The Continental Congress had decided on June 10 to form a committee to draft a declaration of independence in case the Lee resolution should pass.

On June 11, Congress appoints a Committee of Five to draft a Declaration of Independence.

They are John Adams, representative of Massachusetts; Thomas Jefferson, representative of Virginia; Benjamin Franklin, representative of Pennsylvania; Robert Livingston, representative of New York; and Roger Sherman, representative of Connecticut, who will become the only person to sign all four of the US state papers: the Continental Association, the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution.

Adams and Jefferson will become the second and third President of the United States, respectively; Franklin, known as one of the most famous of the Founding Fathers, will become the first United States Minister to France.

That same day, Congress decides to establish two other committees to develop the resolution's last two parts.

The following day, another committee of five (John Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Benjamin Harrison V, and Robert Morris) is established to prepare a plan of treaties to be proposed to foreign powers; a third committee is created, consisting of one member from each colony, to prepare a draft of a constitution for confederation of the states.

It is certain that the first Committee of Five, after discussing the general outline that the document should follow, had decided that Jefferson would write the first draft.

With Congress's busy schedule, Jefferson has had limited time to write the draft over the ensuing seventeen days.

He has consulted with the others on the committee, who review the draft and make extensive changes.

Jefferson now produces another copy incorporating these alterations.

Among the changes is the simplification of the phrase Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, which Jefferson had phrased "preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness".

This is a return to wording closer to John Locke's original description of private property as a natural right, in the phrase "life, liberty, and estate".

On June 28, 1776, the committee presents this copy to the "Committee of the Whole" Congress, which is commemorated by one of the most famous paintings in US history (at right).

The title of the document is "A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled".

John Trumbull's Declaration of Independence is a 12-by-18-foot (3.7 by 5.5 m) oil-on-canvas painting in the United States Capitol Rotunda that depicts the presentation of the draft of the Declaration of Independence to Congress.

It is based on a much smaller version of the same scene, presently held by the Yale University Art Gallery.

Trumbull will paint many of the figures in the picture from life, and will visit Independence Hall to depict the chamber where the Second Continental Congress met.

The oil-on-canvas work will be commissioned in 1817, purchased in 1819, and placed in the rotunda in 1826.

Oliver Ellsworth had joined the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in May 1787 as a delegate from Connecticut along with Roger Sherman and William Samuel Johnson.

More than half of the fifty-five delegates are lawyers, eight of whom, including both Ellsworth and Sherman, have previous experience as judges conversant with legal discourse. 

Ellsworth takes an active part in the proceedings beginning on June 20, when he proposes the use of the name the United States to identify the government under the authority of the Constitution.

The words "United States" had already been used in the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation as well as Thomas Paine's The American Crisis.

It is Ellsworth's proposal to retain the earlier wording to sustain the emphasis on a federation rather than a single national entity.

Three weeks earlier, on May 30, 1787, Edmund Randolph of Virginia had moved to create a "national government" consisting of a supreme legislative, an executive and a judiciary.

Ellsworth accepts Randolph's notion of a threefold division, but moves to strike the phrase "national government."

From this day forward the "United States" is the official title used in the Convention to designate the government, and this usage will remain in effect ever since.

The complete name, "the United States of America," had already been featured by Paine, and its inclusion in the Constitution is the work of Gouverneur Morris when he makes the final editorial changes in the Constitution.

After six weeks of turmoil, North Carolina switches its vote to equal representation per state and Massachusetts abstains, and a compromise is reached, being called the "Great Compromise."

In the "Great Compromise," every state is given equal representation, previously known as the New Jersey Plan, in one house of Congress, and proportional representation, known before as the Virginia Plan, in the other.

Because it is considered more responsive to majority sentiment, the House of Representatives is given the power to originate all legislation dealing with the federal budget and revenues/taxation, per the Origination Clause.

Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, both of the Connecticut delegation, have created a compromise that, in a sense, blends the Virginia (large-state) and New Jersey (small-state) proposals regarding congressional apportionment.

