In Congress, July 4th. 1776. The Unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America

Book Description

[Washington]: Benjamin Owen Tyler, [1818]. Broadside. (29 x 24 1/4 inches). Engraving, on paper, by Peter Maverick of Newark, NJ, after Tyler, backed onto linen, edged with black linen tape, ebonised wood rollers at head and foot, age-toned. A remarkable document, the present Tyler facsimile is the first publication of the "Declaration of Independence" in the same form as the original. The Declaration of Independence, the foundation document of the United States, has been printed myriad times since its original publication in 1776. At first as broadsides, then as an essential addition to any volume of laws, it was from the beginning a basic work in the American canon. In the period following the War of 1812, Americans began to look back, for the first time with historical perspective, on the era of the founding of the country. The republic was now forty years old, and the generation of the Revolution, including the Signers of the Declaration, was dropping away. With nostalgia and curiosity, many Americans began to examine the details of the nation's founding. Among other things, such documents as the debates of the Constitutional Convention were published for the first time. Others revisited the Declaration - not the often reprinted text, but the actual document itself, then preserved in the State Department. They discovered remarkable differences between the original and the published versions. First, the title of the document was different (the manuscript original was as given above); secondly, the names of the Signers, now revered as the Founders, were omitted in all the published versions. It seemed extraordinary that the document, as created, was unknown to Americans, when the text was so central to the national identity. Several entrepreneurs set out to remedy this gap. The first to do so was a writing master named Benjamin Owen Tyler. Tyler decided to create a calligraphy version of the Declaration, giving the title and text exactly as it appeared in the original manuscript (although not directly copying its format), and then recreating exactly the signatures of the Signers as they appeared on the original. This he did to a remarkable degree. John Bidwell notes: "Tyler...retained every stroke and nuance of his models, preserving their proportions, stress, and weight...so convincing are his signatures that they masquerade as the originals in a recent book on American autographs...." Tyler won the endorsement of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and, more importantly, that of the author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, to whom his edition is dedicated. The Tyler facsimile was published on paper at five dollars, or on vellum at seven dollars. Only three copies on vellum survive. This is one of the copies printed on paper. John Bidwell has fully documented the story of Tyler's creation. John Bidwell, "American History in Image and Text" in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 1988, Vol. 98, pp.247-302 (also issued as a separate pamphlet by AAS). A copy accompanies the document.

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