The Declaration of Independence, Lesson 8: The Declaration After 1776

The Night of July 4: The Dunlap Broadside

Congress approved the Declaration on July 4, 1776, and the first thing it needed was copies. The manuscript went to the Philadelphia printer John Dunlap that night, and he set it in type and ran off a broadside, a single large sheet. On the morning of July 5, members of Congress dispatched copies to assemblies, conventions and committees of safety and to the commanders of the Continental troops.¹

The National Archives says it is not known how many copies Dunlap printed. Twenty-six are known to survive today: 21 in American institutions, two in British institutions and three in private hands.¹ The sheet carried the names of John Hancock as president and Charles Thomson as secretary and no other signatures. That is a detail the engrossed parchment later changed. The people whose names fill the bottom of the famous parchment signed it weeks afterward.

The count of surviving copies changes when a new one is found, and the 26 above is the figure the Archives gives on its history page. Anyone repeating the number should check the Archives for the current count.

How the News Traveled

A secondary account from the Utah Valley University Center for Constitutional Studies traces the first days. The Pennsylvania Evening Post printed the text on July 6, which it identifies as the first newspaper printing. The Pennsylvania Packet followed on July 8. On July 8, according to the same account, John Nixon read the Declaration at noon in the State House Yard in Philadelphia, and public readings took place in Trenton and Easton the same day. New York heard it on July 9 on Washington's orders, Boston on July 18 and Savannah on August 10. By the end of August, the account says, 29 newspapers and 14 broadsides had carried the text.²

The Library of Congress timeline for its Declaring Independence exhibit agrees on three of them (the Pennsylvania Evening Post of July 6, the first public reading in Philadelphia on July 8, and Washington's reading to the army in New York on July 9). This lesson could not check the other dates against the original newspapers, and the source itself notes a conflict over the date of Baltimore's Maryland Journal, which it gives as July 9 or 10.² The pattern is still clear. Readings came first in the cities close to Congress, and the distance in days grew with the distance in miles. The same source gives a rough measure: Savannah heard 37 days after Philadelphia's first printing.

Abigail Adams described the Boston reading in a letter to John Adams dated July 21, 1776. Colonel Crafts read the Declaration from the State House balcony, and, she wrote, "the kings arms were taken down."³ The letter is a contemporary report from an eyewitness. It records one ritual of the day: a public reading, then the removal of royal symbols.

The Parchment, the Signers and the Goddard Broadside

The famous handwritten copy came later. After New York's convention approved the action on July 9, all thirteen states had signaled their approval, and on July 19 Congress ordered the Declaration "fairly engrossed on parchment." Engrossing means preparing an official copy in a large, clear hand, and the Archives says Timothy Matlack was "probably" the engrosser. The Journal of Congress records on August 2 that "The declaration of independence being engrossed and compared at the table was signed." Eventually 56 delegates signed, though not all were present on August 2, and some who voted for the Declaration on July 4, including John Dickinson, never signed.¹

That timeline corrects a common belief. The Declaration was adopted on July 4 and signed on August 2 (and by some members later). A reporter or speaker who says "the signers signed on July 4" is repeating a misconception that the Archives page itself addresses.¹

On January 18, 1777, Congress ordered an authentic copy with the names of the signers sent to each state, "and that they be desired to have the same put upon record." Mary Katherine Goddard printed the "authentic copy" in Baltimore.¹ The Archives says the July printing had included only the names of Hancock and Thomson, and that the names of the other signers were "kept secret for a time because of fear of British reprisals." The Goddard printing was ordered after the victories at Trenton and Princeton.

