Composing America (Blog Week 8)

I was kind of stunned after reading the articles that Thomas Starr and James Munves wrote. I never have heard much of this stuff about the Declaration of Independence. I knew who the people were that composed the document, but I didn't know that it was so heavily edited by Congress. If Congress knew they were going to edit it anyway why didn't they just write and save those 5 men their time? It just seems kind of dumb how Congress did that and it made Jefferson very angry because they took out some stuff that he thought was important that's why he wrote the stuff he did. I thought it was kind of cool how in two weeks of having the declaration printed there were only 24 copies of it actually made. I think today there would be millions of copies made within a day. Just shows how far we have come along in printing. I didn't know that Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" influenced Congress that summer in 1776, very interesting. I also like how Jefferson sent copies of his original text to some of his friends in Virginia, just to show how much Congress edited and revised the declaration. I liked how Edmund Pendleton said that Congress changed it "much for the worse." It seems kind of like he was foreshadowing bad times for our country. Was interesting read this week!