Don Wildman

The English Bill of Rights, ironically, 1689.

Much of John Locke's philosophy, which Jefferson certainly would have been well-versed on, he really writes this over a period of days in that little room in, I think, Market Street in Philadelphia.

Edits were then made to the draft by Adams and Franklin.

Congress approved and rejected different sections.

This is what's interesting.

Right.

The body of this declaration up at the top, you know, that prose is different than the bottom two thirds, just in appearance.

And the reason for that is that most of this document are the grievances.

There's 27 grievances against George III.

Tell me about the grievances.

We don't need to go through all 27 of them, but generally, what were they saying?

Let's talk about that preamble, the famous lines.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

We should be walking around with those lines memorized.

They are that profound and that reductive is the wrong word.

But I mean, they take so much of the thinking of that time and distill them down to a really pithy paragraph.

Yeah, we wouldn't be talking about it today without those ideas.

There were a lot of changes and edits being made.