Happy 4th of July!

Happy 241st 4th of July, Monticello. This date is also referred to as Independence Day, but it was far from the date when the United States actually became independent from the British Empire.

Over eight years after the Revolutionary War began in 1775, the Treaty of Paris was signed ending the war. Representatives from the colonies were John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, and Henry Laurens and Richard Oswald from Great Britain. Of our representatives, Jefferson never left the colonies and Laurens was captured by a British warship and kept in the Tower of London until the end of the war.

With this treaty, Great Britain gave us all the land between the Allegheny Mountains in western Virginia and the Mississippi River, doubling the size of the country which already included the 13 colonies. Strangely other items in the treaty were to give the new nation fishing rights off the coast of Canada and to stop harassing loyalists to the crown and to restore their property seized by the colonists.

On July 4th, 1776, assistant to the Secretary of the 2nd Continental Congress, Timothy Matlack, finished the handwritten copy of the Declaration and it was signed by two members. Today, you can view this document in the Rotunda of the National Archives. Although the copy is kept in a sealed bronze container in a darkened room, the copy is fading rapidly.

On the evening of July 4th, 1776, John Dunlap, a Philadelphia printer, was authorized to typeset and print the Declaration. He made 200 copies. These copies, known as the “Dunlap Broadsides,” were distributed to the 13 colonies for reading by the public. Today, there are only 26 copies known to exist.

On August 2nd, 1776, representatives from the 13 colonies gathered to sign the Declaration. Signers from Georgia were Button Gwinnett who died in a duel outside Savannah, Lyman Hall who had to run from the British who seized his property and accused him of treason, and George Walton who founded Richmond Academy and Franklin College which became the University of Georgia.