99 Fun Facts About Declaration of Independence

On July 4, Congress did what to the Declaration?

Approved its text: the vote for independence itself had come on July 2, the day John Adams expected to be celebrated as the great anniversary festival.

In which building was the Declaration adopted?

The Pennsylvania State House was only on loan: the colony's legislature lent Congress its Assembly Room, and the building became known as Independence Hall only later.

In which 2004 adventure film is the Declaration stolen for a map hidden on its back?

National Treasure invented the map: when conservators examined the real back in 2001, they found only a filing label reading 'Original Declaration of Independence dated 4th. July 1776'.

Which two of the Declaration's drafters both died on July 4, 1826?

Adams and Jefferson died hours apart, exactly fifty years after their text was adopted; in his eulogy Daniel Webster called the timing proof of Providence's care for the country.

Which Committee of Five member represented New York?

Robert R. Livingston helped oversee the draft but never signed the Declaration: he had left Congress for duties at home before the parchment was signed.

The Declaration's 'He has' grievances accuse which king?

George III is never named in the text, which speaks of 'the present King of Great Britain' and then says 'He', over and over.

Delegates knew that signing the Declaration amounted to which crime against the Crown?

High treason carried the death penalty, so Congress kept the signers' names secret for months and only published them in January 1777.

Which newspaper was the first to publish the Declaration, on July 6, 1776?

The Pennsylvania Evening Post gave the text its front page on July 6, two days after the first broadsides were printed, and newspapers across the colonies soon copied it.

Which words open the Declaration of Independence?

When in the Course of human events opens a sentence invoking 'a decent respect to the opinions of mankind': the text was written to justify the break to the world, not only to Americans.

The signers close the Declaration by pledging 'our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred' what?

Honor is the final word, pledged 'with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence', a phrase that is missing from Jefferson's rough draft and was added before the text was approved.

Which president read the Constitution through the Declaration's promise that all men are created equal?

Abraham Lincoln opened the Gettysburg Address by counting 'four score and seven years' back to 1776 and the Declaration, not to the Constitution.

In the Declaration, which word describes the rights to 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness'?

Unalienable is the word on the signed parchment, though Jefferson's own rough draft says 'inalienable'; both mean rights that cannot be given or taken away.

Which 1776 pamphlet by Thomas Paine made the impassioned public case for independence?

Common Sense appeared anonymously in January 1776, argued in plain language for a complete break, and was read aloud in taverns and meeting places across the colonies.

Which leader opened his country's 1945 proclamation of independence with words borrowed from the American Declaration?

Ho Chi Minh read it to a huge crowd in Hanoi on the day Japan formally surrendered, opening with the American line that all men are created equal.

Which colony, later the last state to ratify the Constitution, first renounced allegiance to the Crown, in May 1776?

Rhode Island broke with the king two months before Congress did, yet it joined the new Union last, in 1790, and only after being threatened with having its exports taxed as a foreign nation's.

Which county, home to Charlotte, claims a May 1775 declaration of independence that historians consider spurious?

The Mecklenburg Declaration first surfaced in 1819, rewritten from memory after the original supposedly burned in 1800, yet its date still appears on North Carolina's state flag.

Which Pennsylvania delegate led the anti-independence faction in Congress?

John Dickinson stayed away from the final vote and refused to sign, yet he then took up arms in the militia for the cause he had argued against.

Who presented the three-part resolution for independence to Congress on June 7, 1776?

Richard Henry Lee was acting on orders from Virginia's convention, and his phrase 'free and independent states' was written into the Declaration's final paragraph.

Which New Jersey royal governor was declared an enemy of liberty and arrested in June 1776?

William Franklin was Benjamin Franklin's son; he stayed loyal to the Crown, spent two years as a prisoner of the Patriots and ended his life in exile in London.

Which Maryland signer was later impeached as a Supreme Court justice but acquitted by the Senate?

Samuel Chase was impeached in 1804 at the urging of President Jefferson, a fellow signer, for partisan conduct on the bench; the Senate acquitted him on every count.

Which colony abstained on July 2 because its legislature, fleeing the British, had not authorized a vote?

New York's delegates had to sit out the vote; their convention approved independence only a week later, on July 9.

John Trumbull's painting of the Declaration being presented to Congress appears on the back of which US banknote?

