Days earlier, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia had proposed that the colonies "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States". Congress postponed the vote but asked a committee to prepare a statement justifying it. The committee gave the drafting to Jefferson, then 33, who wrote in a rented room over the following weeks. Adams and Franklin made edits. Congress voted for independence on July 2 and adopted the revised declaration on July 4.
The committee's members represented different regions: Adams of Massachusetts, Sherman of Connecticut, Livingston of New York, Franklin of Pennsylvania and Jefferson of Virginia. Many years later Adams recalled that he had urged Jefferson to write the draft for three reasons: Jefferson was a Virginian, he was less disliked than Adams, and he could "write ten times better" than Adams could.
Jefferson worked at a portable writing desk he had designed, in rooms he rented on the second floor of a bricklayer's house at Seventh and Market Streets. Drawing on his draft of a constitution for Virginia and on George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights, he produced a text in about 17 days. Franklin and Adams suggested changes, including the replacement of "sacred and undeniable" with "self-evident".
The committee presented the draft to Congress on June 28. After voting for independence, Congress spent two days editing it, cutting about a quarter, including a passage condemning the slave trade. Jefferson was upset by the changes. Livingston, one of the five, never signed the final document.
Key people: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston