"History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days "
---------Winston S. Churchill

"Freedom is but one generation from extinction."
---------Ronald Wilson Reagan

"About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers."

----------Calvin Coolidge on 150th Anniversaty of thr Declaration of Independence

When the Second Continental Congress met in June of 1776, Americans were already fighting the most awesome military power since the Roman Empire and a powerful British fleet was bearing down on New York.The battles at Lexington and Concord and Bunker's Hill were behind the colonists and a year before in July of 1775 the Continental Congress had previously issued one of the three of most important documents in American History :The Causes and Necessities for Taking Up Arms - HERE. The authors of that document were none other than John Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson and the document was signed by John Hancock as President of the Second Continental Congress and Charles Thomson its secretary.This document began to lay out the grievances and charges against the King that were refined and restated as the reasons for not only taking up arms but also declaring Independence from Great Britain.

In the long history of the British Empire no colony had fought and won a war of independence against Great Britain. However, despite those daunting odds and knowing full well history was not on their side, the delegates decided they finally needed to issue a Declaration of Independency (D of I) as per a resolution of June 7th submitted by Virginian Richard Henry Lee .

Thus the war that began at Lexington and Concord against generic oppression morphed into a War for Independence. On June 12th Thomas Jefferson was designated to draft the Declaration at the suggestion of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Of course, the D of I went through several drafts some of which are preserved at various locations. But Jefferson's original draft does not exist in its entirety although portions of it have been recreated in part from the notes of John Adams. During drafting process which took 22 days there was of course much debate about wording but eventually a "Fair Copy" and the "Final Version" of the Declaration of Independence that we know today emerged late in the afternoon on July 4th, 1776 when twelve of the thirteen colonies reached agreement to declare the new states of the colonies as a free and independent nation. New York was the lone holdout. That very evening President of the Continental Congress John Hancock ordered Philadelphia printer John Dunlap to print broadside copies of The Declaration that was signed by Hancock as President and Charles Thomson as Secretary. Dunlap is thought to have printed 500 Broadsides which were distributed to the members of Congress and throughout the colonies by horsemen. General Washington received his copy in New York where he ordered it read to his troops. A fragment of the copy delivered to Washington is now in The Library of Congress The following link is to an image of the 'Dunlap Broadside.' A copy of the broadside was also given to Timothy Matlack who was an assitant to Secretary Thomson and Matlack, another patriot who put himself in grave danger, used the broadside to engoss what we now know as original The Declaration of Independence that resides in the national Archives.

The Broadsides varied slightly in size but averaged approximately 15 in x 19 in and they were of course printed on chain laid paper. In the case of the broadside the chains for some reason were oriented vertically to the type.They were printed on paper some of which had watermarks

John Dunlap deserves special credit for printing the Declaration because by doing so he committed an act of sedition and could have been hanged as could have all of the signers. Today their are only 25 of these broadsides that are known to exist. The original Declaration of Independence that was signed by John Hancock and Charles Thomson on July 4, 1776 is lost. A Dunlap broadside - unsigned, as it is known, recently sold for $8.14 million, the highest price ever achieved for an object sold at an Internet auction. This copy was discovered in 1989 by a man browsing in a flea market who purchased a painting for four dollars because he was interested in the frame. Concealed in the backing of the frame was an Original Dunlap Broadside of the Declaration of Independence.

The other copies of the Dunlap broadside are dispersed among American and British institutions and private owners:

Of course not only was Dunlap an intrepid individual but so were the 56 men who signed the D of I at the risk of 'their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.' The following is a list of those men often just referred to as 'SIGNERS'. The first, largest, and most famous signature was that of John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress. The youngest signer was Edward Rutledge (age 26) while Benjamin Franklin (age 70) was the oldest. Two future presidents signed: John Adams (second President) and Thomas Jefferson (third President).Here are the names of all the signers:

Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence after they pledged their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor in that document? These men , who are sometimes referred to derisively in the media as 'that group of long dead white male slave owners' , paid for their act in blood and treasure as documented herein. What kind of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well- educated, but they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.It is not surprising then that in actual fact five signers were in fact captured by the British as traitors and they were tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.And here is what happened to some others:Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his Ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.Thomas McKean was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward.Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Ellery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Rutledge, and Middleton.At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr., noted that the British General, Cornwallis, had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt.Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.John Hart was driven from his wife's bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished. So, take a few minutes on occasion and silently thank these patriots. It's not much to ask for the price they paid. Remember: freedom is never free! As Ronald Reagan said, "freedom is but one generation from extinction."

