Michael Hattem

But another major factor, a major purpose behind the declaration is that once the colonists accept that independence is going to happen, which happens in June, they immediately decide

know that they are going to need foreign assistance if they are going to win this war against the British Empire.

And so on the day that the Committee of Five is established to draft the Declaration, the next thing that the Congress does is create another committee that is supposed to explore the possibilities and the options for securing foreign alliances, right?

So those two things are...

are totally interconnected, both in Congress's eyes, but also in the document itself.

Yeah.

So Jefferson is part of a committee that's selected.

And that committee is Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, Roger Sherman from Connecticut, and Robert R. Livingston from New York.

And Jefferson is chosen because he has a reputation at this point for his writing.

He published a pamphlet in 1774 called A Summer Review of the Rights of British America.

It was a quite fiery pamphlet, really taking –

both parliament and the king to task and that pamphlet circulated in philadelphia at the congress before jefferson even became a delegate so he has a reputation there for being a supporter of independence and and also a a talented writer and also he has the added quality of being virginian right uh

They thought, and I think correctly, that you couldn't have the Declaration of Independence authored by a New Englander because New Englanders, especially the delegates from Massachusetts –

were not the most popular delegates in the Congress.

And that's because they had been pushing for independence, you know, going back to 1775.

And they had really sort of ticked off the moderates in the Congress.

And so the idea was, one, you couldn't have a New Englander write the Declaration because there was already a sense among the moderates that New England was dragging us into, the rest of us, into independence, right?

But also, Virginia is...

the largest and the wealthiest of all the colonies.

And so you want to have a Virginian, as John Adams said, at the head of this business.