A rare copy of the Declaration of United States Independence was found at a British Achive with papers of an aristocrat who supported the rebels, has been authenticated, officials revealed.
The manuscript was discovered in 2017 at the West Sussex Record Office in the southern English city of Chichester by a team of researchers led by two Harvard University academics.
After much research, tests supported the hypothesis that it was produced in the 1780s, West Sussex County Council said earlier this week, just a few years after the declaration was issued in 1776.
Earlier this week, The Matlack Declaration said, “ The document is the only other contemporary manuscript copy of the Declaration of Independence on parchment apart from the signed copy at the National Archives in Washington DC”
There are other printed and handwritten copies on paper but the Sussex Declaration, as it has been dubbed, and the Matlack Declaration in Washington are the only two known ceremonial parchment copies of the declaration.
Multi-spectral imaging of the document “revealed a date beneath an erasure on the document” which reads either “July 4, 178″ or July 4, 179”, the researchers revealed. The fourth digit for the year may have been permanently erased.
The Harvard Gazette said the clerk drawing up the document was “inexperienced” as the date was written on a slight downward slant and the year of the production of the document was used rather than the year in which the declaration was enacted.
Written on July 4, 1776, the declaration states that 13 American colonies then at war with Britain would regard themselves as independent sovereign states no longer under British rule.
July 4 is celebrated as Independence Day in the United States.
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