The Declaration is divided into three main sections: a preamble, a list of grievances, and a conclusion. There are some historians that claim that many of the complaints are exaggerated propaganda, but that overall they are an accurate portrayal of royal crimes. The document concludes with a statement on British-American relationships, a formal declaration of America's independence and powers as a sovereign nation, and a pledge by the signers to support the Declaration with their "Lives," "Fortunes," and "sacred Honor."

As Jefferson entered upon the process of drafting the Declration we know now for certain what was in his mind as reveled not only by Causes and Nessities he helped draft but also by a letter Jefferson wrote to an Indian Chief five years after the fact :

"You find us brother, engaged in a war with a powerful nation. Our forefathers were Englishmen, inhabitants of a little island beyond the great water and, being distressed for land they came and settled here. As long as we were young and weak. the English, whom we had left behind, made us carry all our wealth to their country, to enrich them;and, not satisfied with this, they at length began to say we were their slaves, and should do whatever they ordered us. We were now grown up and felt ourselves strong; we knew we were as free as they were, that we came here of our own accordance not at their biddance, and we were determined to be free as long as we should exist. For this reason they made war on us."

----Address to Brother John Baptiste de Coigne. June 1781 (L&B XVI, 172)

During the drafting some of the most intense debate centered around the attribution of inalienable rights. What follows is a an encapsulation of that debate as represented in the drafts.

JEFFERSON 1ST DRAFT- We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal and independent; that from that equal creation they derive in rights inherent and unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

JOHN ADAMS EDIT-In the Adams copy, written, sometime between June 11 and June 28, in his own (J. Adams) handwriting we have the following:
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and independent; that from that equal creation they derive in rights inherent and unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

FINAL ITERATION-Sometime later, but before being submitted to Congress, the above was changed to the following: 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.

Obviously Jefferson gave precedence to establishing the concept of inalienable rights and that thought or concept was revisited over and over during the drafting process until some sensible and wise person(s) asked the fundamental question-do we want man's inalienable rights to be derived from his Creator and thus a power greater than man himself or from government (King) knowing full well that governments and Kings giveth and they can also taketh away?? The Founders finally settled on the belief or philosophy that that the inalienable rights of man are derived from a creator or power greater than any one man and therefore can not be taken away by a government or a King. Everything else concerning the freedom we enjoy today as a result of the Declaration and the United States Constitution came from the idea that our creator endowed us with inalienable right- including the right to life, liberty and the pursuit happiness****. Someone in the gang of 56 signers was pretty smart-- but of course we already know that two and a half centuries later.

[Much ink has been spilled by scholars arguing whether inalienable or unalienable is more correct. Actually Dumas Malone, one of the worlds great Jefferson scholars states in his The Life of Thomas Jefferson that unalieanble was an inadvertent misspelling in the Declaration].

America's Founding Fathers wanted the Declaration to establish a novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages, when they undertook the subsequent task of writing the United States Constitution. The reason it was a new order can be found in the great ends set out in the Declaration of Independence-the foundation upon which the Constitution would be built. The proposition that "all men are created equal" was a wholly new basis for legitimate government in the history of man; likewise, to pronounce certain "rights" "inalienable," such as those to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," meant that an objective standard of justice was to forever guide our experiment in self-government. Equality, especially, was the foundation for legitimate government in that it implied there can be no claim to legitimate rule by any man over his fellow men if all are equal in their rights. It meant, once again, that man could not be governed unless he consented to be governed. Obtaining that consent is what the electoral process is all about. ***What makes this whole undertaking so remarkable is the fact that there was nothing else like it anywhere in the world. Only five percent of te men in England had any vote and there was no governing concept of equality in England, France, Germany or Russia or anywhere else at that time.