The parchment itself has had a long career. In August 1814, with British forces landing in the Chesapeake, it was moved out of Washington and stored in Virginia while the White House burned. It returned to Washington in September 1814. It was exhibited in Philadelphia at the 1876 Centennial and returned to Washington after, and in the Second World War it was moved to Fort Knox for safekeeping.¹

On July 4, 1876, the text was read aloud to a crowd in Independence Square by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, a grandson of the signer of the same name. The Archives page records that the "faded and crumbling manuscript" was then shown to the crowd.¹

The Parchment's Travels and Wear

The engrossed Declaration lived a hard life. The National Archives history traces it in some detail. After the signing it was most likely kept in the office of Secretary Charles Thomson. When Congress left Philadelphia in December 1776 under British threat, a light wagon carried the parchment to Baltimore, and it stayed there until March 1777. It would then have moved with Congress to York, Pennsylvania, where it was likely kept in the courthouse from September 1777 to June 1778, and later to Princeton (from June to November 1783), Annapolis (until October 1784) and Trenton (in November and December 1784).¹ The Archives words this chronology as an assumption that the Declaration moved with Congress, so a reader should treat the stops as probable and not documented.

Wear came from handling and display. Two facsimile printings appeared in 1818 and 1819. In 1820 Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned William J. Stone to make an exact copy, and 200 official parchment copies were struck from his copperplate, dated July 4, 1823. A later theory said Stone used a "wet transfer" that lifted ink from the original. The Archives reports that a committee reached that conclusion in 1881, but that modern conservators have raised doubts and that the question may never be settled.¹

From 1841 to 1876 the Declaration hung in the Patent Office, mounted in a frame with Washington's commission, in a hall opposite a window. The Archives says that the exposure to sunlight over 35 years accelerated the deterioration of the ink and parchment. After the 1876 Centennial exhibit in Philadelphia, it returned to Washington, where it was placed in a cabinet in the State Department library on March 3, 1877. A few months later fire gutted much of the Patent Office it had just left. In 1921 President Harding signed an executive order moving the Declaration and the Constitution to the Library of Congress, where the Librarian carried them off in the Library's mail wagon, cushioned by mail sacks. There the Declaration hung until December 1952, with one interruption.¹

The interruption was the Second World War. After Pearl Harbor, on December 23, 1941, the Declaration was wrapped in acid-free paper, sealed in a bronze container and put on a train. It reached Fort Knox on December 27 and was placed in a compartment in the Bullion Depository, where it was examined from time to time.¹

Jefferson Looks Back, 1825 and 1826

Jefferson wrote two letters near the end of his life that people quote often. Both were recollections written decades afterward, so they carry the usual limits of that kind of evidence.

On May 8, 1825, he told Henry Lee that the Declaration's aim was "to place before mankind the common sense of the subject," and that it drew on "the harmonising sentiments of the day." He listed authors whose works had shaped the common stock, among them Aristotle, Cicero, Locke and Sidney.⁴ He wrote 49 years after the event.

On June 24, 1826, he sent Roger Weightman a letter declining an invitation to the fiftieth-anniversary celebration in Washington. The letter calls the Declaration "the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains" and says "the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs."⁵ The first phrase says what Jefferson thought the document was for. The second is among the best-known images of equality in American writing. The Chief Justice's 2025 report notes that most of the 56 signers enslaved other people at some point in their lives, and any use of Jefferson's sentence should carry that fact with it.⁶

Lincoln and the Declaration

No American politician did more to change how the Declaration is read than Abraham Lincoln. Four texts show the arc, and a fifth, from his opponent, shows what he was arguing against.

Peoria, October 16, 1854

Lincoln spoke at Peoria against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which let settlers in the new territories decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. Senator Stephen Douglas defended the law as self-government. Lincoln accepted the premise and attacked the application. "My faith in the proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own," he said, "lies at the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me." But the doctrine had no application, he argued, if the enslaved person was a man, because then "no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent." That, he said, was "the leading principle" and "the sheet anchor of American republicanism."⁷

He then quoted the Declaration, including its words that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," and said that "the relation of masters and slaves is, PRO TANTO, a total violation of this principle." He also said he hated the spread of slavery partly because it forced "so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty," including "criticising the Declaration of Independence."⁷ Douglas had appealed to the instructions several states gave their delegates in 1776, which Lincoln answered in the same speech.⁷ The instructions themselves are covered in the lesson on the debates.

