The Tribulations of the Writer

(even a famous one)

  One of the greatest masterpieces of human rhetoric came from Thomas Jefferson, who was on the committee appointed by Congress to prepare a statement explaining the colonies’ decision to revolt. To this day, we cherish some of the ringing phrases of the Declaration of Independence:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

 However, even Jefferson, the great thinker, writer, and revolutionary, had his prose revised by others. First, let us remember how  Jefferson came to be the principal author of the Declaration. History moves in strange ways. It was due to personalities and politics that Jefferson was chosen as the primary author of the document; it was by no means inevitable that his flights of rhetoric and oratory would be the ones to guide the rebels and inspire the new nation. Said John Adams of the events that led to Jefferson ’s appointment (quoted in Colbert, 1997, p. 80):

The committee met, discussed the subject, and then appointed Mr. Jefferson and me to make the draft, I suppose because we were the two first on the list. The sub-committee met. Jeff­er­son proposed to me to make the draft. I said, “I will not.”

                        “Oh, you should do it,” he said.

                        “Oh, no!”

                        “Why will you not? You ought to do it.”....

“Reason first – You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of the business. Reason second – I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third – You can write ten times better than I can.”

  “Well,” said Jefferson , “If you are decided, I will do as well as I can.”  

Jefferson accordingly wrote up the ideas which had been discussed among the delegates for the previous several years. Changes were made by Congress to Jefferson ’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, and he found it hard to stomach some of them. Some of the proposed changes concerned style, and others concerned substance. Below are two cases in which wordiness was removed:

            TJ: To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.

                Edited version: To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

            TJ: He [King George III] has suffered the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these states.

               Edited version: He has obstructed the administration of justice.    

 What is your opinion? Do you think that the changes improved the text? The most famous edit of all was made for political reasons. It concerned Jefferson ’s condemnation of the slave trade, for which he blames George III in a passage that begins:

              He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant  
              people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in 
              their transportation thither. 

 This long passionate passage was entirely deleted, “struck out,” said Jefferson , “in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others” (quoted in Gottesman et al., 1979, p. 494).  Of course, the supreme irony is that Jefferson himself had many slaves and conducted a long affair with one of them, fathering several children with her.

So console yourself. Even the greatest writers have faced the wicked pen of the editor – or even a group of them! 
  
    John Adams’s account appears in The Works of John Adams, 1856, excerpted in Colbert, D. (Ed.). (1997), Eyewitness to America . New York: Pantheon. p. 80.   Franklin’s anecdote originally appeared in Hazelton, J., The Declaration of Independence : Its History (1906), also excerpted in Colbert, pp. 81-82.  Thomas Jefferson’s autobiography is excerpted in Gottesman, R., Holland, L. B., Kalstone, D., Murphy, F., Parker, H., & Pritchard, W. H. (1979). (Eds.). Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1. NY: Norton. pp. 495-500 .