on this day a five-man drafting committee placed the Declaration Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.of Independence before the Second Continental Congress after striking out the inappropriate fifty-five word preamble penned by the young idealistic author, Thomas Jefferson.

Chairman John Adams had originally asked the far more experienced Benjamin Franklin to pen the declaration but he had refused citing a long-standing aversion to having his own words edited by others. It was a lesson not lost on the dismayed Jefferson who truly believed that his rhetorical prose had been "mangled" by the drafting committee.

From a broader perspective, Adams, Franklin, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman were absolutely right because the Declaration was not a standalone document to be embellished by Jefferson. Rather it was the last in a series of stage documents preceded by Richard Henry Lee's resolution of June 7th that "these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states".

In his own treatise, "Thoughts on Government" Adams had made it clear that he sought evolution. Not much more in fact than the transfer of sovereignty to a Republican Government. Because despite its grandiose democratic-sounding title, the Second Contintental Congress was not yet an elected body. And Jefferson's words took the struggle for independence to a new level, a revolution that seem to invite, welcome even, an untested future of mob rule: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".

Franklin, a man that heartily agreed with the sentiments of the preamble, offered a prophetic warning to Adams. Rushed into action by King George's Prohibitory Act, Adams plan offered a reasoned approach to the assumption of power. But ran the risk of causing a reaction. Making revolutionaries of idealists such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, soon to be the most dangerous men in America.