Transcript

Updated June 30, 2026. This episode of Documents That Changed the World is from 2015; here’s the original version; but hang on at the end for a couple of updates!

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How do you read something that isn’t there? Well, you can’t, unless somehow you know it used to be there.  There are lots of examples of the creative process at work in all its messy, myriad varieties – in multiple drafts of novels, plays, scientific articles and so on, showing us how works are tweaked and pruned and sometimes taken apart and put back together again.

Think, for example, about lawmaking, where the stakes can be very high, so in a contemporary legislature, meticulous minutes are kept recording proposed amendments, speeches made, votes taken and so on, so that the public, and future generations, can know, if they care, how it all happened and moreover who to thank or blame.

This wasn’t always the case, and one of our most cherished and fundamental documents underwent a serious of edits and revisions from the trivial to the profound.  We are largely in the dark as to how and why, and one piece in particular, taken out in one of the most pivotal decisions in our early history, resounds, even – especially - in its absence, today.

A document that changed the world: A passage, beginning with “He has waged cruel war,” deleted by the Second Continental Congress from the Declaration of Independence, 1776

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and that date is so ingrained in the American consciousness that it sort of blots out everything else that year.  The first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published, as was the Wealth of Nations, Catherine the Great is in the middle of her reign, Louis XVI in the third year of his, and the Phi Beta Kappa society is founded at William and Mary that winter.  But pride of place goes to the document drafted by Thomas Jefferson in a second-floor rented apartment on the corner of 7^th and Market Streets in Philadelphia on behalf of a committee of five members of Congress. 

There are many, many stories about the Declaration, including the early printed copy I nearly sneezed on one winter’s morning at the Library of Congress, but those will have to wait for another day.  The basics:  Jefferson was much more interested in helping to prepare Virginia’s new constitution and only somewhat reluctantly took on the task of drafting it; John Adams later claimed he talked him into it.  Jefferson borrowed freely from numerous sources, and his initial effort went first to the rest of the committee, including Adams and Benjamin Franklin, who then made some 47 changes, mostly minor, adding several paragraphs. 

There are 7 versions and fragments in Jefferson’s hand, including what’s known as the “original Rough Draft” which looks like exactly that.  It’s got crossouts, additions, boxes, even a pasted-on flap, showing how the text evolved, if not the reasons or people responsible.  For example, somehow we got from “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” to “self-evident.”  Who did that? Franklin, Adams, Jefferson?  We don’t know.  To this day, research goes on about the writing and editing processes, including recent sophisticated imaging studies of Jefferson’s drafts.

Congress debated the committee’s submission over three days, making a further 39 edits, which seriously annoyed Jefferson who by now was feeling more than a little protective of the prose, later calling his colleagues “pusillanimous” in trying not to offend the British people too grievously.  It was adopted, as amended, on July 4.  The original resolution on declaring independence was passed on the 2^nd, but nobody remembers that.  How important were these words?  Note that we celebrate the adoption of the Declaration on the 4^th as our national holiday rather than, as John Adams predicted, the 2^nd, when the decision was actually made. 

Anyway, adopted it was, and the committee took it to John Dunlap, their official printer, that night to have copies made. 26 of these “Dunlap broadsides” are known to survive; one discovered hidden in a flea market picture frame in 1991 fetched $2.5 million at auction.  The handwritten engrossed version was signed, first by John Hancock, beginning on August 2.  That has had a journey of its own, being moved at least 20 times, including sitting in the sun for about 35 years in the Patent Office, in a State Department library room with an open fireplace for another 17, and a trip to Fort Knox to wait out World War II.  It has resided since 1952 in the National Archives, now in the rotunda, protected by a monitoring system designed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and not at all susceptible to being stolen and rolled up like wallpaper like you saw in National Treasure which I can’t believe they sell the DVD of in the Archives’ gift shop.  Seriously.

