Excerpt from State of New Hampshire Manual for the General Court The Declaration of Independence is generally re garded as one of the most famous documents in the history of the world. On June 10, 1776, the Conti neutal Congress appointed a' committee, consisting of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston to draft a Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote out a rough draft of the Declara tion, which was carefully revised by the committee and presented to Congress for adoption. After some further slight revisions by that body, it was adopted on July 4, 1776, at Philadelphia. The parchment with the original signatures was deposited with the Department of State when the government was organized in 1789. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.