A Clear Declaration of Intent Is Now Even Clearer

By DAVID W. DUNLAP, Published: July 3, 2012

The Declaration of Independence should not be a mystery. Yet offering a facsimile alone, as The New York Times has done every Fourth of July for 90 years, does not do much to illuminate it. While the language of the document is lucid, the florid 18th-century handwriting can be difficult to decipher.

This year, The Times is presenting a much higher-resolution facsimile, furnished by the National Archives and Records Administration. It is accompanied for the first time by a transcription, set in the Imperial typeface, following the capitalization, punctuation and spelling of the original. Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, a Times art director, designed the page.

The point of the exercise — to reacquaint Americans with this stirring document — is unchanged since July 4, 1897, when The Times, newly acquired by Adolph S. Ochs, first reproduced the declaration on Independence Day, calling it the “original charter of the Nation.” (The custom of printing a facsimile annually dates to July 4, 1922.)

“Its character is familiar to all,” an accompanying editorial said in 1897, “but we commend it to the lovers of sound literature as one of the purest and noblest examples of 18th-century English extant.”

Thomas Jefferson, the principal author, was justifying a revolution that had already begun and framing the principles by which the newly formed nation would be guided.

Meeting in Philadelphia as the Second Continental Congress, 12 colonies adopted a resolution of independence on July 2 and the declaration on July 4. New York abstained at first. Once it joined, Congress ordered the preparation on parchment of a formal, handwritten copy of the declaration, suitable for signing. Timothy Matlack of Pennsylvania is credited with the work, which was finished and signed by most of the delegates on Aug. 2.

The version reproduced in The Times is not of the original, which has faded to near-illegibility, but of an authorized facsimile completed by William J. Stone in 1823. This is the most widely reproduced image of the Declaration of Independence.

Sharp-eyed readers can spot Stone’s mark under the first column of signatures, a half inch or so below George Walton’s name: “W. J. Stone sc. Washn.” Catherine Nicholson, deputy director of the conservation lab at the National Archives, explained that “sc” stands for “sculpsit,” an 18th-century designation added after an engraver’s name.

Just how Stone managed to copy Matlack’s original so faithfully is a matter of conjecture and debate. Stone has long stood accused of having made a “press copy,” transferring some of the ink from the original by placing a thin sheet of damp paper on the parchment; in other words, degrading the very document he was charged with perpetuating.

However, Ms. Nicholson said there is no contemporary account of Stone using the wet transfer method. It is known that the project took him three years to finish. He may have laboriously traced the original by hand or with a mechanical device called a pantograph.

In any case, the copper plate that he engraved still exists and is exhibited at the archives.

During the national bicentennial in 1976, a protective coating of beeswax and paper was removed from the surface of Stone’s engraving. Angelo LoVecchio, a master printer at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, inked the copper plate and pulled six new prints.

A print from that 1976 series is what appears in The Times. The image furnished by the National Archives is a TIFF file with a resolution of 300 pixels per inch. The scan took about seven minutes to make, using a Linhof Technika camera and a Better Light Super 8K digital scan back, under Kino Flo fluorescent lights with ultraviolet filters.

This is not the first time in 90 years that The Times has tinkered with the facsimile. In 1953, some extra space was added, presumably for the sake of appearance, since the declaration is of a different proportion than a newspaper page.

The errant photoengraving, kept in a picture editor’s desk, was reused again and again.

In 1978, however, as The Times prepared to convert to offset production, a new facsimile was requested of the National Archives. “It was discovered that someone had long ago inserted a few inches of bootleg white space below the text and above Hancock’s signature,” recalled Allan M. Siegal, a former assistant managing editor. “In their naïveté, the founding fathers had lacked the foresight to accommodate The Times’s aspect ratio.

“The art department restored the authenticity that year.”