Whose Handprint Is on the Declaration?

Fontana Micucci’s article at Boundary Stones focused my attention on something I’d seen for years without thinking about—there’s a handprint on the corner of the Declaration of Independence.

By “Declaration of Independence” in this case, I mean the engrossed copy written out by scribe Timothy Matlack in the summer of 1776.

(I think we’ve come to equate that physical document too closely with the Declaration and forget that for the first generations of Americans it was a set of words, not an object they ever saw, even in facsimile. The Declaration was originally a text, not a textile. But I digress.)

The National Archives, current custodian of the engrossed copy, has a detailed article on its preservation over the years. Perhaps because that agency was put in charge of the Declaration only after World War 2, it’s candid about earlier missteps.

I remember reading that the handwritten Declaration is so faded today because the first facsimiles of it, authorized in 1823 by John Quincy Adams as secretary of state, had been produced using a “wet transfer” process that removed some of the ink. With great irony, the reproductions that made that handwritten document into a national icon left the original permanently damaged. All legible copies of the Declaration today are actually reproductions of the early copperplate engraving because the original has faded so much.

The National Archives article upended my understanding a bit. While time and the wet transfer process did cause some fading in the Declaration’s first century, a series of photographs starting in 1883 shows that most of the damage to the words happened in the early 1900s.

A 1903 photo shows “a text that is completely legible and free of water stains.” And back then, there was no handprint.

The Library of Congress commissioned more photos in 1922, but those images can’t be located. The next surviving photographs therefore come from 1940.

By then, the Declaration had suffered noticeable damage in several areas. The ink was more faded. Some of the words no longer looked as crisp as they had four decades earlier. New marks on the parchment included the imprint of a left hand at lower left and water stains near the center.

Most significant, the National Archives article reports, “Some signatures, such as John Hancock’s, were enhanced while others were rewritten in efforts to make them more visible.” The H in Hancock was overwritten to be taller, for example.

People probably tried to clean or restore the Declaration in the early twentieth century, and that effort (or series of efforts) went awry. But evidently no U.S. government records survive to say when and how that happened. And the handprint, while obviously on the document today, isn’t clear enough to identify the responsible party.

A Spatial Analysis of the Declaration of Independence’s Grievances

Jack Rakove’s comment on the different sorts of grievances in the Declaration of Independence, quoted yesterday, led me to explore more deeply into their lack of parallel grammatical structure, also discussed yesterday.

I took a closer look at every jot of the Declaration, exercising the “punctuation is a moral issue” attitude of a former book editor.

To start with, though the grievances in the official text are all formatted to start with the same indentation, the punctuation at the ends of the lines is different. Instead of ending with a period, all the “For…” items end with a colon. (As first printed by John Dunlap, that is. Timothy Matlack apparently left out a colon after one line on the handwritten parchment.)

We no longer use a colon that way, but it eighteenth-century style it signaled a pause of less weight than a period but more than a semi-colon. In other words, while the other grievances were full sentences in their own right, those “For…” grievances were all parts of a single sentence.

I then looked at earlier drafts, starting with the text that Thomas Jefferson shared with his colleagues on the Continental Congress’s Declaration-drafting committee, as shown here by the Library of Congress. Jefferson had some idiosyncratic style preferences, such as the possessive “it’s” and much less fondness for capital letters than his contemporaries. He ended the grievances with colons and semi-colons instead of periods and colons.

What’s important to this discussion is that Jefferson didn’t start a new line for his first “for…” clause. Rather, that phrase was a continuation after a comma of the preceding “He has…” clause. Jefferson also indented the following “for…” lines more than the “he has…” lines, and he ended them with semi-colons instead of colons.

Then there’s John Adams’s early copy from June 1776, at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Adams copied all the “for…” items as part of the “He has…” clause that preceded them in one long paragraph at the bottom of page 2, as shown above.

Jefferson also made a copy of the committee’s draft, now at the Massachusetts Historical Society. In this version the “he has…” lines end with periods. It’s ambiguous whether the first “for…” item is part of the preceding clause or not. But there’s no question that Jefferson put a larger indent before all the other “for…” lines before returning to “he has…”

The full Congress adopted different punctuation and capitalization, and it wasn’t careful about keeping Jefferson’s original spatial formatting. The officially adopted text made no typographical distinction between “He has…” sentences and “For…” sentence fragments. They all start flush left with a capital letter.

But the earlier drafts let us see what we might call the committee’s original meaning of those lines. The “For…” items were all subordinate parts of the preceding “He has…” clause, serving to spell out the “Acts of pretended Legislation”—i.e., laws enacted by Parliament despite the colonists having no representation in that body.

For logical clarity in the outline form, the published Declaration should have been formatted the way Jefferson wrote those lines, with two levels of indentation:

• . . . He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences[:]

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

• He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. . . .

Those laws start before the Coercive Acts with Britain’s imperial trade laws, Quartering Act, and the new taxes of the 1760s. Only the last five “For…” items relate directly to the laws of 1774. The grammatical outliers thus don’t map exactly onto one of Rakove’s three categories of grievances, though it’s still useful to look on them all as basically chronological.

So if the nine “For…” lines in the Declaration are actually part of the preceding “He has…” clause, does that mean the Declaration has only eighteen grievances?

The Aspect of the Declaration of Independence that Bothers Me

For decades, something about the grievances in the Declaration of Independence has bothered me: They’re not grammatically parallel.

I know this problem might not look as weighty as one-sided descriptions of policy, piling all the blame onto King George, the hypocrisy of complaining about wartime measures the Continental governments had also taken, or the hollowness of those “self-evident” truths in practice, but it really did bother me.

The Continental Congress listed twenty-seven grievances, starting with “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good” and ending with “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

As you see, the grumbling moves from a vague disagreement about policy and governance to incendiary language about non-white warriors killing women and children.

Along the way, the grammatical structure of those grievances changes. The first thirteen are complete sentences beginning “He has…” Then come “For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us” and eight more similarly constructed phrases that are not even complete sentences. The list resumes the “He has…” for the last five complaints.

The first printing of the Declaration by John Dunlap, the first newspaper printing, and the official government transcript all format those grievances with the same indentation and emphasis.

The famous handwritten copy likewise makes no clear distinction among the grievances. That’s because none of those clauses are set out in separate paragraphs, scribe Timothy Matlack formatting the whole thing in just two blocks of text.

So if all those complaints are supposed to be parallel, why aren’t they worded in the same way?

Last month in a series of Twitter postings starting here, Jack Rakove, emeritus William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and professor of political science at Stanford, wrote:

The real structure of the DoI, once past its Preamble, has three distinct parts: a summary of longstanding grievances of imperial governance; a denunciation of all the recent acts adopted in response to the Boston Tea Party and other acts of intercolonial resistance; and a concluding set (I would say the last 5 listed) relating to the forms of military repression and violence directed against the colonists, obviously including but hardly limited to the invitation to insurrection on the part of the enslaved and indigenous peoples.

In other words, the first batch of grievances covered the years 1760 to 1773, the next batch the Coercive Acts of 1774, and the last bunch the British government’s decisions since the start of the war.

I wondered if those three categories mapped onto the three grammatically distinct groups of complaints. In the end, I concluded they don’t match up exactly, but Rakove’s observation got me thinking about how those groupings pointed in somewhat different directions rather than running in parallel.

TOMORROW: Sorting out the lists.