America 250: 7 important dates for the Declaration of Independence
3. Committee of Five appointed — June 11, 1776
In response to the Lee resolution, the Continental Congress appointed five individuals to a committee that would draft a declaration reflecting the call for independence from Britain.
Known as the Committee of Five, the members included John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, Robert R. Livingston of New York and Roger Sherman of Connecticut.
“Each of them except Franklin served on other committees during the period in which they prepared the declaration,” explained the Thomas Jefferson Papers project at Princeton University.
“Committee work was done outside the regular sessions of Congress, which were generally held every day of the week except Sunday. ‘We were all in haste,’ Adams recalled in a letter to Timothy Pickering in 1823, and ‘Congress was impatient.’”
