A rare copy of the United States' Declaration of Independence has been discovered in a small records office in South East England.
Researchers constructing a database of every known copy of the historical document uncovered the document in an archive in the cathedral city of Chichester, West Sussex. The original, drafted by third US President Thomas Jefferson, was signed on 4 July 1776 in Philadelphia, asserting the independence of the thirteen American colonies which were then at war with Great Britain.
While a limited number of copies were made at the time, the original is considered to be the one housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
In August 2015, Emily Sneff, a researcher at the Declaration Resources Project found a catalogue listing reading: "Manuscript copy, on parchment, of the Declaration in Congress of the thirteen United States of America".
Previously, numerous mentions of the document had been found that turned out to be 19th-century reproductions, so Sneff was sceptical. After obtaining images of the document from the West Sussex Record Office, however, she noted several features that pointed to its authenticity.
"When I looked at it closely, I started to see details, like names that weren't in the right order - John Hancock isn't listed first, there's a mark at the top that looks like an erasure, the text has very little punctuation in it, and it's in a handwriting I hadn't seen before," Sneff said in the Harvard Gazette.
John Hancock is well known for his large and flamboyant signature on the original document, which has even led to his name being used as a synonym for a signature.
Furthermore, the document from Chichester was written on parchment; another sign of its authenticity, and it is the only known copy where the 56 signatures are not grouped by state.
The so-called Sussex Declaration is thought to have been produced around ten years after the original and, while it's an important artefact in its own right, it also sheds light on the political upheaval of the time.
“It illuminates in one stroke how the Federalists and anti-Federalists debated the question of whether the new republic was founded on the authority of a single, united sovereign people or on the authority of thirteen separate state governments," Danielle Allen, Harvard professor and Director of the Declaration Resources Project told WIRED.
"The Federalists were making the first argument and this document appears to have been produced to support their case. It is fascinating to learn more about how the Federalists, and James Wilson in particular, drew the Declaration of Independence into the work of advocating for a national Bank, a Constitutional Convention, and a stronger central government.
“Up until now, only one large format ceremonial parchment manuscript was known to exist. That one is in the National Archives and was produced in 1776. This one was produced a decade later, with the signed parchment as its source, as part of the fight between Federalists and Anti-Federalists about whether the new republic was founded on the authority of a single, united sovereign people or on the authority of thirteen separate state governments. It illuminates the politics of the 1780s in a flash.”
The researchers said they will continue to investigate how the document made its way across the sea from the U.S. to Sussex. They are also working with the West Sussex Record Office, the British Library and the U.S. Library of Congress to carry out hyper-spectral imaging and various other tests to try and read some text that appears to have been scratched away at the top of the Declaration.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
