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On 11 June 1776, Congress appointed a committee of five to draft
a formal declaration of independence: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams,
Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston. In his
Autobiography, Adams wrote that he and Jefferson were members of
a subcommittee, and that he pressed the chore upon his younger colleague
for a variety of political and personal reasons; Jefferson simply
said that he was chosen by the committee as a whole to draft the
document. Scholars now generally agree that Jefferson showed his
draft first to Adams and then to Franklin before he presented it
to the entire committee. On 2 July 1776, once the resolution on
independence passed, Congress turned immediately to the Declaration itself and the committee of the whole considered its language.
At an early
stage of the revisions, before it was even presented to the committee
of five, Adams copied the entire document. The Adams copy is extremely
important for demonstrating the evolution of the text from Jefferson's
"original Rough draught," as he called it, which exists now only
as a much marked-up document, to the Declaration so familiar today.
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