The $2 bill carries the scene often called the signing, but Trumbull painted an earlier moment: the drafting committee handing its text to Congress on June 28, 1776.

Jefferson's self-written epitaph names him author of the Declaration and father of which university?

University of Virginia is on the stone, but his presidency is not: Jefferson listed only three achievements he wished to be remembered for, and eight years in the White House was not among them.

Which Enlightenment philosopher is usually cited as a primary influence on the Declaration?

John Locke: historian Carl Becker wrote that Americans had absorbed his works 'as a kind of political gospel' and that the Declaration's phrasing closely follows his second treatise on government.

Which 1963 speech called the Declaration and the Constitution 'a promissory note' to every American?

I Have a Dream, Martin Luther King Jr.'s address to the March on Washington, said America had defaulted on that note and handed Black citizens 'a bad check' that the marchers had come to cash.

Which part of the draft did Congress cut before approving the Declaration?

A passage blaming the king for slavery was cut to appease South Carolina and Georgia, and Jefferson noted that Northern delegates agreed too, since Northerners had been 'pretty considerable carriers' of enslaved people.

Whose last-minute arrival broke Delaware's tie in favor of independence on July 2?

Caesar Rodney, at home in Delaware when word of the deadlock reached him, rode all night through a thunderstorm and arrived just as the voting began.

Which abolitionist's 1852 Rochester speech asked what the Fourth of July could mean to an enslaved American?

Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery himself, told the crowd gathered to mark the signing that the holiday was theirs, not his: 'You may rejoice, I must mourn.'

Which word did Congress add to the Declaration's title by a resolution of July 19, 1776?

Unanimous could be added only once the last holdout colony had approved independence, ten days earlier; the engrossed title became 'The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America'.

The first printed Declaration to name its signers came in January 1777 from which city, then Congress's refuge?

Baltimore: Congress had fled there from Philadelphia, and the town's postmaster, Mary Katherine Goddard, printed the sheet and put her own full name at its foot.

Whose Virginia Declaration of Rights was one of Jefferson's most immediate sources?

George Mason later refused to sign the Constitution, objecting above all that it lacked a declaration of rights like the one he had written for Virginia.

The 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, which says 'all men and women are created equal', was adopted at a convention in which town?

Seneca Falls delegates adopted Elizabeth Cady Stanton's text, which kept the 1776 structure but aimed its list of 'He has' grievances at men's rule over women instead of at a king.

How many delegates' signatures are on the Declaration?

56 delegates signed, though not all at once: most did so on August 2, 1776, and some had not even joined Congress when independence was voted.

Whose signature, as President of Congress, is the largest on the Declaration?

John Hancock's outsized signature made his name American slang for any signature; the tale that he wrote it large so the king could read it without spectacles is a later legend.

Which Georgia signer's autograph is among America's rarest because he died after a duel in 1777?

Button Gwinnett was shot by his rival Lachlan McIntosh less than a year after signing, so collectors who want a full set of the signers' autographs prize his above almost any other.

Which hefty signer, father of a future president, joked about hanging faster than a skinny colleague?

Benjamin Harrison, whose son and great-grandson both became president, told a slender fellow delegate that he would die in minutes while the lighter man would 'dance in the air an hour or two'.

Who urged her husband in Congress to 'remember the ladies' as he pressed for independence in spring 1776?

Abigail Adams wrote the line to John on March 31, 1776, in a letter longing to hear independence declared; he replied, 'As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh.'

Which surviving object is believed to have served the signers of both the Declaration and the Constitution?

A silver inkstand: Philip Syng made it in 1752, and because both documents were signed in the same room eleven years apart, it is thought to have served the two sets of signers.

Which Philadelphia printer worked through the night of July 4, 1776 to produce the first copies of the Declaration?

John Dunlap, Congress's official printer, set the text overnight and ran off about 200 broadsides, which were sent to the colonies' assemblies and to the commanders of the Continental troops.

Which sitcom producer paid over $8 million for a Declaration printing found behind a $4 flea-market painting?

Norman Lear, the creator of All in the Family, then sent the broadside on a tour of the country so that ordinary Americans could see it.

The 'large Armies of foreign Mercenaries' condemned in the Declaration had been hired by Britain from which part of Europe?

