After Jefferson incorporated the committee's revisions into a second draft. The committee edited that draft and presented a "fair copy" of this document to Congress, which made more revisions of its own. After printing the document eventually approved by Congress, the printer, Dunlap, probably threw that draft away. (It makes one wonder what the printer was thinking. "Oh, this is just a draft of some nonimportant paper that these guys are writing up. I'm sure they have another one floating around.")
Apparently Dunlap was right, if he actually did think this. Jefferson saved the second draft, that indicated some revisions by Ben Franklin and Adams in their own handwriting, and the changest that Congress made later. This is the document now on display. Jefferson also made six annotated longhand copies of the official congressional draft explaining the ways in which his draft had been "mutilated." (The editor burned by a red pen!) Four of these six survive, at the Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, New York Public Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Maier also explains how it is not feasible to look at their mindset then and compare it to today, regarding the statement "all men (not women or blacks) are created equal."...
Women did not have rights and slaves were an "anomaly" which drafters knew about but decided not to address. In fact, it took Abraham Lincoln, author of the Emancipation Proclamation, to reinterpret the Declaration of Independence and make it stand for all people.
So, actually it turns out that the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence were human after all. They could make mistakes and they could write and rewrite like all authors. Who knows how many ripped up or balled wads of paper were thrown away before the document was ready to go the printer and what was changed from those early drafts? In some respects it is a pleasure to know that this was a "design by committee." It shows how even way back then, Americans knew that no one person should do all the work and take all the credit for him/herself.
