Posted on 08/02/2026 4:37:25 AM PDT by DFG
On August 2, 1776, members of Congress affix their signatures to an enlarged copy of the Declaration of Independence.
Fifty-six congressional delegates in total signed the document, including some who were not present at the vote approving the declaration. The delegates signed by state from North to South, beginning with Josiah Bartlett of New Hampshire and ending with George Walton of Georgia. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania and James Duane, Robert Livingston and John Jay of New York refused to sign. Carter Braxton of Virginia; Robert Morris of Pennsylvania; George Reed of Delaware; and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina opposed the document but signed in order to give the impression of a unanimous Congress. Five delegates were absent: Generals George Washington, John Sullivan, James Clinton and Christopher Gadsden and Virginia Governor Patrick Henry.
Exactly one month before the signing of the document, Congress had accepted a resolution put forward by Richard Henry Lee that stated “Resolved: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”
Congress adopted the more poetic Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, two days later, on July 4. The president of Congress, John Hancock, and its secretary, Charles Thompson, immediately signed the handwritten draft, which was dispatched to nearby printers. On July 19, Congress decided to produce a handwritten copy to bear all the delegates’ signatures. Secretary Thompson’s assistant, Philadelphia Quaker and merchant Timothy Matlack, penned the draft.
News of the Declaration of Independence arrived in London eight days later, on August 10. The draft bearing the delegates’ signatures was first printed on January 18 of the following year by Baltimore printer Mary Katharine Goddard.
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Elbridge Gerry, Oliver Wolcott, Lewis Morris, Thomas McKean, and Matthew Thornton signed the Declaration of Independence after August 2, 1776.
Thomas McKean (Delaware) signed the Declaration of Independence January 1777. He was the last to sign it.
There were 7 new members of Congress who were added and signed the Declaration of Independence after July 4, 1776.
John Jay’s father/grandfather was a Huguenot who changed his name to Jay so that the Catholic king’s soldiers could not find him and fled for his life from France to England ...
The English crown sponsored him to the new world and helped him settle in the colonies...
When John Jay was asked why he did not take up arms against the English soldiers, he said “Why would I do that? If it was not for the English king, my family would not have survived when the French were hunting for them”
My own Huguenot family in the colonies did the same. When they fled to England, the English crown had paid for their passage and gave them 40 pounds to settle in New York...
They also were reluctant to traitorously turn on the very people who saved their lives...
The States were declared as independent nation states, with equivalent status to the State of Great Britain. That is why they were called states and not called counties. The union of states was similar to the UN now.
Today is also the anniversary of the death of Warren G. Harding, who was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge, the only President to have been born on the Fourth of July.
All 13 states were named in the treaty of peace in 1783, because the British claimed to be uncertain if the United States would remain a single country.
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