The Creation of a Nation

In June 1776 the Continental Congress handed the drafting of a declaration to a committee of five, and the committee gave the pen to Thomas Jefferson. He was thirty-three. Working in a rented second-floor parlor at Seventh and Market Streets in Philadelphia, he produced a draft in a little over two weeks. Franklin and Adams suggested small changes; Congress made larger ones, cutting roughly a quarter of the text, and adopted the result on 4 July. The second sentence of what survived is the one the world remembers.

Michelangelo painted The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel around 1512, near the center of a vault he had worked on for four years. Adam reclines on a bare hillside, the Creator sweeps in from the right inside a billowing mantle crowded with figures, and the whole painting turns on the gap between two fingers that do not quite touch.

Jefferson takes Adam's place on the rock at the left, red hair loose, shirt open, a quill still in his left hand and paper and a writing box beside him. He reaches toward a white-bearded figure in a rose-colored robe who fills Michelangelo's mantle with a different crowd: Franklin in his spectacles, Washington in blue and gold, and a half-dozen more of the founding generation. A small light burns between the two fingertips. The background is bare plaster, cracked like an old fresco, and nothing distracts from the reach.

It is a thesis as much as a picture. Nothing was handed down. The document was reached for, argued over, and written by hand.