<P> The Founding Fathers of the United States were those individuals of the Thirteen Colonies in North America who led the American Revolution against the authority of the British Crown in word and deed and contributed to the establishment of the United States of America . </P> <P> Historian Richard B. Morris in 1973 identified the following seven figures as the key Founding Fathers: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington . Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin were members of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence . Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were authors of The Federalist Papers, advocating ratification of the Constitution . The constitutions drafted by Jay and Adams for their respective states of New York (1777) and Massachusetts (1780) were heavily relied upon when creating language for the US Constitution Jay, Adams and Franklin negotiated the Treaty of Paris (1783) that would end the American Revolutionary War . Washington was Commander - in - Chief of the Continental Army and was President of the Constitutional Convention . Washington, Jay and Franklin are considered the Founding Fathers of U.S. Intelligence by the CIA . All held additional important roles in the early government of the United States, with Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison serving as President . Jay was the nation's first Chief Justice . Four of these seven - Washington, Jay, Hamilton and Madison - were not signers of the Declaration of Independence . </P> <P> The term Founding Fathers is sometimes used to refer to the Signers of the embossed version of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 . It is not to be confused with the term Framers; the Framers are defined by the National Archives as those 55 individuals who were appointed to be delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and took part in drafting the proposed Constitution of the United States . Of the 55 Framers, only 39 were signers of the Constitution . Two further groupings of Founding Fathers include: 1) those who signed the Continental Association, a trade ban and one of the colonists' first collective volleys protesting British control and the Intolerable Acts in 1774 or 2) those who signed the Articles of Confederation, the first U.S. constitutional document . </P>

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