The Source Manuscript

When most Americans picture the Declaration of Independence, they picture the elegantly engrossed parchment now displayed at the National Archives — the broad sheet of cursive bearing John Hancock's oversized signature. That document, however, was not the copy John Dunlap worked from. It was prepared weeks later and is, in fact, a transcript of the Dunlap Broadside rather than the source for it. The manuscript Dunlap actually used has been lost to history. The most likely scenario is that, once Congress approved the final wording on the afternoon of July 4, a "true copy" of the agreed text was hastily written out — probably by the secretary of Congress, Charles Thomson, or by a clerk working at his direction — and rushed across Philadelphia to Dunlap's shop to serve as the printer's exemplar. Because the broadside had to be ready by morning, it is almost certain that Dunlap cut this manuscript into multiple pieces, allowing several compositors to set type simultaneously from different sections of the text. Once the first printed sheets had been pulled and approved by the Committee of Five — Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Sherman, and Livingston — the marked-up, dismembered manuscript was of no further use to anyone and was almost certainly swept out with the day's trash, its purpose served and its historical significance unappreciated. To re-enact the printing faithfully, the Colonial Heritage Foundation's calligraphy team produced a reasonable facsimile of that vanished document: a hand-lettered "true copy" of the Declaration's text, written in a period-appropriate hand on handmade paper, prepared so that our compositors can work from the same kind of source material — and, if the night demands it, cut it into pieces — exactly as Dunlap's printers did in July of 1776.