The German states, Hesse-Kassel above all, rented out whole regiments, so Americans called them all Hessians; news that the king had hired them pushed many wavering colonists toward independence.

What did Patriots do with the lead from a statue of the king toppled in Manhattan in July 1776?

Made musket balls, by the traditional account: after hearing the Declaration read on July 9, a crowd pulled the statue off its pedestal at Bowling Green, and much of the metal is said to have been melted down for ammunition.

Which Massachusetts signer's name lives on in the word for drawing oddly shaped voting districts?

Elbridge Gerry was governor in 1812 when he signed off on a district shaped like a salamander; a cartoon dubbed it the 'Gerry-mander', and the word outlasted his vice presidency.

In November 1776, hundreds of Loyalists in British-held Manhattan signed which document?

A Declaration of Dependence turned the rebels' title inside out: its signers, living under British occupation, affirmed their allegiance to the king whom Congress had renounced that summer.

Where was the engrossed Declaration kept for safekeeping from 1941 to 1944?

Fort Knox's bullion depository took it in weeks after Pearl Harbor: the Declaration left Washington by train under Secret Service guard and was met in Kentucky by a troop of armored cavalry.

Which Washington institution has held the engrossed Declaration since 1952?

The National Archives received it in December 1952, when servicemen carried the helium-filled cases down the Library of Congress steps to an armored Marine Corps personnel carrier.

Which signer is credited with the gallows pun that the delegates must 'all hang together' or 'all hang separately'?

Benjamin Franklin is said to have made the pun in reply to a colleague's plea that the delegates pull together, but the story surfaced only years later and is probably apocryphal.

A second parchment copy of the Declaration, found in Chichester, England in 2017, is known by what name?

The Sussex Declaration turned up in a county record office; its signers' names are jumbled, not grouped by state, which its Harvard finders linked to James Wilson's view that one whole people had declared independence.

Which secretary of state ordered the 1823 engraving most Declaration copies reproduce?

John Quincy Adams ordered William Stone's copperplate facsimile because the parchment was already showing its age; the original later faded so badly that Stone's engraving became the picture people know.

Which US banknote has shown the Declaration's drafting committee presenting its work on the back since 1976?

The $2 bill dropped its view of Monticello for the scene when the note was reissued after a ten-year break. The engraving is a rendition, not an exact copy, of a painting that hangs in the Capitol.

Which actor plays the treasure hunter who steals the Declaration of Independence in the 2004 film National Treasure?

Nicolas Cage plays Ben Gates, who takes the document from the National Archives during a gala to keep a rival crew from stealing it first.

In which month did most delegates sign the engrossed Declaration of Independence that Congress had ordered on July 19?

August 2 was the main signing day, almost a month after the vote. Delegates who were away that day added their names later.

What is actually written on the back of the engrossed Declaration, where National Treasure imagines a map?

An identifying label is all it carries: the words Original Declaration of Independence and its date, written along the edge so the rolled-up document could be picked out in storage.

Which signer of the Declaration predicted that July 2, the day of the vote, would be celebrated with bonfires forever?

John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that the date deserved parades, games, guns and bells across the continent. He was off by two days: Americans took up July 4, the date printed on the text.

Which American monument carries a tablet inscribed with the date of the Declaration of Independence in Roman numerals?

The Statue of Liberty holds the tablet in her left hand, reading JULY IV MDCCLXXVI. Its sculptor, Bartholdi, chose the date to tie the idea of liberty to the Declaration.

Which civil rights leader quoted the Declaration of Independence's equality line in 1963 at the March on Washington?

Martin Luther King built part of his I Have a Dream address on it, arguing that the founders' words promised equal treatment whatever a person's race.

Which general had the Declaration of Independence read to his soldiers on July 9, with British warships in the harbor?

George Washington had it read to his troops in New York City, hoping it would inspire the soldiers and encourage others to join the army.

During which war was the Declaration of Independence rushed out of the capital in a linen sack ahead of British troops?

The War of 1812 brought British troops to the capital in the summer of 1814. A State Department clerk, Stephen Pleasonton, packed the records into coarse linen bags and sent them to Leesburg, Virginia, before the city burned.

Which country's 1945 proclamation quoted the American Declaration of Independence in a bid for Allied support?

Vietnam's proclamation was written by Ho Chi Minh and read out in Hanoi on 2 September 1945. Historian Pierre Asselin reads the borrowing as a move to win over the American agents in the crowd.

