In composing his draft of the Declaration, Jefferson made direct use of some existing sources, including several that he had drafted or helped draft for other purposes. One reason for this is that he was pressed for time. As the historian Pauline Maier noted, Jefferson “had to prepare a written text with little time to waste, and … like others in similar circumstances, drew on earlier documents of his own and other people’s creation, acting within the rhetorical and ethical standards of his time.” Additionally, the drafting committee’s job was to capture and express Americans’ sentiments and to package them in recognizable form. “I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether,” Jefferson wrote to James Madison years later.

The Declaration is made up of three primary elements: a statement of the right of self-government, a catalog of the wrongs committed by the British government that broke the compact with the people of the colonies, and lastly the formal declaration of the colonies’ independence.

Each of those components had a direct precedent in another document or series of documents.

For the ringing opening statement, Jefferson had at hand a building block in the form of the first article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, recently penned by George Mason, which, in Mason’s preliminary draft, declared that “all men are born equally free and independant, and have certain inherent natural rights” including life, liberty, property, and “pursueing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

To compose the list of grievances, Jefferson used a roster of charges against the British government that he had composed in the spring of 1776 for a draft Virginia constitution. That enumeration of charges was based on even earlier building blocks, for Jefferson had named several injustices against the colonies in his draft of the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms in 1775, and before that in the 1774 paper published as A Summary View of the Rights of British America.

Finally, the avowal of the colonies’ independence that appears at the end of the Declaration was intentionally built around Richard Henry Lee’s resolution for independence introduced in Congress on June 7, 1776. This was to be expected, as the purpose of the Declaration was to implement the resolution.

This part of the exhibit traces those direct connections to previous documents. What is not tracked here is the precedent of form provided by the 1689 English Declaration of Right or the Declaration’s incorporation of ideas found in such sources as the Treatises of John Locke, Enlightenment writings, 17th-century Puritan antimonarchical tracts, or colonial resistance beginning with responses to the Stamp Act. Those connections are less direct and reveal themselves through deeper study of the Declaration’s text.

Go to Section 1 for the connection to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Section 2 for the development through time of the list of grievances, and Section 3 for the incorporation of Lee’s resolution in the Declaration.

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 30 Aug. 1823, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, 20:123-5.

Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997), 98-9.