Why did Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence?

The question deserves a candid answer, and I can speak to it from my own record. The immediate cause was practical and political. The Virginia delegates moved in Congress, as I recorded in my notes on the proceedings, that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States”. A committee was formed to draft the declaration that would announce and justify that resolution — John Adams, Dr. Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and myself. The task fell to me, and I sat down to write it between the eleventh and twenty-eighth of June, 1776. But the deeper reason was philosophical. I believed — and the opening of the Declaration states it plainly — “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent_and inalienable rights; that among these — cemain are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness”. These were not merely convenient arguments for independence; they were convictions I drew from the Enlightenment principles that had shaped my thinking — the sanctity of the individual, the idea that just government rests only on the consent of the governed. The Declaration was, at bottom, an act of moral reasoning addressed to the world. As I wrote in its closing lines, we pledged “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” — and we knew full well the price of failure.