Two Harvard University researchers announced Friday that they have found a second parchment manuscript copy of the Declaration of Independence in a tiny records office in southern England.

The only other parchment copy is maintained by the National Archives in Washington, D.C., researchers Emily Sneff and Danielle Allen said in a statement.

The newly discovered document — which the two have dated to the 1780s — was found in the town of Chichester archives, and is believed to have originally belonged to Duke of Richmond who was known as the “Radical Duke,’’ for the support he gave to Americans during the Revolutionary War, the researchers said.

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The parchment was likely made in New York or Philadelphia. The researchers are still trying to determine the person who wrote the document and who paid for the foundational document of the United States to be copied.

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The signatories on the Sussex version of the document are not broken down by state, something that distinguished it from the Declaration in the National Archives, the researchers said.

In an academic paper, the researchers say the document probably was commissioned by James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who later helped draft the Constitution and was among the original justices appointed to the Supreme Court.

“The team hypothesizes that this detail supported efforts, made by Wilson and his allies during the Constitutional Convention and ratification process, to argue that the authority of the Declaration rested on a unitary national people, and not on a federation of states,’’ the researchers wrote in the statement.

The team, working with British officials, is working to carefully test the document in a way that will not damage the parchment.

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According to the National Archives, the Massachusetts Historical Commission holds one of 26 copies of the Declaration of Independence prepared by John Dunlap, the printer for the Congressional Congress, after its signing on July 4, 1776.

John R. Ellement can be reached at ellement@globe.com . Follow him on Twitter @JREbosglobe</s>Harvard University researchers say they’ve discovered a second parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence.</s>One of only two parchment copies of America’s Declaration of Independence has been discovered in a record office in West Sussex, filed away without fanfare for half a century.

Researchers from Harvard University were shocked to unearth the manuscript while compiling a database of later reproductions of the declaration. The only other parchment copy is kept in the National Archives in Washington DC.

According to the researchers, staff at the West Sussex Record Office, in Chichester, had not taken a particular interest in the copy, which was produced ten years after the declaration and signed by the original signatories, before the team from Harvard got in touch. They are now said to be “working on a valuation”.</s>BOSTON (AP) - Harvard University researchers say they've discovered a second parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence.

The Boston Globe reported Friday researchers Emily Sneff and Danielle Allen found the copy in a records office in southern England.

The only other parchment copy is maintained by the National Archives in Washington.

Undated handout photo of a parchment manuscript of the US Declaration of Independence, believed to date from the 1780s and found in a records office in Chichester, southern England. Harvard University researchers say they've discovered a second parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence, The Boston Globe reported Friday, April 21, 2017. (West Sussex Record Office Add Mss 8981 via AP).

The two dated the document to the 1780s. They say it was found in the archives in Chichester, and is believed to have originally belonged to a Duke of Richmond known as the "Radical Duke" for his support of Americans during the Revolutionary War.

The researchers said the signers on the Sussex version are not broken down by state, something that distinguishes it from the copy in the National Archives.

The parchment was likely made in New York or Philadelphia.</s>A Harvard University research pair announced on Friday that they'd discovered only the second parchment manuscript copy of the pivotal document in a small provincial records office in Chichester, southern England. (Until now, the only known parchment copy was the 1776 document preserved in the National Archives in Washington, DC.)

It is now the only other known 18th century, handwritten copy of the document that formally launched the bloody separation of the American colonies from England.

The discovery began with a short listing from the catalog of the West Sussex Record Office, which read, "Manuscript copy, on parchment, of the Declaration in Congress of the thirteen United States of America.

The listing caught the eye of Emily Sneff, a researcher with Harvard's Declaration Resources Project, in August 2015. She told the Harvard Gazette she didn't think much of it at first, but the words "manuscript on parchment" intrigued her.

After seeing images of the document sent by the English archive, Sneff and fellow Harvard researcher, professor of government Danielle Allen, would come to realize that they had a very, very significant find on their hands.

The new discovery, which the team is calling the Sussex Declaration, isn't an official government document, but a display copy commissioned sometime in the 1780s, the researchers say. They believe it was probably commissioned by one of the drafters of the US Constitution, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who would go on to be one of the young United States' first Supreme Court Justices. How it got to England remains a mystery, but the copy is believed to have ended up in the hands of Charles Lennox, third duke of Richmond, who was known as the "radical duke" for his support of American colonists during the Revolutionary War, the Boston Globe reports.

