Signing the Declaration of Independence: Hang Together or Hang Separately
Friday, August 2, 1776
The declaration of independence being engrossed and compared at the table was signed by the members.
One sentence. That’s all that the journals of the Continental Congress have about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Then it was on to other business. The members of Congress themselves didn’t even mention it in their diaries or letters.
But there are plenty of stories about the signing, such as that Benjamin Franklin supposedly said, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall hang separately.” Or that John Hancock said that he signed his name large so that the king would be able to read it without his spectacles. Or that Stephen Hopkins, whose signature is quite wobbly because he had palsy and couldn’t hold his hand very steady, said, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.” Or the story that James Thacher, an army doctor, heard about Benjamin Harrison and Elbridge Gerry:
Mr. Harrison, a delegate from Virginia, is a large portly man—Mr. Gerry of Massachusetts is slender and spare. A little time after the solemn transaction of signing the instrument [i.e., the Declaration], Mr. Harrison said smilingly to Mr. Gerry, “When the hanging scene comes to be exhibited, I shall have the advantage over you, on account of my size. All will be over with me in a moment, but you will be kicking in the air half an hour after I am gone.”
Whether any or all of those stories are true, I’m not sure, but they make good stories at any rate. And, all joking aside, the comments from Franklin and Harrison about hanging were quite relevant; by declaring independence, they had committed treason, and the penalty for treason was death by hanging.
There is a common misunderstanding that the declaration was signed on July 4, 1776; in reality, it was adopted — that is, the text was finalized and approved — on that day, but it wasn’t signed until August 2, after it had been written out in clear, beautiful handwriting (the term they used was “engrossed”) on the big sheet of parchment that is now on display in Washington, D.C.
To make up for the fact that almost nothing was said about the signing of the Declaration on August 2, John Adams made some comments about the Declaration itself in a letter he wrote that day:
Is not the Change We have seen astonishing? Would any Man, two Years ago have believed it possible, to accomplish such an Alteration in the Prejudices, Passions, Sentiments, and Principles of these thirteen little States as to make every one of them completely republican, and to make them own [i.e., acknowledge] it? Idolatry to Monarchs, and servility to Aristocratical Pride, was never so totally eradicated, from so many Minds in so short a Time.
There’s something in those few sentences for us to contemplate. What seems impossible may not actually be so. We may someday be surprised by the results of our own seemingly puny or futile efforts.
Sources
- Journals of the Continental Congress, 5:626.
- Military Journal during the American Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783, by James Thacher, 48.
- “John Adams to Richard Cranch, 2 August 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-02-02-0045. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 2, June 1776 – March 1778, ed. L. H. Butterfield. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 73–74.]