Springfield, June 26, 1857

A few months after the Supreme Court decided Dred Scott, Lincoln replied to the decision and to Douglas's defense of it. Chief Justice Taney had written that the general words of the Declaration "would seem to embrace the whole human family," but that "it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included."⁸ Lincoln said Taney and Douglas argued that the authors had not meant to include Black people "by the fact that they did not at once, actually place them on an equality with the whites," and he answered that this proved nothing, because the authors had not placed all white people on an equality with one another either.⁹

His own reading followed. The authors, he said, "intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects." They "defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal," namely in "certain inalienable rights." They "meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit." And they "meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated."⁹

The speech also quotes Douglas's view, which Lincoln attacked: that the Declaration was adopted only to justify "withdrawing their allegiance from the British crown," so that it was, in Lincoln's characterization, "mere rubbish-old wadding left to rot on the battle-field after the victory is won."⁹ The same speech contains passages on race and what Lincoln called "amalgamation" that modern readers will find troubling. It is quoted here for what it says about the Declaration, and a reader who uses it should read all of it. Justices Curtis and McLean dissented from Taney's reading in the case itself.⁸

The fragment on the Constitution and the Union

An undated fragment, traditionally assigned to January 1861, compares the Declaration to an "apple of gold" and the Constitution to a "picture of silver" set around it. Lincoln wrote that "The picture was made for the apple" and that the apple was not made "for the picture."¹⁰ The next lesson takes up how readers have argued over that image.

Gettysburg, November 19, 1863

At Gettysburg he said the nation was "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."¹¹ The Chief Justice's 2025 report notes that Lincoln dated the nation's dedication to 1776 and not to 1787, and that he urged a "new birth of freedom" to advance the "unfinished work" of the founders.⁶

Douglass, July 5, 1852

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass spoke in Rochester, New York, to the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. The editors at Teaching American History note that he had insisted on speaking the day after Independence Day.¹² He told the audience his subject was American slavery, seen "from the slave's point of view," and he said "This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn." He asked whether "the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence" had been "extended to us."¹²

The sharpest passage answers his own question. "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?" he asked. It is "a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim." To the enslaved person, he said, "your shouts of liberty and equality" were a "hollow mockery." Slavery, he said, "brands your republicanism as a sham."¹²

The speech does not reject the founding. Douglass held the nation to its own text. He praised the founders as "statesmen, patriots and heroes" in the same speech, and he said that, "interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document."¹² He ended with hope. "While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions," he said, "my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age."¹² The next lesson returns to Douglass's view of the Constitution and to the older debate with William Lloyd Garrison.

Seneca Falls and After

The Seneca Falls convention met on July 19 and 20, 1848. Its Declaration of Sentiments follows the 1776 text almost word for word and changes one phrase: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." Where the Declaration lists the king's offenses, the Sentiments lists man's: "The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her." The first charge reads "He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise."¹³ The National Park Service records that 68 women and 32 men signed.¹⁴

On July 4, 1876, Susan B. Anthony issued a Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States. The Chief Justice's 2025 report quotes her: "we cannot forget, even in this glad hour, that while all men of every race, and clime, and condition, have been invested with the full rights of citizenship under our hospitable flag, all women still suffer the degradation of disfranchisement."⁶ The report also quotes John Stuart Mill, writing in 1865, that with the Thirteenth Amendment "the opening words of the Declaration of Independence" would no longer be "a reproach to the nation founded by its authors."⁶

King, August 28, 1963

In his speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King Jr. told the crowd that they had come "to cash a check." When the architects of the republic wrote the words of the Constitution and the Declaration, he said, "they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir." The note "was a promise that all men, yes, Black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." He said the country had given its Black citizens "a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds," and that they refused to believe the funds were gone.¹⁵ Later in the speech he described his dream as "deeply rooted in the American dream," in which the nation would "live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."¹⁵

The Chief Justice's report also quotes King's remark that the Declaration expressed "the dignity and the worth of human personality."⁶ Across Douglass, Seneca Falls and King, people who were left out of a promise used the promise's own words to argue for inclusion. Each speaker also read the text as a legal and moral claim about equality before the law, and not as a description of the world as it was.