The Declaration has been inspirational, not only for its words and ideas, but as an idea unto itself.   Visit the Alamo in San Antonio, and you’re treated to considerable discussions about the Declaration of Independence – of Texas – signed in 1836.  It’s explicitly referenced in South Carolina’s 1860 declaration of secession as well.  In 1777, only a few months on, a “Petition for Freedom” from “A Great Number of Blackes” was submitted to the Massachusetts legislature.  Declarations of independence have been composed over the decades by labor groups, farmers, women, socialists, and others.  Frederick Douglass asked, in an 1852 speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”

One of the most consequential amendments removed a section of some 168 words, laying out one of the litany of charges and accusations against George III, piling up the indictments and thus justifying the quite novel idea of breaking away.  It’s typically known by its opening words as the “He has waged cruel war” passage, and it accuses the king of perpetuating the slave trade and by inference slavery itself.  Adams said in 1822 he never thought it would get through, though his otherwise comprehensive diaries of the relevant days are silent on what happened.  Jefferson also was sanguine if a bit snippy about it, saying it was “struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves…Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender…for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”

The rudimentary congressional journal is of no help on what actually happened; it simply records that there was discussion and debate, as a committee of the whole, and approval, but that’s it.  The next order of business concerned the hiring of a boat from a Mr. Walker.

Much has been written about Jefferson’s deeply conflicted position as slaveholder and as defender of individual rights.  At the time of the Declaration’s drafting, he owned 180 slaves, rising to 267 by 1822.  He had 6 children by Sally Hemmings, his slave and dead wife’s half-sister, and he did not, as was often the practice, free his slaves upon his death. There are few clean hands here; at least a third of the signers were slaveowners, and even in northern states abolition was gradual; New York didn’t outlaw slavery until 1827, the 1840 census lists seven slaves in Rhode Island, and in at least a few Union states full abolition wasn’t achieved until 1865.  And lest we get too smug about all this, estimates put the current number of people in forced labor or human trafficking today at between 20 and 35 million.

This edit can be seen as ordinary and unremarkable deliberative mechanics:  provisions are drafted, revised, taken out, added, re-revised, and so on, all part of the process of discussion and coming to agreement. 

For many, though, this is the American national mark of Cain; the proverbial can that has been kicked down our proverbial road for nearly a quarter of a millenium.  Yes, it’s true, as well as cliché, to say that progress has been made – including the Fourteenth and Nineteenth Amendments (to a Constitution that countenances slavery without ever soiling its hands by using the word outright). You could also point to civil rights legislation, Supreme Court decisions from Brown to Obergefell, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and so on.  And yet, well, you know.

Any writer will tell you that less can be more. Sometimes, however, more is more, more words, more ideas, more voices, more people.  Alloys are stronger for a reason. 

This decision has been second-guessed, criticized and defended since, it seems, day one; many believe the Declaration and the new nation would never have worked otherwise.  Quite possibly – though that doesn’t remove the inherent sting.  It’s hard not to think of this as a missed turning, an opportunity lost. 

So, we finish where we started:  how do you read something that isn’t there?  There’s a difference between something that just isn’t there and never was, and something that’s been removed, intentionally, purposefully.  Perhaps knowing how that happened and why and by whom would be useful, or make a difference, perhaps not; without a more comprehensive record, we shall never know. Ultimately, this is a story about grand and noble language and ideas, which have stirred souls for generations, and, within, a silence, which nonetheless speaks volumes, still. 

Works cited

Allen, D. S. (2014). Our Declaration: a reading of the Declaration of Independence in defense of equality (First edition). New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a Division of W. W. Norton & Company.

Analysis Reveals Changes in Declaration of Independence - News Releases (Library of Congress). (n.d.). [text]. Retrieved September 29, 2015, from http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2010/10-161.html

Boyd, J. P., & Gawalt, G. W. (1999). The Declaration of Independence: the evolution of the text (Rev. ed). Washington : Hanover: Library of Congress in association with the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation ; Distributed by University Press of New England.

Congress, U. S. C. (1823). Journals of the American Congress from 1774-1788: In Four Volumes. Way and Gideon.

