#ORIGINAL DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE FREE#

Congress debated Lee’s resolution on Monday, July 1. This is the scene depicted in John Trumbull’s famous painting that now hangs in the Capitol Building rotunda in Washington, D.C. After incorporating changes suggested by Adams and Franklin, the committee submitted its draft declaration to the Congress on June 28. The fifth member, Virginian Thomas Jefferson, was chosen to be the document’s principal drafter. Livingston of New York and Roger Sherman of Connecticut.

John Adams of Massachusetts and Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania were on the committee, along with Robert R. It appointed a five-member committee to draft a public statement that would explain the reasons for declaring independence should Congress so decide. On June 11, Congress put off a vote on Lee’s resolution. Such a profound action demanded careful deliberation.

#ORIGINAL DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE FREE#

The first of three provisions in this resolution read as follows: 'Resolved, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.' Other town and colonial assemblies were issuing similar pleas.

Richard Henry Lee, a Virginia delegate acting on behalf of the Virginia Convention, proposed to Congress a resolution on independence on June 7, 1776. By the middle of 1776, public sentiment in numerous colonies appeared to have turned decisively in favor of independence from Great Britain. The Second Congress swiftly formed a Continental Army under the command of George Washington. In August of 1775, the King declared the colonies to be in open rebellion. King George III had not replied to the petition sent the prior October by the First Continental Congress, stating the colonists’ grievances. Weeks earlier, hostilities had broken out between the British and colonial militias at Lexington, Massachusetts, and Concord, Massachusetts. In May of 1775, the Second Continental Congress was seated in the Assembly Hall of the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia. These historic events, central to the founding of the United States of America, deserve to be understood in detail. Yet it is not true, as often believed, that the document was actually signed on that celebrated date. The most well-known printed version of the United States' Declaration of Independence is emblazoned with the words 'In Congress, July 4, 1776' at the top, and displays the signatures of John Hancock and other founding fathers at the bottom.

Original declaration of independence