Which two words follow "When in the Course of" in the opening line of the Declaration of Independence?

The phrase human events sets up one long sentence saying that a people breaking its political ties owes the world its reasons. The equality line everyone quotes comes a paragraph later.

The signers close the Declaration of Independence by pledging their lives, their fortunes and what else?

Their sacred honor completes the pledge the delegates make to each other in the document's very last words, just above the signatures.

According to the Declaration of Independence, governments derive their just powers from the consent of whom?

The governed are where all legitimate power starts in the text: governments are set up to secure people's rights, not the other way round.

Which British institution goes unnamed in the Declaration of Independence, which calls its members only "others"?

Parliament is left out on purpose: the colonists refused to admit it had any authority over them, so every charge is aimed at the king, who is said to have combined with others.

Which two words open most of the charges against the king listed in the Declaration of Independence?

He has begins charge after charge, a drumbeat that pins the blame on one man. The king is never called by his own name anywhere in the text.

In the last sentence of the Declaration of Independence, the signers voice a firm reliance on the protection of what?

Divine Providence is the last of four references to a higher power in the text, after Nature's God, the Creator and the Supreme Judge of the world.

The "foreign Mercenaries" condemned in the Declaration of Independence were soldiers hired from which part of Europe?

The German states, above all Hesse-Kassel, rented out the troops Americans came to call Hessians. News of the deal helped swing opinion in the colonies toward a full break.

The Declaration's charge about English law swept away in "a neighbouring Province" refers to which colony?

Quebec had been allowed its old civil law in place of English common law, and given borders reaching into today's Midwest, by an act of 1774. The colonists feared the same kind of rule was being readied for them.

The Declaration's grievance about quartering armed troops was later answered by which amendment to the Constitution?

The Third Amendment bars housing soldiers in a private home in peacetime without the owner's consent. It is among the least cited sections of the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence says a people may do what to a government that becomes destructive of their rights?

Alter or abolish it, the text says, and then build a new one. It adds a caution: long-established governments should not be changed for light and transient causes.

Which Connecticut member of the Declaration's drafting committee was the only man to sign all four great state papers?

Roger Sherman put his name to the Continental Association of 1774, the Declaration, the first national frame of government and the Constitution. Robert Morris managed three of the four.

Which secretary of Congress attested the first printed broadside of the Declaration beside the president's name?

Charles Thomson is listed as the witness, beside the word Attest. He never signed the engrossed copy, so his name is missing from the famous handwritten version.

Which 1775 appeal, Congress's final plea to the king for peace, went unread a year before the Declaration?

The Olive Branch Petition asked the king for a lasting settlement, but he refused to read it and proclaimed the colonies in rebellion instead.

Which first plan of national government grew out of the very resolution that proposed independence to Congress?

The Articles of Confederation answered the resolution's last part, a plan to bind the states together. Congress argued over them for more than a year, and the last state did not ratify until 1781.

Below the president's large signature, how are the other names on the Declaration of Independence grouped?

By state, arranged by geography: Georgia's delegates fill the far-left column and the New England states the far-right one.

Jefferson's self-written epitaph names the Declaration, the University of Virginia and which other achievement?

A religious freedom law, the Virginia statute he drafted, made his list of three. He left out every political office he had held, the presidency included.

The Declaration of Independence came more than a year after the war's first shots at which pair of towns?

Lexington and Concord saw the fighting begin in April 1775, yet most colonists still hoped to patch things up with Britain for months afterward.

The first copy of the Declaration of Independence sent to which hoped-for European ally was lost on the way?

France did not get a replacement until November, four months after the vote. Supporters of independence had argued that no foreign power would help the colonies until the break was formal.

Which 1848 women's rights convention reworded the Declaration's famous line to read "all men and women"?

Seneca Falls adopted a Declaration of Sentiments whose main author, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, modelled it on the original text.

Which artist painted the Declaration of Independence scene in the Capitol Rotunda, often mistaken for the signing?

John Trumbull actually shows the drafting committee presenting its draft to Congress. The 12-by-18-foot canvas was commissioned in 1817 and placed in the Rotunda in 1826.

Which Washington body showed the Declaration of Independence in a shrine dedicated before President Coolidge in 1924?

