Declaration of Independence: The Lee Resolution, Lincoln and a Bad Check

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The legal vote to break from Britain came on July 2, 1776, with the Lee Resolution, and most delegates did not sign the engrossed parchment until August 2. This episode follows the Declaration from the debts of the Seven Years' War through the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Intolerable Acts of 1774 to King George III's late 1775 proclamation that the colonies were in open rebellion. The colonists argued that Parliament had no jurisdiction to tax them and that their allegiance ran only to the king. Thomas Paine's Common Sense in January 1776 moved opinion so fast that places such as Rhode Island and North Carolina passed their own declarations before Congress acted.

A Committee of Five that included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin handed the drafting to 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson, and on July 4 Congress approved an edited text that is mostly a list of 27 grievances against the king. For decades after the war the document was barely cited while the Constitution and state constitutions took center stage. Abraham Lincoln revived it by focusing on the line that all men are created equal, and at Gettysburg in 1863 he dated the nation's founding to 1776. That reading turned a text written by a man who enslaved over 600 people into a tool for later movements, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 description of a promissory note returned marked insufficient funds.

• The parchment was engrossed by a clerk named Timothy Matlack, and each signature was evidence of high treason.
• July 2 was the legal break, while July 4 approved the public case meant to persuade potential allies such as France.
• The 1848 Declaration of Sentiments copied the structure, declaring all men and women created equal and listing grievances against male rule.
• Frederick Douglass used the text to ask what, to the slave, is the Fourth of July.
• In the late 1970s Harvey Milk and other LGBTQ activists cited its promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.