  It has been a long-standing problem how to relate Chern-Simons theory to the
quantum groups. In this paper we recover the classical $r$-matrix directly from
a 3-dimensional Chern-Simons theory with boundary conditions, thus creating a
direct link to the quantum groups. It is known that the Jones polynomials can
be constructed using an $R$-matrix. We show how these constructions can be seen
to arise directly from 3-dimensional Chern-Simons theory.
