e was proposed, but they unanimously pressed on myself alone
to undertake the draught. I consented; I drew it: but before I reported
it to the committee, I communicated it separately to Doctor Franklin
and Mr. Adams, requesting their corrections, because they were the two
members of whose judgments and amendments I wished most to have the
benefit, before presenting it to the committee: and you have seen the
original paper now in my hands, with the corrections of Doctor Franklin
and Mr. Adams interlined in their own hand-writings. Their alterations
were two or three only, and merely verbal. I then wrote a fair copy,
reported it to the committee, and from them, unaltered, to Congress.
This personal communication and consultation with Mr. Adams, he
has misremembered into the actings of a sub-committee. Pickering's
observations, and Mr. Adams's in addition, 'that it contained no new
ideas, that it is a common-place compilation, its sentiments hacknied
in Congress for two years before, and its essence contained in Otis's
pamphlet,' may all be true. Of that I am not to be the judge. Richard
Henry Lee charged it as copied from Locke's Treatise on Government.
Otis's pamphlet I never saw, and whether I had gathered my ideas from
reading or reflection I do not know. I know only that I turned to
neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as
any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether, and to offer no
sentiment which had ever been expressed before. Had Mr. Adams been
so restrained, Congress would have lost the benefit of his bold and
impressive advocations of the rights of Revolution. For no man's
confident and fervid addresses, more than Mr. Adams's, encouraged and
supported us through the difficulties surrounding us, which, like the
ceaseless action of gravity, weighed on us by night and by day. Yet, on
the same ground, we may ask what of these elevated thoughts was new, or
can be affirmed never before to have entered the conceptions of man?

Whether, also, the sentiments of Independence, and the reasons for
declaring it, which makes so great a portion of the instrument, had been
hacknied in Congress for two years before the 4th of July, '76, or this
dictum also of Mr. Adams be another slip of memory, let history
say. This, however, I will say for Mr. Adams, that he supported the
Declaration with zeal and ability, fighting fearlessly for every word of
it. As to myself, I thought it a duty to be, on