Declaration of Independence - A History. (n.d.). Retrieved August 18, 2015, from http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_history.html

Dershowitz, A. M., & Rogers D. Spotswood Collection. (2003). America declares independence. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons.

Dyer, J. B. (2012). American soul: the contested legacy of the Declaration of Independence. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Essay - Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents | Exhibitions - Library of Congress. (1995, July 4). [webpage]. Retrieved September 29, 2015, from http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/declara3.html

Findings. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/findings/

Foner, P. S. (1976). We, the other people: alternative Declarations of Independence by labor groups, farmers, woman’s rights advocates, Socialists, and Blacks, 1829-1975. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hazelton, J. H. (1970). The Declaration of independence; its history,. New York: Da Capo Press.

How to Understand Slavery and the American Founding. (n.d.). Retrieved August 18, 2015, from http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2002/08/how-to-understand-slavery-and-americas

Jayne, A. (1998). Jefferson’s Declaration of independence: origins, philosophy, and theology. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Jayne, A. (2007). Lincoln and the American manifesto. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

Jefferson and the Declaration (July 1999) - Library of Congress Information Bulletin. (n.d.). Retrieved September 29, 2015, from http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9907/jeffdec.html

Jefferson’s “original Rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence - Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents | Exhibitions - Library of Congress. (1995, July 4). [webpage]. Retrieved August 18, 2015, from http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html

McCullough, D. G., Maier, P., Parkinson, R. G., McDonald, R. M. S., Armitage, D., O’Connor, S. D., … University of Virginia (Eds.). (2008). Declaring independence: the origin and influence of America’s founding document: featuring the Albert H. Small Declaration of Independence Collection. Charlottesville, Va: University of Virginia Library.

Shain, B. A. (2014). The Declaration of Independence in historical context: American state papers, petitions, proclamations & letters of the delegates to the First National Congresses.

Statistics and indicators on forced labour and trafficking (Forced labour, human trafficking and slavery). (n.d.). Retrieved August 20, 2015, from http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/policy-areas/statistics/lang--en/index.htm

The Deleted Passage of the Declaration of Independence (1776) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed. (n.d.). Retrieved August 18, 2015, from http://www.blackpast.org/primary/declaration-independence-and-debate-over-slavery

Tsesis, A. (2012). For liberty and equality: the life and times of the Declaration of Independence. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Many of the edits on Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration are obvious; words are crossed out, written above lines, inserted, that sort of thing.  On page 3, however, there’s more of a smudge, as though in the process of writing, Jefferson immediately thought better of a word and tried to rub it out while the iron gall ink was still wet, and cover it up.  Since the time of original recording, further investigation by the Preservation Research and Testing Division of the Library of Congress using UV, infrared light and other techniques, has revealed what happened, and in this case, that revision is telling – even inspirational and spine-straightening.  Although – ironically for our purposes - the passage in question didn’t survive into the final version, it’s nonetheless arguably, at least in one mind and one moment, when the people of America were transformed, when “subjects” was replaced by “citizens”.  Not a kingdom, a republic.

The final, signed, holographic Declaration continues to reside in the Rotunda of the National Archives, as one of the “Charters of Freedom”, accompanied as it has been by the original Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.  In 2026, for the semiquincetennial, it’s been joined by two new neighbors, the Nineteenth Amendment granting the right to vote for women, and the Emancipation Proclamation, the first new permanent additions in decades, more signs of progress along the often bumpy road to a more perfect union.

At the National Archives, the Declaration Gets More Company - The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/arts/national-archives-emancipation-19th-amendment.html. Accessed 30 June 2026.

“Thomas Jefferson, June 1776, Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence.” June 1776, Manuscript Division, Microfilm Reel: 001. Library of Congress Digital Collections, https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.001_0545_0548/.

Villafana, Tana. “Eighteenth Century Track Changes: Uncovering Revisions in Founding Fathers’ Documents | Guardians of Memory.” Webpage. The Library of Congress, 7 July 2022, https://blogs.loc.gov/preservation/2022/07/founding-fathers-independence-day.