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Americans who cheered Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence dumbfounded John Adams. He, too, had sat on the committee assigned by the Continental Congress to compose the treasonous tract. The committee approved it, and then so did Congress, but only after subjecting it to "severe Criticism, and striking out several of the most oratorical Paragraphs...." The Declaration was a group project and not, as Jefferson's admirers claimed, a solitary performance. "Was there ever a coup de theatre that had so great an effect as Jefferson's penmanship of the Declaration of Independence?" Adams wondered in 1805. "The Declaration of Independence I always considered as a theatrical show," he said six years later. "Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect . . . and all the glory of it."' Adams's resentment resulted from confusion as much as jealousy. When he was young, an author was an authorizer, and Congress, not Jefferson, had authorized the Declaration. Few people had known that Jefferson drafted the document, and even fewer people cared. Now, however, the meaning of authorship was shifting in ways that Adams did not yet grasp. For increasing numbers of Americans, authorship was an individual act of creation and, since the 1790s, Jeffersonian Republicans had told them that Jefferson did more than any other individual to create the Declaration. Adams still thought of him as the Declaration's penman, but they had come to exalt him as its author.
Two recent studies begin to explain this phenomenon. Pauline Maier's American Scripture, the first book-length monograph to examine critically how the Declaration gained its high status, shows that it "was at first forgotten almost entirely" by Americans. Then, for political reasons, Republicans "recalled and celebrated" it, and later elevated it "into something akin to a holy writ."2 Meanwhile, Jay Fliegelman's Declaring Independence situates the Declaration and the literary craftsmanship of its principal draftsman within "eighteenth-century theories and practices of rhetoric." Fliegelman explains that Jefferson, who borrowed ideas and words from previous writers, did not anticipate "the changing nature of authorship-from a view that sees the editorial and authorial functions as versions of one another to one that stresses the primacy and originality of imagination." Taken together, these books represent the most important revision of our...