A second parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence was found

It was believed that the only handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence written on parchment was the one Nicolas Cage protected in a multi-million dollar nuclear-proof vault at the National Archives. There is, however, a second handwritten copy, that can be found in the West Sussex records office in Chichester, England.

The newly discovered manuscript was likely commissioned in the 1780s by James Wilson of Pennsylvania, a lawyer and fervent nationalist who signed both the Declaration and later the Constitution, according to the Harvard Gazette.

Harvard University researchers Emily Sneff and Danielle Allen first came across the manuscript in 2015, as the Washington Post reports. They saw a listing for a “Manuscript copy, on parchment, of the Declaration in Congress of the thirteen United States of America” while combing the holdings of records offices in the UK. They had come across many such entries before. But those were nothing more than 19th-century reproductions of the Declaration. This one, however, was listed as a manuscript, leading the researchers to send a request for more information to Chichester.

The researchers were in shock when they were given a disc with images of the parchment, according to the Smithsonian. “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,” Emily Sneff said. “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 document is not a twin of the one that is preserved in the National Archives. The New York Times reports that the 1780s are known by historians as“America’s Critical Period”, due to the country being in debt in the midst of a recession and The Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first constitution, leading to a very weak federal government.

James Wilson was a supporter of a new Constitution and a stronger national government with a right to tax the people, as the Smithsonian reports. The researchers believe one reason the names on the new document are in a different order is that Wilson tried to show that the signers were part of one nation, not their separate states. After the Declaration was written, a lot of different copies were made in newspapers and as paper broadsides. Something written on parchment,made from animal hide and used for legal documents, is very rare.

Regarding how the parchment made its way to on out-of-the-way corner of England is not completely clear, Wang says it’s possible that the parchment belonged to or came into the possession of the Duke of Richmond, a supporter of American Independence. There are records indicating that the parchment was handed over to the West Sussex Records Office in 1956, when the law firm that handled the affairs of the Duke and his descendants made a document deposit.