“In the shape in which Mr. Jefferson had presented it”

In August 1822, Timothy Pickering wrote to John Adams with questions about the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

Pickering had served as Secretary of State while Adams was President. The men fell out over foreign policy, and Adams chose a new Secretary of State. Later Adams grouped Pickering in the “Essex Junto” he said undermined him, to Pickering’s puzzlement.

But by 1822 both men were out of public office. Thomas Jefferson and his adherents had been in the White House for two decades. Old intraparty enmities didn’t seem so important as ongoing interparty enmities.

Pickering asked to clear up what he considered mysteries about how the Continental Congress chose its committee to write the Declaration:

Mr. Jefferson being first on the list, became the chairman. This, considering the composition of the committee, and that Mr. Jefferson was the youngest man, would appear remarkable. Mr. Charles Lee, who married a daughter of R. H. Lee, once gave me this account: That Mr. Lee having moved the resolution for declaring the Colonies independent, would, according to the usual course, have been elected chairman of the committee for preparing the declaration; but sickness in his family caused him to return home.—Mr. Jefferson, another Virginian, was then chosen to supply his place.

As Pickering said, in many committees of this sort, the first man named was not only expected to be chairman but also the principal writer of the committee’s report—in this case, the Declaration.

However, Pickering misstated the history in a couple of ways. Jefferson was older than another committee member, Robert R. Livingston. And Richard Henry Lee had a second reason to return home besides a sick wife: he wanted to be involved in how Virginia formed a state government.

The letter went on:

The late [Massachusetts] Chief Justice [Theophilus] Parsons once told me, that in conversing on this subject, you informed him, that you and Mr. Jefferson were the sub-committee to prepare the declaration, and that you left to Mr. Jefferson the making of the draught. . . . But I was at a loss to account for the committee’s letting it be reported in the shape in which Mr. Jefferson had presented it to them.

Pickering guessed that the other members of the committee held back their criticism of the wordy draft after “observing a strong attachment of the parent to his offspring,” figuring Jefferson would more easily accept revisions from the Congress as a whole.

As an arch-Federalist, Pickering invited Adams, the last Federalist President, to confirm his theories because:

there is no end of the praises of Mr. Jefferson as the author of the declaration of independence:—if he had been the author of our independence itself, he could hardly have been more eulogized.—I have thought it desirable that the real facts in this case should be ascertained.

Could Adams’s recollections knock former President Jefferson down a peg or two?

TOMORROW: Adams’s reply.