For two centuries, historians credited Benjamin Franklin with the Declaration of Independence's most famous edit, changing Jefferson's "sacred and undeniable" to "self evident." Constitutional scholar Bill Norton tells Jenny Beth Martin why that story does not hold up: university handwriting research shows the change is in Jefferson's own hand, and no written evidence ties Franklin to the word at all. Even HBO's John Adams series staged the Franklin version. Norton also reveals the edit that cuts the other way: the iconic phrase "endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights" was not Jefferson's. It came out of Congress, which took Jefferson's awkward draft language and packed the entire American theory of rights into one line. As Norton puts it, things that come out of committee are not always that great, but this one was. It is a story about evidence over tradition, and about why the Declaration of Independence belongs to more than one man and to the whole American founding. Norton's book Behind the Declaration of Independence, which walks through every one of these principles, releases in the next few weeks.
Watch Bill Norton's free constitutional and founding principles training at teapartypatriots.org/1776. Find full episodes of The Jenny Beth Show at jennybethshow.com and learn more at teapartypatriots.org.
00:00 — The Book Behind the Declaration
00:19 — The Congressional Edits to Jefferson's Draft
01:07 — 'Endowed by Our Creator': Congress's Phrase
01:34 — 'Self Evident': The Franklin Attribution
03:15 — The Handwriting Evidence Says Jefferson
04:50 — Even HBO Told the Franklin Version
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