The Declaration Turned the Other Way

The Declaration was also cited by people defending slavery and secession, and the record is worth reading directly. South Carolina's Declaration of the Immediate Causes, issued in December 1860, begins with the 1776 Declaration. It says that after independence "each of the thirteen States proceeded to exercise its separate sovereignty," that the states then joined a confederation that "expressly" kept their sovereignty, and that the federal government "is subject to the two great principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence." The text adds a third principle, "the law of compact." Its list of grievances names the Constitution's protections for slavery: the three-fifths clause, the twenty-year slave-trade provision and the fugitive clause.¹⁶

Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president, spoke at Savannah on March 21, 1861, in what is called the Cornerstone speech. He said that Jefferson and the leading statesmen of the founding generation held the "prevailing ideas" that "the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature," and that the new Confederate government was "founded upon exactly the opposite idea," resting on "the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man."¹⁷ Stephens did not name the Declaration in that passage. He called the founders' assumption of the equality of the races "an error," which puts him on the opposite side from Lincoln's reading at Springfield four years earlier. The text circulates from a newspaper report of the speech (the Savannah Republican of March 22, 1861, which this lesson did not open), so anyone quoting it at length should check a second printing.

Teachers and reporters can set these texts beside Lincoln's. Each reads the same document and reaches a different conclusion about who is covered and what it requires, and each should be cited from the full text and attributed to its author.

The Declaration in the First State Constitutions

The state constitutions of 1776 and 1777 treated the Declaration as a founding fact. New York's constitution, adopted at Kingston on April 20, 1777, quotes the Declaration of Independence in full in its preamble and notes New York's own approval of July 9, 1776.¹⁸ Vermont's constitution of July 8, 1777, took the principle of natural equality in a direction the national document did not: its first article barred holding men past 21 and women past 18 as servants or slaves.¹⁹ The lesson on colony and state constitutions covers both texts.

That is the earliest example of what later speakers did with the Declaration: quote it as the first premise of a new argument. The Vermont framers, the Seneca Falls signers and Lincoln each started from the same sentence.

The Declaration Around the World

David Armitage's The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard University Press, 2007) counts more than one hundred declarations of independence written since 1776, with examples from Haiti to Vietnam and from Venezuela to Rhodesia.²⁰ The Chief Justice's report calls the Declaration "one of the most widely read and emulated political documents in history."⁶ This lesson has not read each of those declarations and takes the count from Armitage's publisher's page.

How Courts and Judges Have Used the Declaration

The Declaration is not part of the Constitution, and it is not enforceable the way a statute is. In his 2025 Year-End Report, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that it "was then, and remains today, a statement of national aspirations, not a codification of enforceable legal obligations." He added that it has nonetheless "played a signal role in the development of the Nation's constitutional, statutory, and common law." The report notes that the United States Code prints the Declaration on the first pages of the Organic Laws of the United States, and that Congress did not treat it as one of the "general and permanent laws." It cites 44 Stat. 1 and 44 Stat. 778 (1926) for that point, and it quotes Justice Scalia describing the Declaration as "aspirations" and "philosophizing."⁶

Individual justices have still cited it. Justice Thomas, concurring in Adarand Constructors v. Pena (1995), wrote that a race-based program was "at war with the principle of inherent equality that underlies and infuses our Constitution," and cited the Declaration.²¹ In his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), he argued that the majority rejected "the idea, captured in our Declaration of Independence, that human dignity is innate."²² Those are opinions by one justice, in separate writings, about different questions, and neither is a holding about the Declaration.

