[This post is excerpted from the new book, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster).]
Though Thomas Jefferson's phrases in the Declaration of Independence remain among the most famous ever penned, America's founding document remains controversial to some, and unread by many. Famously intended by the young Jefferson to be an "expression of the American mind," the Declaration was primarily of an amalgamation of George Mason's Virginia Bill of Rights, Jefferson's draft Virginia Constitution, and Richard Henry Lee's resolution of June 11 proposing Independence. Though informed by dozens of local declarations and statements, as ably chronicled by the late Pauline Maier in her 1997 American Scripture, one might say that the Declaration grew out of the Virginia soil, seeded by the tempestuous rains of Massachusetts.
