Quin Hillyer
The American Spectator
July 1, 2011
As much as the American book-buying public has shown deep interest in the superstars of the nation’s founding period, too little attention has been paid to some of the other legislative workhorses and statesmen of the period, and too few lessons thus learned from their examples. As we celebrate Independence Day on Monday, we should move beyond the famous Jefferson-Adams-Franklin troika, in order to marvel at the great decades of public service of the two other members of the committee charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence.
Those two were Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert R. Livingston of New York — and they were no mere window-dressing on the committee, much less in public life.
First, consider a little background. The Declaration did not merely spring like mental lightning from the fertile mind of Jefferson (although his genius came through in the document’s particular eloquence), but rather represented what Jefferson himself rightly described as “an expression of the American mind.” The impressively researched 1997 American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, by Pauline Maier, shows just how widespread throughout the colonies were the ideas and sentiments given voice in the Declaration. At least 90 townships, county organizations, and state legislatures alike, all across the land, had passed similar petitions or declarations in the months immediately preceding the great act of the Continental Congress.
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