The report ties the two documents together with a statement by James Wilson, then a delegate to the Pennsylvania ratifying convention. On December 4, 1787, Wilson said the Declaration's key passage was "the broad basis on which our independence was placed," and that "on the same certain and solid foundation this system [the Constitution] is erected."⁶ The next lesson looks at how scholars and judges have argued about that connection.

The Chief Justice's report also points to the Declaration's ninth grievance, that the king "has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries," and says the Constitution answered it with life tenure and salary protection.⁶ The report draws a line from that clause of the Declaration to the tenure and salary protections of Article III. The report also notes that Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson stressed that "The law regards man as man," and that the later decisions in Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 carried the ideals forward.⁶

July 4, 2026

The 250th anniversary fell on Saturday, July 4, 2026. This lesson reports the observance through news and agency sources. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported a time capsule buried on Independence Mall to be opened in 2276, heat near 100 degrees, and a storm that delayed an evening concert, and WPVI (6abc) carried the same three facts in its live coverage that day, with the Associated Press credited for the time capsule story.²³ The National Archives announced, in a June 17, 2026 press release, a July 4 ceremony from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. with a dramatic reading of the Declaration by educators in period dress, its special exhibit "Free and Independent," and the original on display. Those are announcements made before the day, and this lesson did not find an Archives report of how the ceremony went.²⁴ The Chief Justice's report, issued on December 31, 2025, used the occasion to reflect on the document.⁶

What This Lesson Could Not Confirm

• The dates of the first newspaper printings and public readings in 1776, which come from one secondary source, and the date of Baltimore's printing.
• The current count of surviving Dunlap broadsides, which the Archives gives as 26.
• The exact date of Lincoln's fragment on the Constitution and the Union.
• Accounts of the 2026 observances beyond the news reports and the Archives announcement cited.
• Scholarly claims about how the Declaration shaped other nations' declarations, which rest on Armitage's summary.

Key Documents

Dates were checked against the sources in the footnotes.

How Idaho Law Uses the Declaration

Idaho's Constitution echoes the Declaration's language in article I, section 1: "All men are by nature free and equal, and have certain inalienable rights, among which are enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing and protecting property; pursuing happiness and securing safety."²⁵

Idaho Code section 33-1602 also names the Declaration. Its list of principles includes "The self-evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights," and the consent of the governed. Its list of key documents students must understand begins with the Declaration, and another subsection treats slavery as antithetical to the Declaration's principles.²⁶ The statute was amended in 2025 and 2026, so a reader citing a subsection should check the current text.²⁶ This lesson reports the statute's words and takes no position on how it should be taught.

Using this in reporting and civic life

The council member planning a July 4 reading

Council member Alma Rowe plans a public reading of the Declaration. She uses the National Archives transcription so the spelling and capitalization match, and she tells the audience that the 1776 broadside was printed on July 4 and the parchment signed on August 2.²⁷¹ Readings in 1776 followed the same pattern: public, spoken and tied to a place.²

The reporter checking a signing claim

Reporter Hugh Daley is told that "all fifty-six signed on July 4." He checks the Archives history page. Congress adopted the Declaration on July 4, ordered a parchment copy on July 19, and recorded the signing on August 2, with some delegates signing later.¹ His story gives the three dates.

The clerk answering "is the Declaration law?"

Clerk Naomi Voss gets the question from a resident. She points to the Chief Justice's 2025 report: the Declaration is printed in the Organic Laws of the United States, it states aspirations, and it is not a codification of enforceable obligations. She notes that individual justices cite it in separate opinions.⁶²¹

The teacher comparing Lincoln and Taney

Teacher Owen Pruitt sets Taney's reading in Dred Scott beside Lincoln's reply of 1857 and asks students to underline the words each man quotes from the Declaration. Both quote the same phrase and reach opposite conclusions about who it covers.⁸⁹

The editor checking a Lincoln quote

Editor Tess Marchand sees "the picture was made for the apple" attributed to the Gettysburg Address. She corrects the source: the line comes from an undated fragment, traditionally assigned to January 1861.¹⁰

The editor checking a "locked in a vault" claim

Editor Wilma Garrity has a draft saying the original Declaration "has always been on public display." She checks the Archives history. The parchment spent part of the Second World War away from the public: in December 1941 it went by train to the Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, with armed Secret Service agents in the neighboring compartments.¹ She changes "always" to "for most of its history" and cites the page.

