maxims of government,to its relentless accumulation of charges against George III, to its elegiac denunciation of the British people, to its heroic closing sentence, it sustains an almost perfect synthesis of style, form, and content. Its solemn and dignified tone, its graceful and unhurried cadence, its symmetry, energy, and confidence, its combination of logical structure and dramatic appeal, its adroit use of nuance and implication all contribute to its rhetorical power. And all help to explain why the Declaration remains one of the handful of American political documents that, in addition to meeting the immediate needs of the moment, continues to enjoy a lustrous literary reputation.

As Garry Wills demonstrates in Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of independence (1978), there are two Declarations of Independence the version drafted by Thomas Jefferson and that revised and adopted on July 4, 1776, by the Continental Congress sitting as a committee of the whole. Altogether Congress deleted 630 words from Jefferson's draft and added 146, producing a final text of 1,322 words (excluding the title). Although Jefferson complained that Congress "mangled" his manuscript and altered it "much for the worse," the judgment of posterity, stated well by Becker, is that "Congress left the Declaration better than it found it". In any event, for better or worse, it was Congress's text that presented America's case to the world, and it is that text with which we are concerned in this report.