Photo Credit: Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.The image shows Thomas Jefferson (right), Benjamin Franklin (left), and John Adams (center) meet at Jefferson’s lodgings, on the corner of Seventh and High (Market) streets in Philadelphia, to review a draft of the Declaration of Independence.
A rare handwritten copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence – thought to be only the second such parchment known so far – has been discovered in southern England.
The manuscript found in the West Sussex Record Office in Chichester, through the work of two Harvard researchers, Danielle Allen and Emily Sneff, has aroused curiosity as to when the manuscript would have been produced, and how it ended up in southern England.
The manuscript will go to the British Library for hyperspectral imaging, a technique that reveals what a naked human eye cannot see.
The only other ceremonial parchment of the Declaration of Independence is the 1776 document displayed at the National Archives in Washington D.C.
According to Reuters, the document masurs 24 by 30 inches (60 by 76 cms),and researchers believe it could have been written in the tumultuous 1780s, probably in in New York or Philadelphia.
The document may have been originally owned by Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, who was known as the “radical Duke” because he supported the American colonists during the American Revolution, a report by the news agency says.
Back at Harvard Emily Sneff, a researcher with the Declaration Resources Project, who initially began the enquiry in 2015 and Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor, have since been focused on a two-year journey into American history.
“We knew we had a mystery,” said Allen, also director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. “We had a big, big mystery,” she said according to Harvard Gazette account headlined “A Hidden Declaration.”
“There are three key questions we want to answer,” Allen continued. “One is: Can we date this parchment based on the material evidence? Second: Who commissioned it, and why? And third: How did it get to England?”
While several copies of the Declaration of Independence were produced after the July 4, 1776, signing, discovery of a parchment manuscript is rare.
“You have the names of everyone who signed the original. You can pick out Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, James Wilson. You have the array of names of the Founding Fathers of the United States,” said West Sussex County Archivist Wendy Walker, according to another report.
