, it might be noteworthy that four of its five members were appointed to one or the other of these other two committees (Sherman and Livingston to the confederation, Adams and Franklin to the plan for treaties) – but not Jefferson himself. This may reflect the attention he was already expected to give to drafting the Declaration itself.

Most of the day’s journal entry, however, is given to the establishment and charge of a standing committee, a “board of war and ordinance.” Thomson included the detailed description. This committee would be responsible for keeping a register of officers and disposition of troops, accounts of weaponry and location, forwarding dispatches and monies, recruitment, prisoners, and communications, all with an oath of secrecy – in short, what we would now regard as Department of Defense.

Finally, a committee of the whole considered a report from the commissioners to Canada. But there was nothing further about the Declaration. Having been appointed, the drafting committee was – in the records, at least – left to its own devices. And therein lies some controversy and quibbling – how did Jefferson become the document’s principal drafter?

For all the things we know and can reconstruct about the Declaration’s drafting (almost entirely by way of Jefferson himself), there are matters that are frustratingly unclear or absent – or at least slightly contested. Even just describing some matters can be complicated.

If the committee kept any minutes or notes, they are not known to have survived. It’s not unlikely that that, except for the drafter Jefferson, no one really thought to preserve notes or memories – and they were quite busy. But three of the members – Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston – left behind no trace of their contribution, if any, to the Declaration.

Adams and Jefferson eventually did – eventually, as in 46 years later — in response to provoking from the reviled troublemaker Colonel Timothy Pickering of Salem, Massachusetts. Pickering, largely unknown nowadays, is a story unto himself, and we may turn to that later. But let’s fast forward to the year 1822. Pickering had been a steadfast Federalist from the outset, and so had developed a hostility toward Jefferson – and had had troubled relationship with Adams (who had kept him as Secretary of State in his presidency and then summarily dismissed him in 1800, which Pickering never forgot.

Pickering had taken an unusual interest in the Declaration’s formation as early as 1804, and had come to the settled conclusion that Jefferson’s “authorship” had been greatly exaggerated. In advance of many readers, Pickering had closely compared one of the Declaration’s submitted drafts (I’ll say much more about these later) to the final version and so had gained insight into Congress’s editing.

On August 2, 1822, Pickering wrote a detailed, unctuous letter to Adams seeking more detailed information about the Declaration’s drafting, assuring him – most unaccountably – that he “alone could give a full statement” about how Jefferson came to be the drafter. (That is a most unaccountable assertion, since Jefferson was still alive; Pickering, despite his distaste, had been in correspondence with him recently.)

Adams’s August 6 reply was fulsome, perhaps too much so, beginning with what has come to be called “the Frankfort advice,” which was that, on the advice of Pennsylvanians, the Massachusetts delegation to the First Continental Congress had been counseled that it would be prudent to give way to the Virginians as much as possible, “to place Virginia at the head of everything,” if they wanted things to go smoothly. And so they did.

Much later, then, Adams claimed, the Declaration drafting committee initially appointed Adams and Jefferson to collaborate on the draft – but that Adams immediately (and dramatically) ceded the drafting to Jefferson alone.

Adams’s account is really the first time (46 years after the fact) anyone had attempted to describe the workings of the drafting committee, and Pickering made sure to incorporate some of Adams’s letter into his Independence Day oration in Salem in 1823, including an abridged, toned-down version of Adams ceding the drafting to Jefferson.

Pickering’s account of Adams’s account made its way into newspapers and as a pamphlet, and then eventually found its way to the eyes of Jefferson himself, and he was not pleased. But not displeased enough to correct the Adams/Pickering account publicly; instead, he wrote privately to James Madison on August 30, 1823 to set matters straight, with some attempt at diplomacy.

He noted that

“mr. Adams’s memory has led him into unquestionable error. At the age of 88 and 47. Years after the transactions of Independence, this is not wonderful. Nor should I, at the age of 80 … venture to oppose my memory to his, were it not supported by written notes, taken by myself at the moment and on the spot.

Presumably, Jefferson is here referring to the longer notes he’d made, wherein he wrote that “the committee … desired me to do it. it was accordingly done.”

Scholars have tended to give Jefferson, and not Adams, the final say here. But there is one other matter to consider, besides the length of time and paucity of materials, and that is that Adams and Jefferson had been in regular correspondence with each other for a decade. Surely, Jefferson could have raised the issue directly with Adams. In fact, only a month later, on September 4, Jefferson wrote Adams and corrected him on the issue of John Jay’s not signing the Declaration, without at the same time bothering to raise the issue of how Jefferson got the drafting job.

The long relationship between Adams and Jefferson, which really began in 1775, is too complicated to recount here, except to note that there was no communication between them from the time that Adams lost the presidency to Jefferson in the election of 1800 and 1812 when Benjamin Rush reactivated correspondence between the two. They never again met in person, but they conducted a brilliant exchange of letters. Lester J. Cappon’s edition of the The Adams-Jefferson Letters, especially volume 2, is highly recommended reading.

And yet I sense that there were matters that, for the sake of peace and amity, neither statesman was willing to cross swords on, and one of them it appears had to do with their memories, sometimes conflicting, of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. And so, from here we will be more focused, as well as we can be, on Jefferson and what he produced – and how.

Countdown to Semiquincentennial: Number 6, June 12, 1776
By Michael G. Ditmore