DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

In Congress, July 4, 1776. The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America. When in the Course of Human Events..., Washington, [Peter Force, reprinted 1833 from the original copperplate]

Footnotes

FINE AND ATTRACTIVE COPY of Peter Force's 1833 issue of the Declaration of Independence. "In 1820, John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state and a future President, commissioned a young printer, William J. Stone, to make a full-size facsimile copperplate engraving of the Declaration of Independence... Stone took three years to complete engraving the copperplate, which today is on display at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C... The prints of the Declaration made from this copperplate are the ones most familiar to Americans, and they provide a clear image of the document that established our nation" (Catherine Nicholson, 'Finding the Stones', Prologue, Summer 2012, vol. 44, no. 2).

By the 1830s, Peter Force (1790-1868), historian, publisher and mayor of Washington D.C., was planning an ambitious 20-volume anthology entitled American Archives. He persuaded the State Department to grant him access to Stone's copperplate, which they held at the time. For this reissue a decade after Stone's first printing, his imprint was neatly burnished out at the top of the plate, and replaced with a faint "W.J. STONE SC[ULPSIT] WASHN." in the lower left portion. Force printed around 4,000 copies of the Declaration on a translucent tracing paper sometimes mistakenly called "rice paper", but in fact machine-made Western paper. Each engraving was inserted along its right edge into the binding of the Fifth Series, volume 1, of American Archives and neatly folded in.

Force's anthology was a publishing failure. "In 1853 Secretary of State William Learned Marcy abruptly cancelled the State Department contract to publish the remaining series of American Archives, with only the Fourth and Fifth Series printed" (Nicholson).