The Library of Congress took custody from the State Department in 1921. Millions of visitors filed past its shrine during the 1920s and 1930s.

Which Washington building hung the Declaration of Independence opposite a large window for 35 years, fading its ink?

The Patent Office kept it on show even after passing from the State Department to the Interior Department. Sunlight and swings in temperature and humidity took a heavy toll.

Which inert gas fills the titanium-framed cases that have held the Declaration of Independence since the early 2000s?

Argon replaced helium, the gas used in the earlier cases, when conservators treated the document and re-housed it in frames of titanium and aluminum.

Which NASA center designed the camera system installed in 1987 to watch the Declaration of Independence for decay?

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory built a system that photographs one-inch squares of the documents and compares them over time, catching ink flaking or fading too slight for the human eye.

Imaging showed Jefferson first wrote which word in his Declaration draft before writing "citizens" over it?

The word subjects, in the phrase our fellow subjects, sat hidden under his heavy correction until scientists confirmed it in 2010. The sentence itself never reached the final text.

Which TV producer bought a first printing of the Declaration that had turned up behind a $4 flea-market painting?

Norman Lear, creator of All in the Family, paid about $8.1 million and sent the sheet on a road trip that took in presidential libraries, a Super Bowl and a Winter Olympics.

The Declaration of Independence is displayed with the Constitution and which other document as the Charters of Freedom?

The Bill of Rights completes the trio shown together in the rotunda of the National Archives building in Washington.

Which abolitionist orator asked in 1852 what the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence meant to a slave?

Frederick Douglass gave the address in Rochester on July 5, a day after the holiday, and it is now known by the question it puts about the Fourth of July.

Which abolitionist left a Declaration of Liberty, dated July 4, 1859, among his papers before raiding Harpers Ferry?

John Brown borrowed the founding document's language for a 2,000-word text of his own. He never had it printed, and it was found among his papers afterward.

Which African colony's white-minority government modelled its 1965 break with Britain on America's Declaration?

Rhodesia's drafters used the American text as their model and lifted one of its phrases word for word, yet left out its claim that all men are created equal.

Which African republic drew on the Declaration of Independence in 1847 when breaking from a private American society?

Liberia had been founded and run by the American Colonization Society. Its declaration lists the injustices its settlers had suffered in the United States, much as the earlier text lists a king's offences.

Which utilitarian philosopher mocked the Declaration of Independence as a hodge-podge of confusion and absurdity?

Jeremy Bentham wrote his Short Review of the Declaration for a 130-page rebuttal that the British government had quietly commissioned from a lawyer friend of his.

Which Philadelphia physician recalled the signing of the Declaration as a scene of "pensive and awful silence"?

Benjamin Rush set the scene down in an 1811 letter: the delegates were called up one after another to sign what each thought was his own death warrant.

Which pop vocal group sang the opening of the Declaration of Independence on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1969?

The 5th Dimension set the text to music as the song Declaration, released on the 1970 album Portrait. Some viewers took the performance as an anti-war protest.

Which San Francisco activist invoked the Declaration's inalienable rights in a 1978 Gay Pride speech?

Harvey Milk argued that the rights the founders listed apply to all persons and cannot be withheld because of anyone's sexual orientation.

The legend that the Liberty Bell rang for the Declaration of Independence on July 4 began in what kind of 1847 work?

A short story by George Lippard imagined an old bellman waiting to hear whether Congress had dared to act. No record shows the bell ringing that day, and the text was not read in public until July 8.

Jefferson and a fellow signer who also became president both died on which anniversary of the Declaration?

The 50th anniversary, July 4, 1826, saw both former presidents die within hours of each other, Jefferson first.

The Declaration of Independence accuses the king of depriving colonists, in many cases, of the benefits of what?

Trial by jury sits in the list beside a complaint that colonists were being carried across the sea to be tried for invented offences.

Which Washington engraver's 1823 copperplate facsimile became the basis of most modern copies of the Declaration?

William Stone spent three years on the plate at the request of the Secretary of State. The original later faded so badly that his copy became the image most people know.

Which state's legislature was first to recognize July 4, the Declaration's anniversary, as an official celebration?

Massachusetts acted through its General Court in 1781, while the war was still being fought. Congress did not make the date a holiday for federal workers until 1870.