A notable difference between this parchment copy of the declaration and the official government document is the order of names. In the official document, the names of the signers are grouped by state. In this copy, however, the order is deliberately jumbled.

"The team hypothesizes that this detail supported efforts, made by Wilson and his allies during the Constitutional Convention and ratification process, to argue that the authority of the Declaration rested on a unitary national people, and not on a federation of states,'' Sneff and Allen wrote in the statement.

Allen explained to the Harvard Gazette that one of the major political debates of the early days of the new American union was whether it rested on the authority of the people or the authority of the states.

"[T]he Sussex Declaration scrambles the names so they are no longer grouped by state," Allen said. "It is the only version of the Declaration that does that, with the exception of an engraving from 1836 that derives from it. This is really a symbolic way of saying we are all one people, or ‘one community,' to quote James Wilson."</s>BOSTON (AP) — Harvard University researchers say they’ve discovered a second parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence.

The Boston Globe reported Friday researchers Emily Sneff and Danielle Allen found the copy in a records office in southern England.

The only other parchment copy is maintained by the National Archives in Washington.

The two dated the document to the 1780s. They say it was found in the archives in Chichester, and is believed to have originally belonged to a Duke of Richmond known as the “Radical Duke” for his support of Americans during the Revolutionary War.

The researchers said the signers on the Sussex version are not broken down by state, something that distinguishes it from the Declaration kept in the National Archives.

The parchment was likely made in New York or Philadelphia.</s>When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to visit a tiny records office in southern England because it claims to have a copy of the Declaration of Independence, a decent respect for history requires investigation.

On Friday two Harvard University researchers announced they had found a parchment copy of the declaration, only the second parchment copy known to exist besides the one kept in the National Archives in Washington DC. Professor Danielle Allen and researcher Emily Sneff presented their findings on the document, known as “The Sussex Declaration”, at a conference at Yale on Friday, and published initial research online.



Sneff found her first clue of the parchment in August 2015, while compiling records for a university database. “I was just looking for copies of the Declaration of Independence in British archives,” Sneff told the Guardian.

But the listing, for the West Sussex record office, struck Sneff as odd because it mentioned parchment, a material suggesting a document made for a special occasion and not simply a broadside copy.

“I reached out to them a bit skeptically,” Sneff said. “The description was a little vague but once we saw an image and talked to a conservator we started to get excited.”

Before Sneff asked, the British officials had never taken a close look at the parchment. They had received it in 1956 from a local man, who worked with a law firm that represented the dukes of Richmond. “The closer we looked at it there were just things that made it a clearly unique and mysterious document,” Sneff said.

Allen and Sneff first tried to deduce when and where the parchment was made by analyzing handwriting, spelling errors and parchment styles and preparation. They concluded it dated to the 1780s, and was produced in America, most likely in New York or Philadelphia.

Their next question proved more difficult: who was the man behind the parchment? Allen and Sneff believe the leading candidate was James Wilson, a Pennsylvania delegate to the continental congress, one of six men to sign both the declaration and constitution, and, later, one of the original supreme court justices. The researchers argue that Wilson, who argued vociferously for a popularly-elected president and separation of powers, played a more influential role in American history than most historians have recognized.

The clue that led them to Wilson, Sneff said, was a stark anomaly on the parchment compared to its counterpart in Washington DC and later copies: “The names of the signers are all scrambled.”

Unlike previously known copies of the declaration, which have signatures grouped by states, the Sussex copy has its signatures in a patterned jumble. Sneff and Allen hypothesize that the appearance of randomness was deliberate and symbolic, part of a nationalist argument that the United States was founded by citizens, each created equal, and not by a looser confederation of states.

Wilson drew the researchers’ attention, Sneff said, because of he repeatedly “invoked the declaration but with the understanding that the declaration was signed by one community, one group of individuals, that they were not enumerated by states.”

Michael Meranze, a professor of the revolutionary era at the University of California Los Angeles, called the evidence behind the parchment’s 1780s American origin “very persuasive”, and the Wilson hypothesis “plausible” if uncertain.

“There was a huge debate over the constitution, about whether it was a compact of states or of the people,” he said. “Wilson was very much in favor of a nation that claimed its direct roots on popular sovereignty, even if he was simultaneously an elitist in many ways.”

Meranze added that while he also found it convincing that the signatures were disordered deliberately, he cautioned that it was difficult to argue who did so or why without more evidence. “We tend to forget these documents were contested and put to different uses, and not simply monuments,” he said. “It’s a fascinating discovery.”

