Word: jefferson
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...DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE underwent numerous changes, mostly minor but some major, before Congress approved it last week. The editing process is illustrated in key excerpts. The words that are crossed out and replaced in roman type are alterations made after Thomas Jefferson consulted with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The bracketed words were cut and the italicized words were added by the Congress...
June 11. Thomas Jefferson elected to committee to produce a Declaration of Independence, and soon starts writing a draft...
Despite the weight of custom and commerce, the past decade has seen a very slowly growing opposition to slavery on both sides of the Atlantic. Much of it has been stirred by the belief that the rights of man are as universal as Jefferson has said. Thomas Paine of the Pennsylvania Magazine has published an article arguing that the slave, "who is proper owner of his freedom, has a right to reclaim it, however often sold." Adds Dr. Benjamin Rush, a leader of a Philadelphia antislavery movement: "The plant of liberty is of so tender a nature, that it cannot...
...most important of the new constitutions is that of Virginia, approved just last month. The proud Virginians had no thought of asking Congress for any advice. Indeed, they considered the work being undertaken in Williamsburg at least as important as that in Philadelphia. Said Thomas Jefferson: "Should a bad government be instituted for us, it had been as well to have accepted the bad one offered us from beyond the water without the risk and expense of contest...
Frustrated at not being able to take part in such debates, Virginia's Jefferson sat down in Philadelphia and wrote his own outline for a constitution, sending it back to Williamsburg with his mentor, Lawyer George Wythe. By the time Wythe got there, however, the many arguments over Mason's draft had finally been settled. Chairman Edmund Pendleton, a distinguished lawyer, said that the members "could not, from mere lassitude, have been induced to open the instrument again." But they did like Jefferson's preamble, which contains many of the same ideas that Jefferson has included...