Related lessons: The Declaration and the Constitution; The Civil War Amendments.

Related Lessons

Lesson 5, The Text, Clause by Clause; Lesson 7, Declarations of Rights; Lesson 9, The Declaration and the Constitution. For the amendments Lincoln urged the country toward, see The Civil War Amendments and Voting and Later Amendments.

Sources & Further Reading

Primary Sources

• National Archives, The Declaration of Independence: A History
• National Archives, Declaration of Independence transcription
• Massachusetts Historical Society, Abigail Adams to John Adams, July 21, 1776
• Founders Online, Jefferson to Weightman, June 24, 1826
• Founders Online, Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825
• Lincoln, Peoria speech
• Lincoln, Reply to the Dred Scott Decision
• Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
• Dred Scott v. Sandford
• Douglass, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?
• King, I Have a Dream
• Adarand Constructors v. Pena
• Obergefell v. Hodges
• Chief Justice Roberts, 2025 Year-End Report
• Idaho Code 33-1602

Secondary Sources and Further Reading

• Utah Valley University, Sharing the Declaration
• National Park Service, Signers of the Declaration of Sentiments
• Harvard WCFIA, Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History
• Dickinson College, Lincoln, Fragment on the Constitution and the Union
• American Battlefield Trust, Cornerstone Speech
• Philadelphia Inquirer, July 4, 2026 report
• National Archives, Freedom 250

