Biography | Thomas Jefferson — Congress Adopted His Draft in This Room on 4 July 1776

People treat 4 July as the day the colonies voted to break with Britain.

That vote happened two days earlier.

On 2 July 1776 the Second Continental Congress, meeting in the Pennsylvania State House, adopted Richard Henry Lee's resolution of independence.

What they adopted on the fourth was the text that explained the break.

Jefferson had written most of that text between 11 and 28 June, not in this chamber but two blocks away, in a rented second-floor room at what is now 700 Market Street.

Congress had named a Committee of Five on 11 June: Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston.

Jefferson was asked to draft.

Adams and Franklin marked the pages.

Congress cut more, including a passage that blamed the king for the slave trade.

The pin is this Assembly Room, because this is where the edited draft became the public act.

The building was still the Pennsylvania State House. The later name Independence Hall is the afterlife of that vote.

Jefferson was thirty-three and already a Virginia delegate, not yet a president and not yet the owner of a finished house on a mountain.

The Declaration's most repeated sentence is his wording after those edits, not a later slogan hung on the facade.

Photo: Bruce Emmerling, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons