July 2, July 4, August 2, the Dates Behind the Declaration of Independence

By John Adams's reckoning, Americans have been throwing their birthday party on the wrong day for two and a half centuries. He was sure the great anniversary would be the second of July. He was wrong about the date and right about the fireworks, which is a better record than most political forecasters manage.

The confusion is understandable, because American independence did not happen on one day. It happened in a sequence: a motion, a postponement, a committee, a draft, a vote, a text, a printing, a reading, a parchment and a long tail of signatures that stretched into the following year. Each step had its own purpose, and each tells us something about how the Founders thought free people should act. They did not storm a palace. They moved a resolution, referred it to committee, debated it, voted on it, and then put their names on it, one at a time. Independence was a revolution conducted by parliamentary procedure, and that is the most American thing about it.

Here is the calendar, in order, with a line on why each step mattered.

Before the motion: the road to June

Independence was not a sudden idea in the summer of 1776. Fighting had begun at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Congress had sent the king the Olive Branch Petition in July 1775, asking for reconciliation, and the king had answered by proclaiming the colonies in rebellion. In January 1776 Thomas Paine published Common Sense, which argued in plain language that hereditary monarchy itself was absurd and that separation was inevitable. It sold enormously.

Then the colonies began to move on their own. On May 15, 1776, the Virginia Convention instructed its delegates in Congress to propose independence. The same day, the Continental Congress adopted a preamble, written largely by John Adams, to its May 10 resolution recommending that the colonies form their own governments where none adequate existed. Adams thought this the real break. The formal declaration was still to come.

Why it mattered: The order is the lesson. The colonists petitioned first, armed themselves second, and declared last. Prudence, as the Declaration itself would put it, dictated that long-established governments should not be changed for light and transient causes.

The timeline, June 7 to August 2

June 7, 1776. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia rises in Congress and moves the resolution his state had instructed him to offer:

That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

Why it mattered: This is the legal act of independence. The famous document is the explanation; the Lee Resolution is the decision. Lee's motion also proposed forming foreign alliances and preparing a plan of confederation, which became the Articles of Confederation.

June 10, 1776. Several middle colonies are not ready. Their delegates either lack instructions or have instructions against independence. Congress postpones the vote on Lee's resolution for three weeks, to July 1.

Why it mattered: Congress chose unanimity over speed. A declaration carried by a bare majority of colonies would have invited Britain to divide them. Waiting gave the holdouts time to get new instructions from home.

June 11, 1776. Congress appoints a committee to draft a declaration so that no time would be lost if the vote passed: Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert R. Livingston of New York. The same week Congress names committees to draft the plan of confederation and a model treaty.

Why it mattered: The Committee of Five balanced regions, North and South, New England and the middle colonies. Jefferson did the drafting. Adams and Franklin suggested changes. The document was a committee product from the beginning.

June 28, 1776. The committee presents its draft to Congress, which orders it to lie on the table.

Why it mattered: The draft would wait until the decision was made. First decide whether; then explain why.

July 1, 1776. Congress, sitting as a committee of the whole, debates Lee's resolution. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania argues against independence at that time; John Adams answers. In the test vote, nine colonies favor independence. Pennsylvania and South Carolina vote no. Delaware's two delegates present are split. New York's delegates abstain because they lack instructions. South Carolina's Edward Rutledge asks that the final vote be put off a day.

Why it mattered: Dickinson, the most respected opponent, made his case in the open and lost in the open. Nobody was silenced. The losing side was given time to reconsider.

July 2, 1776. The vote that made independence. Caesar Rodney, Delaware's third delegate, arrives after riding through the night to break his delegation's tie in favor of independence. Pennsylvania flips when Dickinson and Robert Morris stay away from their seats, letting the delegation's majority vote yes. South Carolina joins. Twelve colonies vote for independence. New York abstains again, still without instructions.

Why it mattered: From this day the United Colonies were, in their own law, free and independent states.

July 3, 1776. John Adams writes to his wife Abigail. He predicts that the second of July will be the most memorable day in the history of America, that he is apt to believe it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival, and that it ought to be marked with pomp and parade, shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of the continent to the other.

Why it mattered: Adams got the menu exactly right and the date one day short. He also told Abigail that he saw through the gloom to the light and glory of the cause, and that posterity would rejoice even if his generation regretted it, which is the optimism of a man who had just voted for a war against the strongest empire in the world.

July 2 to 4, 1776. Congress, again as a committee of the whole, edits the draft. It cuts roughly a quarter of the text. The largest deletion is Jefferson's long passage blaming the king for the slave trade, removed at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia and, Jefferson later wrote, with some northern delegates uneasy because their own merchants had carried slaves. Congress also adds language, including the closing appeal "to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions" and the phrase "with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence."

Why it mattered: The Declaration became a document of the whole Congress, not of one author. Jefferson resented the cuts for the rest of his life. Most editors would say the text got tighter.

July 4, 1776. Congress adopts the final text of the Declaration. It orders the document printed and sent to the states and to the commanders of the army. That night John Dunlap, a Philadelphia printer, sets the text in type. The broadsides, printed by the next morning, carry only two names: John Hancock, President, and Charles Thomson, Secretary.

Why it mattered: July 4 is the date printed at the top of the Declaration, and the date the public saw. Perhaps two hundred copies of the Dunlap broadside were printed; a few dozen are known to survive. The text, not the parchment, was what traveled.

July 8, 1776. The first public reading in Philadelphia, in the yard of the State House, now Independence Hall, by John Nixon. The Declaration is also read in other towns that day, including Trenton and Easton.

Why it mattered: Independence was announced to citizens, read aloud in public, and greeted by crowds. The authority of the act came from the people's acceptance, which is the consent principle the document itself states.

July 9, 1776. In New York, General George Washington has the Declaration read to his troops. That evening a crowd pulls down the gilded lead equestrian statue of George III at Bowling Green; much of the lead is later melted into musket balls. On the same day the New York Provincial Congress, meeting in White Plains, approves independence.

Why it mattered: The army now knew what it was fighting for: not better terms within the empire but a new nation. And New York's approval closed the last gap.

July 15, 1776. Congress learns of New York's approval.

Why it mattered: For the first time the decision could be described as the act of all thirteen.

July 19, 1776. Congress orders the Declaration "fairly engrossed on parchment" under a new title, The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, to be signed by every member of Congress.

Why it mattered: One word, "unanimous," changed the document's weight. And the requirement that every member sign meant every man would answer personally for it. In 1776 a signature on that parchment was evidence of treason under British law.

August 2, 1776. The engrossed parchment, very likely written out by Timothy Matlack, is laid before Congress, and most of the delegates present sign it. Hancock's signature is the largest on the page.

Why it mattered: This is the date of the signing most Americans picture as July 4. Several men who signed on August 2, among them Benjamin Rush and George Clymer of Pennsylvania, had not yet joined Congress on July 4.

The long tail: signatures after August 2

Not every signer was in the room on August 2. Several members signed later as they returned or took their seats.

• Matthew Thornton of New Hampshire did not join Congress until November 1776 and signed then.
• Thomas McKean of Delaware, who had voted for independence on July 2, signed later; the date is uncertain and may have been in 1777 or even later.
• Others, including Elbridge Gerry, Oliver Wolcott and Lewis Morris, are generally thought to have signed after August 2 as well, and Richard Henry Lee and George Wythe, who were in Virginia that summer, probably signed in the fall.

In all, fifty-six men signed. John Dickinson, who argued against the timing of independence, never signed the Declaration; he did, however, take up arms for the cause and later represented Delaware at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Robert R. Livingston, one of the Committee of Five, never signed either, because he had left for New York before the parchment was ready.

January 18, 1777. Congress orders an authenticated copy printed with the names of all the signers, and sends it to the states. The printer is Mary Katharine Goddard of Baltimore, who adds her own name at the bottom.

Why it mattered: Until this order, the signers' names had been kept from the public, since publishing them would have handed the British a list of men to hang. By January 1777, after the victories at Trenton and Princeton, Congress was willing to stand by its names in public.

July 4, 1826. Fifty years to the day after the adoption, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both die.

Why it mattered: The two men most responsible for the Declaration, one its chief advocate on the floor and the other its drafter, died on its jubilee. Americans of the time took it as a sign. It also settled, forever, which date the country would remember.

The objection: the dates are trivia

Here is the strongest case that this is all footnotes. The Declaration's meaning does not depend on which day which man signed. The signing date is a matter for antiquarians. What matters is what the document says, and the second paragraph says it whatever the calendar shows. Spending time on dates is a way to avoid the substance.

The answer, in three points.

1. The sequence is the substance. The Declaration claims that just powers come from the consent of the governed. The calendar shows that consent in action: a motion from instructed delegates, a delay so the holdouts could consult their own colonies, a vote, a public reading, a unanimity achieved only when New York's convention agreed. The process is the principle in practice.

1. The myth hides the courage. If everyone signed on one sunny day, the act looks ceremonial. The real record shows men signing a parchment, one by one, over weeks and months, knowing their names would be kept secret only so long as the war went well. That is a deeper kind of bravery than a single dramatic afternoon.

1. Getting history right is a conservative duty. Conservatives argue from the record. If we cannot get the dates of our own founding right, we have no standing to correct anyone else's history. Accuracy is a form of respect for the people who did the work.

The verdict: the dates are not trivia. They are the evidence that the Founders practiced what the Declaration preached.

What the calendar teaches now

Three lessons for citizens follow.

Deliberation before action. Congress could have declared independence on June 7 with a majority. It waited until it could speak for all thirteen. Modern politics, which treats every decision as an emergency, could learn from that patience.

Responsibility is personal. The decision to require every member's signature was a decision to make every representative answerable by name. That is the principle behind recorded votes in Congress today. Every member's vote on a bill is a matter of public record, and you can check it. The site's scorecard is a place to start.

The text outlasts the occasion. The Dunlap broadsides carried the words to the states, and the words, not the parchment, did the work. The parchment itself has faded badly over the centuries. The ideas have not. Read the words and the theory of government they contain in The Declaration's Second Paragraph Is a Complete Theory of Government, the charges against the king in The Grievance List in the Declaration Reads Like a Charge Sheet Against Power, and the common misconceptions about all of this in Seven Myths About the Declaration of Independence, Checked Against the Record.

And if you want the parallel story of how the Constitution itself was approved state by state, start with From Delaware to Rhode Island, the Ratification Fight State by State, then the closing act of the Philadelphia convention in Franklin's Closing Speech Asked Delegates to Doubt Themselves and Sign Anyway.

The case in brief

1. Richard Henry Lee moved independence on June 7, 1776; Congress postponed the vote to July 1 so that the hesitant colonies could get instructions.
2. Twelve colonies voted for independence on July 2, with New York abstaining until its convention approved on July 9.
3. Congress edited and adopted the text on July 4, and the Dunlap broadside carried it to the states with only Hancock's and Thomson's names.
4. Most delegates signed the engrossed parchment on August 2, and others signed later, so no single day saw all fifty-six signatures.
5. The sequence shows consent, deliberation and personal responsibility at work, which is the Declaration's own theory put into practice.

What you can do: on the next July 2, read the Lee Resolution aloud at your dinner table, and on July 4 read the whole Declaration, then look up how your own members of Congress voted on the last major bill.