New Library of Congress exhibit features rare draft of Declaration of Independence: “You can see them changing words throughout”

Washington — They are words etched into America’s conscience: “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Visitors to the Library of Congress can rediscover those foundational principles in a rare, original draft of the Declaration of Independence written by President Thomas Jefferson. It’s on display in a new exhibit titled “The Declaration’s Promise” that debuted this month for America’s semiquincentennial and will continue through July 2027.

“This is Jefferson’s fully-realized draft,” Ryan Reft, lead curator for the exhibit, told CBS News. “You can see them changing words throughout and kind of distilling the initial draft into the draft that we know today.” 

The document contains edits from fellow Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, like using the word “citizens” instead of “subjects.”
 
“They were breaking from a monarchy and they were breaking from the idea of kinship through ethnicity, creating a country based on this critical idea established in the Declaration that was new and that we were not subject to anyone,” Reft explained. “We were subject to each other. We were citizens.” 

And there were other changes, according to historian Kevin Butterfield, acting chief of the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress.

“Initially, Thomas Jefferson had said, ‘We hold these rights to be sacred and undeniable.’ And Ben Franklin said, no, actually, maybe we should say ‘self-evident,'” Butterfield said.

But it was the phrase “all men are created equal” that took time to evolve.

“The ‘all men are created’ probably only applied to White men,” Reft said. “It ignored women and enslaved folks, Native Americans and others. But that’s the great thing about the Declaration — even in its weaknesses there is strength — the sense that the language he created, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, consent of the governed, enabled those folks who were unequal at the time to get to judge for themselves what equality was.”

The exhibit showcases the nation’s evolution through other items, like President Abraham Lincoln’s draft of the Gettysburg Address during the Civil War.

“He (Lincoln) says, well, why are we here? Why did we fight this war? And he comes down to one basic idea, equality,” Reft told CBS News.

The collection also features a Declaration of Rights read by Susan B. Anthony in support of women’s suffrage, as well as speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis during the Civil Rights Movement.

“These are moments to kind of look back and see where we are, and see where we should be,” Reft said.