Sneff and Allen plan to publish their first paper this year in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and are still working to find more clues about who had the parchment created. They also face a third confounding riddle: how did the the parchment end up in Chichester?

Copies of the declaration made their way to England in the wake of its original 1776 signing, but the Sussex Declaration was made sometime in the next decade, years when America’s leading statesmen were at odds over a post-war financial crisis, an armed uprising and an uncertain constitution. Somehow the parchment ended up in Britain, possibly in the possession of the dukes of Richmond.

Sneff said she is hoping to gain access to the papers of the dukes to trace the declaration’s history, possibly as far back as Charles Lennox, a contemporary of George III who was called “the radical duke” because he supported American colonists in their rebellion against the king and parliament.

“It would be nice to associate this document with the radical duke,” Sneff said.</s>Two Harvard researchers on Friday presented their discovery of a rare parchment manuscript of the Declaration of Independence discovered in a small town in southern England last year. "The Sussex Declaration," as the document has been dubbed, is believed to have been made in America in the 1780s. It is one of only two known parchment copies of the Declaration worldwide.

"I was just looking for copies of the Declaration of Independence in British archives," said researcher Emily Sneff, when she noticed a record office listing mentioned "parchment," suggesting a rare find. "I reached out to them a bit skeptically," Sneff recalled. "The description was a little vague, but once we saw an image and talked to a conservator we started to get excited."

The Sussex Declaration differs from the parchment copy at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., mainly in the order of the signers' names. In the Washington copy, the names are organized by state; in the Sussex copy, they are not. "The list of names was intentionally scrambled," Sneff suggested, "to drive home the point that the signers of the Declaration of Independence signed as individuals, as a community" rather than solely as representatives of states. Bonnie Kristian</s>US historians have found a rare parchment of the US Declaration of Independence hidden away in a small records office in Sussex, England.Researchers Emily Sneff and Danielle Allen announced their discovery at a Yale conference on Friday. They published their initial research online.The newly discovered parchment of America's formative text is believed to date back to the 1780s, which they say sheds light on the tumultuous years the US experienced after the Revolutionary War.The parchment is believed to have belonged to the Duke of Richmond, known as the 'Radical Duke' due to his support for the American colonists against the monarchy and British parliament during the war.Working as part of Harvard's 'Declaration Resources Project', which is seeking to create a database containing every known iteration of the declaration, Sneff and Allen first stumbled upon a listing for the parchment in 2015, but thought little of it at the time."I'd found vague descriptions of other copies of the Declaration that turned out to be 19th century reproductions of the signed parchment in the National Archives, so that was what I was expecting," said Sneff. "What struck me as significant was that it said manuscript on parchment," she said.Sneff then contacted the West Sussex records office, which mailed her images of the historic document."When I looked at it closely, I started to see details, like names that weren't in the right order - John Hancock isn't listed first, there's a mark at the top that looks like an erasure, the text has very little punctuation in it - and it's in a handwriting I hadn't seen before," she said."As those details started adding up, I brought it to my research partner's attention and we realized this was different from any other copy we had seen."Upon studying the document, the two concluded that it was likely produced in the 1780s, some years after the original 1776 declaration.The parchment was likely made in either New York or Philadelphia, though researchers are still trying to determine who wrote and paid for the document.They think it may have been commissioned by James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who later helped draft the Constitution and was among the original justices appointed to the Supreme Court.</s>BOSTON -- Harvard University researchers say they’ve discovered a second parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence.

The Boston Globe reported Friday researchers Emily Sneff and Danielle Allen found the copy in a records office in southern England.

The only other parchment copy is maintained by the National Archives in Washington.

Sneff discovered the copy in August 2015, at first not thinking much of the document, according to the Harvard Gazette.

“When I looked at it closely, I started to see details, like names that weren’t in the right order — John Hancock isn’t listed first, there’s a mark at the top that looks like an erasure, the text has very little punctuation in it — and it’s in a handwriting I hadn’t seen before,” she told the Gazette. “As those details started adding up, I brought it to Danielle’s attention and we realized this was different from any other copy we had seen.”

The two dated the document to the 1780s. They say it was found in the archives in Chichester, England, and is believed to have originally belonged to a Duke of Richmond known as the “Radical Duke” for his support of Americans during the Revolutionary War.

The researchers said the signers on the Sussex version are not broken down by state, something that distinguishes it from the copy in the National Archives.

The parchment was likely made in New York or Philadelphia.
A second parchment manuscript of the United States Declaration of Independence is discovered by Harvard University researchers, in a record office in Chichester, United Kingdom.