Therefore these founding principles implied a certain kind of relationship between rulers and the ruled, thus providing the justification for the complaints against the King of England, the basis for the delayed fight over slavery, and the engine for that vibrant American tradition of a perpetual debate about justice under the law. In other words, it is the founding principles articulated in the Declaration that served, and continue to serve as, in the words of Thomas Paine, "an expression of the American mind." These founding principles are what defines American 'exceptionalism.'

After the final version of the D of I was agreed upon there was the first public announcement of the existence of the D of I and that announcement or reading of the Declaration was captured in a few local papers of which very few copies remain today. What is seldom mentioned mentioned relative to this reading on July 8th is that it was only the second or third time that the Liberty Bell had been rung****. The insciption on the Liberty Bell is 'Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof' from Leviticus . XXV, X.

See very first paragraph from one of the newspapers of July 9th as shown:

The Declaration of Independence was first published in full outside North America by the Belfast Newsletter on the 23rd of August, 1776. A copy of the document was being transported to London via ship when bad weather forced the vessel into port at Derry. The document was then carried on horseback to Belfast for the continuation of its voyage to England, where upon a copy was made for the Belfast newspaper. Obviously this turn of events gave Parliament a heads up as to what those rascals in the colonies were really up to.

The original Declaration was not cared for properly in that is was left hanging in direct sunlight in the Library of Congress and it was noted that its condition was obviously deteriorating. By 1820, growing concern about the condition of the original Declaration by the surviving Signers of The Declaration of Independence and other leaders resulted in an Act of Congress to reproduce a facsimile of the original. Charged with heading the project, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned engraver William J. Stone of Washington to reproduce the Declaration by engraving a copperplate facsimile from the original utilizing a wet-ink transfer process during which the original Declaration was moistened and ink was lifted directly from it and transferred to a clean copperplate, which was then engraved, creating a perfect copy of the original document.

Stone completed the task of engraving the copper plate in 1823. However the original document was almost destroyed during the ink transfer process thus making the Stone copperplate itself exceedingly valuable as the only accurate replica of the original D of I (Recently our D of I has undergone extensive and painstaking restoration). The first time Stone used his engraved plate he printed 201 copies on the same type of vellum parchment as the original. Approximately 31 of these "vellum Stone D of I's" are known to have survived**, 19 of which are in museums. The first few copies of vellum replica was distinguished from the original document by the fact that "Engraved by W. J. Stone for the Department of State, by order" was printed in the upper left hand corner and "of J. Q. Adams, Sec. of State July 4th 1823." was printed in the upper right hand corner. Later printings on vellum did not have the aforementioned printing on them. The details of how the vellum iteration was distributed are below.*** . In addition to the vellum copies, Stone also printed an unknown number of additional copies on paper, possibly as proofs or for his personal use. The exact number of these paper copies is unknown, but they appear to have had a much more limited run than the official vellum version. Three of these paper Stones have appeared at auction in the last decade the most recent of which was auctioned at Swann's Galleries in 2008 (Sale 2148 Lot 141).

The Stone copperplate was then placed in storage. Twenty years later, in 1843, Peter Force was commissioned by Congress to print a series of books that became known as the American Archives. The purpose of the nine-volume set was to create and preserve copies of the founding documents of the United States. Accordingly, the Stone engraving plate was taken from storage and used once again to produce copies of the D of I on rice (wove) paper for Volume I of the Fifth Series of the Archives (the seventh volume out of the nine).Originally it was planned to print 1500 copies of the rice paper iteration but the project ran out of funding and it is estimated that far less than 1000 copies were done.

Both the rice paper and vellum copies are distinguishable from the original document by an engraving in the lower left corner "W.J. Stone S.C. Washn" After printing the copies of the D of I on rice paper the Stone plate was again retired and is now displayed at the National Archives.

