US Independence Day Explained.

Many Americans are familiar with the the date July 4, 1776 as the date the American colonies declared independence from the British empire But most may also know that the constitution was not signed on July 4. Most the signers of the Declaration of Independence did so on August 2nd, 1776, not July 4.   In fact, nobody signed it on the 4th.  This is contradictory to Thomas Jefferson’s, John Adams’, and Benjamin Franklin’s account of events.  However, as you’ll see shortly, their accounts have been shown to have been misremembered.  Incidentally, this is not the only time this has been shown to be the case with their account of events during this time.  Of course, this period would have been quite a whirlwind, so one can understand their misremembering.

In any event, the public congressional record of events actually back Jefferson’s, Adams’, and Franklin’s story.  The problem is that the Secret Journals of Congress, that were eventually made public in 1821, do not.  They contain an entry stating, on August 2: “The declaration of independence being engrossed & compared at the table was signed by the Members.”  Now if this was the only evidence, one might lean towards a typo in the journal and believing the above three individuals.  However, one of the other signers of the declaration, Thomas McKean, denied the July 4 signing date and backed it up by illustrating a glaring flaw in Jefferson’s, Adams’, & Franklin’s argument.  Namely, that most of the signers were not members of congress on July 4 & thus wouldn’t have been there to sign it. As McKean said in 1796: “No person signed it on that day nor for many days after.”

Further evidence comes from the interesting fact that the parchment version of the Declaration of Independence that is on display and kept in the United States National Archives wasn’t actually written until July 19th; this being a copy of the approved text that was announced to the world on July 4th, with about 150-200 copies being made on paper and distributed on that date (26 of which are still around today, thus pre-dating what is now generally thought of as the “original”).  This little tidbit also came from the Secret Journals of Congress which has an entry on July 19th stating: “Resolved that the Declaration passed on the 4th be fairly engrossed on parchment with the title and stile of “The unanimous declaration of the thirteen united states of America” & that the same when engrossed be signed by every member of Congress.”  Thus, this signed document probably would have been actually copied by Timothy Matlack, Jefferson’s clerk and certainly couldn’t have been signed on July 4.

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