The Document That Started It All — and the 6 Civics Questions It Generates

You're studying for one of the most important tests of your life — a test that will help determine whether you become a citizen of this country. And the USCIS officer will almost certainly ask you about a document written 250 years ago by people who were trying to do something similar: declare who they were and what they believed.

There's something fitting about that. You're joining a country that was founded on a declaration of values. The civics test asks whether you know those values. Here's everything the test covers — and enough context to make the answers actually stick.

The Short Answer: What the USCIS Test Expects

The Declaration of Independence appears in the "Colonial Period and Independence" section of the USCIS 2025 civics test (Questions 58–70). Six questions draw directly from it. You don't need to have read the whole document — but you do need to know these answers cold.

The 6 Declaration Questions

And the two most directly Declaration-focused questions:

What the Declaration Actually Says

Most people know the most famous line: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Three rights. All declared "unalienable" — meaning they can't be taken away or given up. That's the phrase behind Question 68. Any two of the three is an accepted answer.

The rest of the document is a list of grievances against King George III — 27 specific complaints about how British rule had violated colonial rights. It was essentially a legal brief for independence, written for a world audience. Thomas Jefferson drafted it; the Continental Congress revised it and adopted it on July 4, 1776.

The original document is held at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. You can view it in person. That's worth knowing — you'll be a citizen of the country that preserves it.

The Date That Always Gets Asked

July 4, 1776. The USCIS test asks about it in several ways — through questions about Independence Day and about when the colonies declared independence. The year 1776 appears repeatedly across the civics test. Know it cold.

Who Wrote It — and Who the Test Credits

Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft. John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were on the five-person drafting committee. The full Continental Congress revised it over several days before adoption.

For the USCIS test, when asked who wrote the Declaration of Independence, the accepted answer is Thomas Jefferson. Franklin and Adams are credited elsewhere — Franklin for his diplomatic work and his role at the Constitutional Convention, Adams as one of the authors of the Federalist Papers (along with Madison and Hamilton/Jay).

Jefferson also later served as the third President of the United States — a fact that appears separately in the Presidents section of the test.

How the Declaration Connects to Other Civics Questions

The Declaration doesn't exist in isolation on the test. It connects to:

• The Constitution (1787): Written 11 years after the Declaration. The Declaration stated the ideals; the Constitution created the system to govern by them. Our three branches explainer covers how that system works.
• The Bill of Rights (1791): Added the first 10 amendments to the Constitution — the specific rights protections the Declaration had promised in principle. Covered in our Bill of Rights guide.
• The Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jay — all appear on the test in various questions.

For the full American history section of the test, our complete American history Q&A guide covers all 30 history questions with official answers.

A Study Tip for This Section

The Colonial Period questions (Q58–Q70) have a lot of dates and names. The trick isn't to memorize them in order — it's to understand the timeline: colonists came for freedom → 13 colonies → tensions with Britain → Declaration 1776 → Constitution 1787 → Bill of Rights 1791. Once that sequence is in your head, the individual questions are much easier to anchor.

iCivics has free interactive resources on the founding era that work well alongside text-based study — short games and timelines that make the sequence stick.

Reading about the Declaration and recalling it out loud under pressure are two different skills. The USCIS officer will ask you these questions in a real conversation — not in a multiple-choice format you can scan. FutureCitizen.us puts you in that conversation: a free AI officer who asks the real questions, one at a time, and waits for your spoken answer. Practice that at futurecitizen.us before your appointment.