Footnotes

1. National Archives, The Declaration of Independence: A History, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-history. Source for the Dunlap printing on the night of July 4, copies dispatched on July 5, the 26 known Dunlap broadsides (21 in American institutions, 2 in British and 3 private), the July 9 approval by New York, the July 19 order to engross, the signing recorded on August 2, the 56 signers, Timothy Matlack as "probably" the engrosser, the January 1777 Goddard printing with signers' names, the 1814 removal during the British attack, the 1876 Centennial exhibit and reading by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia (grandson of the signer), and the wartime move to Fort Knox.
2. Utah Valley University, Center for Constitutional Studies, Sharing the Declaration, https://www.uvu.edu/ccs/civic_thought_leadership/sharing_the_declaration.html. A secondary account. It dates the first newspaper printing (Pennsylvania Evening Post) to July 6, the Pennsylvania Packet to July 8, John Nixon's reading at the State House Yard at noon on July 8, readings in Trenton and Easton the same day, New York on Washington's orders on July 9, Boston on July 18, Savannah on August 10, and a total of 29 newspapers and 14 broadsides by the end of August. It gives conflicting dates (July 9 or 10) for Baltimore's Maryland Journal. This lesson could not check these dates against the original newspapers.
3. Massachusetts Historical Society, Adams Family Correspondence, Abigail Adams to John Adams, July 21, 1776, https://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php/view/AFC02d034. She reports that Colonel Crafts read the Declaration from the balcony of the State House in Boston and that "the kings arms were taken down."
4. Founders Online, Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5212. A recollection written 49 years after the event.
5. Founders Online, Thomas Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-6179. Written about fifty years after the Declaration, to decline an invitation to the anniversary celebration in Washington.
6. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., 2025 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary (December 31, 2025), https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2025year-endreport.pdf. Source for the statement that the Declaration "was then, and remains today, a statement of national aspirations, not a codification of enforceable legal obligations"; its place in the Organic Laws of the United States rather than the general and permanent laws (44 Stat. 1 and 44 Stat. 778 (1926)); the count of 27 grievances; the 56 signers; the quotations from Wilson, Lincoln, Mill, Anthony, King, Harlan and Coolidge used below; and the discussion of Scalia's remark in A Matter of Interpretation at 134. A Chief Justice's year-end report is a public statement and does not decide cases.
7. National Park Service, Lincoln Home National Historic Site, Peoria Speech, October 16, 1854, https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm.
8. Cornell Legal Information Institute, Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/60/393. Chief Justice Taney's opinion; Justices Curtis and McLean dissented.
9. Teaching American History, Abraham Lincoln, Reply to the Dred Scott Decision, June 26, 1857, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/reply-to-the-dred-scott-decision/.
10. Dickinson College, House Divided Project, Fragment on the Constitution and the Union, https://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/lincoln/fragment-on-the-constitution-january-1861/. The fragment is undated and traditionally assigned to January 1861.
11. National Park Service, Lincoln Home National Historic Site, Gettysburg Address, https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/gettysburgaddress.htm.
12. PBS, Africans in America, Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (July 5, 1852), https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2927t.html; and Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/. Delivered at Rochester for the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society.
13. National Park Service, Women's Rights National Historical Park, Declaration of Sentiments, https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/declaration-of-sentiments.htm.
14. National Park Service, Women's Rights National Historical Park, Signers of the Declaration of Sentiments, https://home.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/signers-of-the-declaration-of-sentiments.htm; and National Archives Prologue blog, https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/?p=30255. The convention met July 19 and 20, 1848; 68 women and 32 men signed.
15. NPR, I Have a Dream Speech, In Its Entirety, https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety. Delivered August 28, 1963.
16. Avalon Project, Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina, December 1860, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp.
17. American Battlefield Trust, Alexander Stephens, Cornerstone Speech, March 21, 1861, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech.
18. Avalon Project, Constitution of New York, 1777, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/ny01.asp. The preamble recites the Declaration of Independence and the convention's approval of July 9, 1776.
19. Avalon Project, Constitution of Vermont, July 8, 1777, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/vt01.asp.
20. Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard University Press, 2007), https://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/declaration-independence-global-history. The page says more than one hundred declarations of independence have been written since 1776.
21. Cornell Legal Information Institute, Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200 (1995), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/515/200. Justice Thomas, concurring, wrote that the paternalism of the program "is at war with the principle of inherent equality that underlies and infuses our Constitution" and cited the Declaration.
22. Cornell Legal Information Institute, Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/14-556. Justice Thomas, dissenting, wrote that the majority "rejects the idea, captured in our Declaration of Independence, that human dignity is innate."
23. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 4, 2026, https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/july-fourth-philadelphia-250-parkway-storms-20260704.html. A news report on the Philadelphia observance, including a time capsule to be opened in 2276, heat and storms. WPVI (6abc.com), "America's 250th celebrations in Philadelphia despite extreme heat," live updates of July 4 to 5, 2026, https://6abc.com/live-updates/philadelphia-celebrates-july-4th-america-250/19421751/, confirms the time capsule burial to be opened in 2276, temperatures around 100 degrees and the evacuation of the One Philly concert for an approaching thunderstorm. The Inquirer piece is a news account and this lesson did not check every detail in it.
24. National Archives, Freedom 250, https://www.archives.gov/freedom250. An agency announcement describing a July 4 morning ceremony with a reading of the Declaration by "historic interpreters" and the exhibit "Free and Independent." The Archives press release of June 17, 2026, https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2026/nr26-3, gives the program: ceremony 10 a.m. to 11 a.m., and a dramatic reading by educators in period dress portraying Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Jefferson, James Forten, Franklin, Hancock and Ned Hector. This lesson did not confirm how events went on the day.
25. Idaho Legislature, Idaho Constitution art. I, sec. 1, https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idconst/ArtI/Sect1.
26. Idaho Legislature, Idaho Code sec. 33-1602, https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/Title33/T33CH16/SECT33-1602. The history line ends "am. 2025, ch. 279" and "am. 2026, ch. 317." Check the current text before relying on a subsection number.
27. National Archives, Declaration of Independence: A Transcription, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.