The Stone rice paper Declaration, measures 26 in x 29 in, and usually shows normal folds with faint shadowing or ink transfer from having been inserted in the book so some of the folds with ink on them were in apposition to one another or to sections of paper free of printing.. This type of ink transfer , the makers mark, the folds, the wove paper and the dimensions serve to authenticate the document. In order to preserve these delicate documents it is better that they be floated in an archival frame. If the documents are acquired folded , they should be laid flat with no pressure on them for several weeks prior to framing to let the paper 'relax.'. If they are pressed down with weight the paper may crack along the lines of fold. We or other dealers or conservators can advise a client on how to frame this document.
In the opinion of The History Buff, Inc. this is one of the scarcest and most worthwhile American historical collectibles available today and it is the cornerstone of any Americana collection. It is as close as a citizen will ever come to owning one of America's founding documents. The Declaration of Independence along with the United States Constitution and Magna Carta are certainly the three most important political documents in the history of man. There has been a steady appreciation of the value of the Stones over the past 5 years. One of the six copies of the Magna Carta sold for over 21 million dollars recently. The last sale of a Dunlap Broadside brought over 8 million.

There have been numerous other printings or engravings of the D of I that have appeared for various commercial or commemorative purposes but their importance pales when compared to the Stone versions of this important founding document. For one reason, none of these representations were made from the original engrossed declaration as were the Stones. An early and scarce reproduction [6th broadside reproduction according to John Bidwell's list] of the founding document printed in the 1820's which honored the simple style of the original Declaration of Independence, was printed by Hartford engraver, calligrapher, and author, Eleazer Huntington. The first reproduction was printed by Benjamin Owen Tyler in 1818. who recreated the exact signatures of the signers as they appeared on the original. Other broadside printings were issued shortly thereafter, each containing ornamental borders or illustrations. Huntington reverted to Tyler's example by creating a calligraphic facsimile of the Declaration without the ornamentation and illustrations that had been added by others, returning the document to the simple title and text of the original, and providing the signatures of the signers in exact facsimile.

Here are links to images of engraved or Printed Declarations of Independence that appeared in the early 1800's based on the name of the artist or printer:John Binnis, Benjamin Owen Tyler, John Trumbull

**On May 26, 1824, a resolution by the Senate and House of Representatives provided: "That two hundred copies of the Declaration, now in the Department of State, be distributed in the manner following: two copies to each of the surviving Signers of the Declaration of Independence (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Carroll of Carrollton); two copies to the President of the United States (Monroe); two copies to the Vice-President of the United States (Thompkins); two copies to the late President, Mr. Madison; two copies to the Marquis de Lafayette, twenty copies for the two houses of Congress; twelve copies for the different departments of the Government (State, Treasury, Justice, Navy, War and Postmaster); two copies for the President's House; two copies for the Supreme Court room, one copy to each of the Governors of the States; and one to each of the Governors of the Territories of the United States; and one copy to the Council of each Territory; and the remaining copies to the different Universities and Colleges of the United.

***The vellum copy of the D of I seldom comes on the market and they are increasingly hard to find. One sold recently for in excess of $400,000. The rice paper D of I's are of course more available but, because of the fragile nature of rice paper, condition is important in determining value. Almost every rice paper copy of the D of I was folded at one time. However, on occasion, an unfolded one surfaces on the market. They sell for roughly twice the price of the folded version.The importance of the Stone Declarations both on vellum and on rice paper is attested to by the fact that examples are found in many of the Presidential Libraries and other institutions devoted to historical preservation.

**** There is debate about how many times the Liberty Bell had been rung prior to July 8th, 1776. It has been alleged it was alkso rung to announce the convening of the First Continental Congress and after the battle of Lexington and Concord but some historians argue the latter is not true.

Sotheby's. The First Printing of The Declaration of Independence: The John Dunlap Broadside. Sale Brochure, May 31, 1993

William R. Coleman, "Counting the Stones--A Census of the Stone Facsimiles of the Declaration of Independence," Manuscripts XLIII:2 (Spring 1991), 97-105.(VERY RARE PUBLICATION).

The John Dunlap Broadside: The First Printing of the Declaration of Independence.Lib of Congress, 1976. Hard Cover.

Philip F. Detweiler, "The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence," 564 AND John Bidwell, "American History in Image and Text," 265. Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Vintage Books, 1922), 226.

The Story of the Declaration of Independence by Dumas Malone, et al.Oxford University Press, 1954.

Jefferson and His Time: Volume I- Jefferson The Virginian by Dumas Malone.Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1948.

The Declaration of Independence: A Global Perspective by David Armitage. Harvard University Press.2007

American History in Images and Text by John Bidwell. Proc. of the Amer. Antiquarian Society. Vol. 98, Part 2. October 1998.