Committee of Five

During these allotted three weeks Congress agreed to appoint a committee to draft a statement to outline the reasons for the Colonies seceding from the British Empire.

[citation needed] On June 11, the Committee of Five was appointed: John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert Livingston of New York, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia.

This shares some similarities with, but is distinct from, John Locke's prior description of private property as a natural right, in the phrase "life, liberty, and estate".

[9] Jefferson's first draft also considered a scathing criticism of Great Britain's use of slavery, which was later removed in order to avoid offending slaveholders.

The Congress then heard the report of the Committee of the Whole and declared the sovereign status of the United Colonies the following day, during the afternoon of July 2.

[citation needed] Jefferson wrote in his autobiography, of the two deleted passages: The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with still haunted the minds of many.

The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa was struck out 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.

[13]As John Adams recalled many years later, this work of editing the proposed text was largely completed by the time of adjournment on July 3.

Not three decades had elapsed by which time the prominent members of the Committee of Five could no longer recollect either detail of what had actually taken place, or their active participation, on July 4 and 5 of 1776.