John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail, noted that Congress split into three factions.įirst, he wrote, there were those who wanted to convince the British to return to the conditions that pre-dated the Stamp Act.
The Congress agreed that current relations with the British were unacceptable, but disagreed over how to proceed. Wikimedia Commons John Adams went from defending British soldiers after the Boston Massacre to serving as the vice president of the newly formed United States. They included members who had attended the First Continental Congress, like John Adams, and new delegates who hadn’t, like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. The men who filled the chamber at the Pennsylvania State House hailed from all 13 colonies. The Revolutionary War had begun, and a month later, the Second Continental Congress would gather in Philadelphia for its first meeting. More gunfire was exchanged, leaving three redcoats and two colonists dead. Then, in April of 1775, a standoff between some 700 British troops and 77 militiamen in Lexington ignited, leaving eight militiamen dead.įrom Lexington, the British troops marched into Concord while a separate contingent of British soldiers encountered militiamen on Concord’s North Bridge. Next came the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773, when angry American colonists dumped 342 chests of tea imported by the British East India Company into the Boston Harbor. (The defense would cost Adams many of his clients, but would elevate his public profile.) A Boston lawyer named John Adams agreed to defend the soldiers. In 1770, British troops in Boston opened fire on a crowd that had pelted them with snowballs, rocks, and shelled oysters, killing five. Library of Congress Paul Revere drew this picture of the Boston Massacre in 1770.įrom there, relations continued to sour. Why Was The Declaration Of Independence Written?
But Jefferson’s original draft would go on to have many edits before emerging as the historical catalyst known as the Declaration of Independence. The committee assigned the first draft to Jefferson. Relations with the British government had steadily deteriorated since the widely despised Stamp Act of 1765 that imposed a direct tax on the colonists.Ĭongress had tasked Jefferson and four other delegates - John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston, the so-called “Committee of Five” - to create a declaration of independence from Great Britain. Jefferson, like all colonists, had lived through a turbulent decade. As Jefferson wrote, his 14-year-old valet, a slave named Robert Hemings, stood nearby.įor more than a month, Jefferson had witnessed debates among the Second Continental Congress in the stuffy Pennsylvania State House. Jefferson’s writing was influenced by the debates of weeks past, and by his reading of philosophers like Thomas Paine and John Locke. Library of Congress Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson review the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.