What is ultimately included in the constitution is a modified form of this plan, partly because the larger states disliked the original.

In committee, Benjamin Franklin had modified Sherman's proposal to make it more acceptable to the larger states.

He had added the requirement that revenue bills originate in the house.

Senate representation is explicitly protected in Article Five of the United States Constitution:

...no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

This agreement allows deliberations to continue, and thus leads to the Three-Fifths Compromise, which will further complicate the issue of popular representation in the House.

The Three-Fifths Compromise proposed by delegates James Wilson and Roger Sherman is a compromise reached between delegates from southern states and those from northern states during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention.

The debate is over whether, and if so, how, slaves will be counted when determining a state's total population for legislative representation and taxing purposes.

The issue is important, as this population number will then be used to determine the number of seats that the state will have in the United States House of Representatives for the next ten years.

The effect is to give the southern states a third more seats in Congress and a third more electoral votes than if slaves had been ignored, but fewer than if slaves and free persons had been counted equally, allowing the slaveholder interests to largely dominate the government of the United States until the Civil War.

The Convention had unanimously accepted the principle that representation in the House of Representatives will be in proportion to the relative state populations.

However, since slaves cannot vote, white leaders in slave states would thus have the benefit of increased representation in the House and the Electoral College.

Delegates opposed to slavery propose that only free inhabitants of each state be counted for apportionment purposes, while delegates supportive of slavery, on the other hand, oppose the proposal, wanting slaves to count in their actual numbers.

The compromise that is finally agreed upon—of counting "all other persons" as only three-fifths of their actual numbers—reduces the representation of the slave states relative to the original proposals, but improves it over the Northern position.

An inducement for slave states to accept the Compromise is its tie to taxation in the same ratio, so that the burden of taxation on the slave states is also reduced.

The Three-Fifths Compromise is found in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution, which reads:

    Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

The three-fifths ratio had originated with a 1783 amendment proposed to the Articles of Confederation.

The amendment was to have changed the basis for determining the wealth of each state, and hence its tax obligations, from real estate to population, as a measure of ability to produce wealth.

The proposal by a committee of the Congress had suggested that taxes "shall be supplied by the several colonies in proportion to the number of inhabitants of every age, sex, and quality, except Indians not paying taxes".

The South had immediately objected to this formula since it would include slaves, who are viewed primarily as property, in calculating the amount of taxes to be paid.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his notes on the debates, the southern states would be taxed "according to their numbers and their wealth conjunctly, while the northern would be taxed on numbers only".

After proposed compromises of one-half by Benjamin Harrison of Virginia and three-fourths by several New Englanders failed to gain sufficient support, Congress had finally settled on the three-fifths ratio proposed by James Madison, but this amendment ultimately failed, falling two states short of the unanimous approval required for amending the Articles of Confederation (only New Hampshire and New York were opposed).

A contentious issue at the 1787 Constitutional Convention is whether slaves will be counted as part of the population in determining representation of the states in the Congress or will instead be considered property and, as such, not be considered for purposes of representation.

Delegates from states with a large population of slaves argue that slaves should be considered persons in determining representation, but as property if the new government were to levy taxes on the states on the basis of population.

Delegates from states where slavery has become rare argue that slaves should be included in taxation, but not in determining representation.

The proposed ratio is, however, a ready solution to the impasse that arises during the Constitutional Convention.

In this situation, the alignment of the contending forces is the reverse of what had obtained under the Articles of Confederation.

In amending the Articles, the North wants slaves to count for more than the South does because the objective is to determine taxes paid by the states to the federal government.

The eleven-member committee makes some significant changes to Madison's nine proposed amendments, including eliminating most of his preamble and adding the phrase "freedom of speech, and of the press".

The House debates the amendments for eleven days.

Roger Sherman of Connecticut persuades the House to place the amendments at the Constitution's end so that the document will "remain inviolate", rather than adding them throughout, as Madison has proposed.

The amendments, revised and condensed from twenty to seventeen, are approved and forwarded to the Senate on August 24, 1789.