The Declaration of Independence is remarkably brief for a document that created a nation. Perhaps that’s because its origins were rather humble. In the summer of 1776, the Continental Congress assigned a committee to draft a statement to accompany a vote for independence, announcing a break from Britain and laying out the reasoning for it. But in the writing, it came to embody an ambitious vision for self-rule, liberty and equality. Over the next 250 years, its words have echoed in courtrooms, classrooms and even the camps of freedom fighters around the globe. Here’s the breakdown.
90 predecessors
Colonial governments, grand juries and community groups issued at least 90 separate declarations urging secession between April and July 1776. North Carolina and Rhode Island were followed by New York’s General Committee of Mechanics and Pennsylvania’s Elk Battalion militia. The tipping point came on May 15, when Virginia instructed its congressional delegates to support independence. The Continental Congress appointed the “Committee of Five” to draft a declaration in June and approved the final version on July 4, 1776.
27 grievances
The declaration’s largest section consists of complaints against King George III, like denying jury trials and billeting troops in colonists’ homes. Parliament gets blamed, too, nine times, named only as “others.” Authored by Thomas Jefferson, with 47 edits from Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and others on the committee, the document totals 1,321 words with 105 commas. Congress voted to cut about a fourth of the committee’s draft.
42,088 musket balls
That’s how much ammunition New Yorkers made by melting down an equine statue of King George. A crowd had removed it from Bowling Green in lower Manhattan on July 9, 1776, stirred by a public reading of the declaration. Philadelphia printer John Dunlap had worked overnight on July 4 to create 200 broadsides of the document to be distributed and read in public squares and military camps. The text was printed in 27 colonial newspapers that month and in British dailies that August.
10.2x larger
John Hancock’s signature is that much bigger than the four smallest names like William Paca. In fairness, the president of Congress had no point of comparison as the first to sign the “fairly engrossed” copy on August 2, 1776. At that scale, only 34 of 56 signatures would have fit. Names were arranged by colony from north to south in six columns. One signer recanted that fall after he was captured by the British, though his name — and all but two signatories — was withheld until 1777 fearing reprisals. Six later signed the Constitution.
5 hours apart
Jefferson died just after noon on July 4, 1826. Adams, his close collaborator, died five hours later and 562 miles away. Once divided by politics, the two close friends and former presidents had reconciled and exchanged 128 letters over their last 14 years. Congress instituted “Independence Day” in 1870 and made it a paid federal holiday in 1938.
“We believe — and we believe it so deeply that Americans know these words by heart — we believe “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
— Ronald Reagan
67°F
The engrossed declaration has been kept at this temperature in a sealed case at the National Archives since 1952, at 40 percent humidity to protect its sheepskin parchment and iron gall ink (made from bulbous growths on oak trees) from cracking or flaking. A $3 million NASA imaging system tracks damage invisible to the naked eye. Previously, it was kept at the Patent Office, Library of Congress and Fort Knox, during WWII.
9 in 10 Americans
The declaration’s principles have been “a force for good worldwide,” 92 percent agree. Only 45 percent can identify the document as the source of its most famous passage, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” More than 120 similar declarations have since been issued worldwide, from Argentina to Kazakhstan, Algeria to the Philippines. In 1945, Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh quoted America’s declaration to open his independence speech.
This story appears in the July/August 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine under the headline “Independence, inked.”* Learn more about how to subscribe**.*