by Timothy Page

Most Americans grow up believing that on July 4, 1776, fifty-six men filed into Independence Hall in Philadelphia and put their names to the Declaration of Independence. It’s a tidy story, and it’s wrong in one important detail: July 4 is the date Congress approved the final wording of the document. The famous mass signing — the moment John Hancock supposedly declared his signature large enough for King George to read without his spectacles — took place almost a month later, on August 2, 1776.

What Actually Happened on August 2

After the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration’s text on July 4, the document was sent to a printer, Philadelphia’s John Dunlap, who ran off copies overnight so they could be distributed to the army, to state assemblies, and to the public. This printed version — known as the Dunlap broadside — carried only two names: John Hancock, President of Congress, and Charles Thomson, the Secretary. It was this broadside, not a signed manuscript, that most colonists first encountered.

Congress then ordered a formal copy to be “engrossed” — carefully handwritten on parchment in large, clear script — so that delegates could sign it as a lasting legal record. That engrossing job fell to Timothy Matlack, a clerk working for the Secretary of Congress. By August 2, the parchment copy was ready, and most of the delegates present in Philadelphia stepped forward that day to sign it. A handful of others, who were absent or who joined Congress later, added their signatures over the following months. New Hampshire’s Matthew Thornton didn’t sign until November.

So while July 4 remains, correctly, “Independence Day,” August 2 is the date most closely tied to the physical act of signing — the moment fifty-plus men committed treason against the Crown in their own handwriting, a decision Benjamin Franklin summed up with his famous line about hanging together or hanging separately.

Where Vermont Fits Into This Story

Here’s the twist: in August 1776, there was no Vermont. The territory that would become Vermont wasn’t one of the thirteen colonies represented in Philadelphia. It was land claimed simultaneously by New York and New Hampshire, a contested frontier region its settlers simply called the “New Hampshire Grants.” No delegate from the Grants signed the Declaration, because the Grants had no seat at the table.

But the ideas in that parchment didn’t stay contained to the thirteen colonies — and Vermont’s settlers, led by figures like Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, took the Declaration’s logic and ran further with it than Congress ever intended.

Vermont Declares Its Own Independence

Frustrated with New York’s claims of authority over their land and unwilling to simply become another colony’s subject territory, representatives of the Grants met in a series of conventions. On January 15, 1777, meeting in Westminster, they declared the region an independent entity — first calling it “New Connecticut,” then, a few months later, renaming it Vermont (from the French verts monts, or “green mountains”). This was, in effect, a second declaration of independence: one aimed not at Britain, but at New York.

Vermont then did something no other American government did at the time. In July 1777, meeting in the town of Windsor, Vermonters adopted a state constitution that explicitly banned adult slavery outright — the first written constitution in what would become the United States to do so. It also extended voting rights to men without requiring property ownership, going further toward the Declaration’s promise that “all men are created equal” than the Continental Congress itself was willing to go.

Fourteen Years as an Independent Republic

For the next fourteen years, Vermont operated as a self-governing republic — minting its own coins, running its own postal service, and negotiating (sometimes controversially) with the British in Quebec while still supporting the American war effort. Congress, wary of upsetting the competing claims of New York and New Hampshire, refused to admit Vermont to the Union.

That standoff finally ended after New York agreed to relinquish its claims in exchange for compensation. On March 4, 1791, Vermont entered the United States as the fourteenth state — the first to join after the original thirteen, and the first to do so having spent over a decade as its own independent country.

Why This Matters

The story of August 2, 1776, is usually told as the closing chapter of the Declaration’s drafting — the day the ink dried, literally and figuratively, on the founders’ commitment. But Vermont’s path shows how the Declaration’s language didn’t stop working once it was signed. It became a template. Settlers in the Green Mountains who had no vote in Philadelphia read the same document, absorbed the same argument about the consent of the governed, and used it to justify breaking away from a state government they hadn’t agreed to either.

In that sense, Vermont is a reminder that 1776 didn’t just create one new nation — it created a rhetorical and legal playbook that kept getting used, including by people the Declaration’s original signers never anticipated.

Sources and further reading: National Archives records on the engrossed Declaration of Independence; Vermont Historical Society records on the 1777 Windsor Constitution; U.S. Senate historical records on Vermont’s 1791 admission to the Union.