John [Adams] was actually at center stage on July 3-4 [1776], for he had selected Thomas Jefferson to draft the document and then had single-handedly defended Jefferson’s draft before the congress, which eventually deleted or revised about 20 percent of the text. But once July 4 became the acknowledged date for America’s birth, credit shifted from Adams to Jefferson. This shift annoyed him for the rest of his life. He could claim, with the lion’s share of the evidence on his side, that he had been the most vociferous advocate of American independence in the Continental Congress, consistently at the cutting edge of the radical camp, willing to risk unpopularity by dragging the moderate faction in the congress to a place they did not wish to go. For a man whose primal ambition was to achieve fame, the secular equivalent of immortality, the ascendance of Jefferson’s reputation over his own proved too much to bear. In his old age he asked, “Was there ever a Coup de Theatre that has so great an effect as Jefferson’s penmanship of the Declaration of Independence?” The real business of American independence was a long-term struggle within the Continental Congress that John, more than anyone else, had orchestrated. By focusing exclusively on the Declaration, “Jefferson ran away with the stage effect…and all the glory of it.”
Joseph Ellis, First Family: Abigail and John Adams (via publius-esquire)
