70 HAYS—DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. (Jan. 19, 
Assemblies, Conventions and Committees, or Councils of Safety, 
and to the several Commanding Officers of the Continental Troops ; 
and that it be proclaimed in each of the United States, and at the 
head of the Army’’ (American Archives, 4th Series, Vol. vi, p. 
1731; also Journal of Congress, 1776, p. 247). 
The Declaration, in accordance with the above order, was then 
authenticated by writing under it ‘‘Signed by Order and in 
Behalf of the Congress, John Hancock, President. Attest, Charles 
Thomson, Secretary.’’ And the original manuscript was, in all 
likelihood as I have elsewhere indicated,’ immediately sent to 
the printer, since the exigencies of the occasion did not allow of 
the delay necessary to copy it, either into the rough Journal of the 
Congress, or for the use of the printer. It was, probably, that 
same evening put in type and the proof corrected by the Commit- 
tee which drafted it, and was printed off, as a broadside, early the 
next morning in time to furnish copies upon the reassembling of 
the Congress. A printed copy was then wafered in the blank space 
left for it in the rough Journal of the Congress, before the reading, 
on the morning of the 5th, of the Minutes of the preceding day. 
This broadside constitutes the first edition of the Declaration. 
It was printed at Philadelphia by John Dunlap, the official printer 
to the Congress, and the copy wafered in the rough Journal of the 
Congress is facsimiled in Buchanan’s Genealogy of the McKean 
Family of Pennsylvania (Lancaster, 1890), page 38. Copies of 
this edition are in the Emmet Collection in the New York Public 
Library (EM. 1528), in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s 
collection and in the Library of Congress. It measures on the 
print 1134 inches in breadth by 17 inches in length.? This 
edition corresponds with the first and so-called second editions 
(Nos. ror and 102, which are in reality one and the same,) of Mr. 
Paul Ford’s Bibliography of the Official Publications of the Conti- 
nental Congress. 
The line for line transcript of the head lines and colophon of 
this edition is as follows: 
In‘ Congress, July 4, 1776|A Declaration | By the Repre- 
sentatives of the | United States of America, | In General Congress 
! Proc. AMER. PHILOs. Soc., Vol. xxxvii, p. 102. 
2 am indebted for these measurements to the courtesy of Mr. Wilberforce 
Eames, of the Lenox Library, New York. 
