Episode Details

In July of 1776, the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia to do the thing there was no taking back: to declare, in writing, that the thirteen colonies were free of their king. This is the story of how that document was actually made — Richard Henry Lee’s resolution, the five-man committee, and the seventeen days a 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson spent at a small writing desk composing the country’s defining sentence: that all men are created equal.

It is also the story of what the document cost and what it left out — the furious anti-slavery passage Jefferson wrote and Congress struck to hold the South; the line about equality standing atop a document a third of whose signers owned human beings; and John Dickinson, the most celebrated patriot in America, who rose in a thunderstorm to warn that his colleagues were about to “brave the storm in a skiff made of paper,” refused to sign the Declaration — and then took up a musket and marched off to fight for the country anyway.