07/04/2026
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee, one of Virginia's representatives to the Second Continental Congress, introduced a resolution stating that "these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be, free and independent states...and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved." Congress delayed its final vote while delegates debated the timing and waited for instructions from their colonies, but it also prepared for the possibility of independence by appointing a committee to draft a declaration explaining that decision to the world: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman.
Though the work was assigned to a committee, the final product bears Jefferson's unmistakable voice and style, encapsulating both essence of Enlighten political ideals and John Locke's social contract theory, which, nearly a century before, had been used to justify the supremacy of Britain's constitutional government over the power of the monarch. Jefferson framed independence not as a reckless break but as a necessary act: unavoidable, compelled by circumstance, and made inevitable by the Crown’s repeated violations of colonial rights. In other words, Jefferson wrote the ultimate “it’s you, not me” letter.
Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in *style periodique*, creating a series of linked, dependent clauses that force the reader to wait until the sentence's end before revealing the full force of the argument. That structure guides the audience toward Jefferson’s conclusion: that George III had become the usurper of liberty and that Americans had no choice but to act in order to preserve that liberty.
That style also created masterful prose that reads like a musical masterpiece and gives evidence that Jefferson and the founders intended for the Declaration of Independence to not only be read but read aloud before audiences.
The task of penning the final copy of the Declaration most likely fell to Congress's master scrivener, Timothy Matlack, who had earlier penned the 1774 Petition to the King, the Olive Branch Petition of 1775, and George Washington's commission as commander-in-chief. Matlack's emphatic capitalization — “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” “Rights,” “Governments,” “People,” and “Tyranny” — amplified Jefferson's argument, creating a document that not only explained the Continental Congress's reasoning but birthed a new political creed as well.
The standard account holds that the Declaration was first publicly read on July 8, 1776, when Colonel John Nixon read it aloud in Philadelphia’s State House Yard, now Independence Square. Yet some historical evidence points to an earlier public reading at noon on July 4, on the steps of Philadelphia's city hall, possibly by Secretary Charles Thomson or Timothy Matlack, though the details remain uncertain. Eyewitness Charles Biddle remarked that "there were very few respectable citizens present" at that July 4 reading, which seems fitting for a nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal.
Later that afternoon (July 8th), the Congress instructed Philadelphia printer John Dunlap to produce printed copies for distribution to the states and for the army. A copy was immediately dispatched to Washington's New York headquarters, where America's founding father had it read "before all the army under [his] immediate command."
Reading of the Declaration of Independence
Listen as an American Village historical interpreter reads the Decl...
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