LONDON: A rare parchment copy of the US Declaration of Independence found at a British archive among the papers of an aristocrat who supported the rebels has been authenticated, officials said.

The manuscript was discovered last year at the West Sussex Record Office in the southern English city of Chichester by a team of researchers led by two Harvard University academics.

Tests supported the hypothesis that it was produced in the 1780s, West Sussex County Council said earlier this week — just a few years after the declaration itself was issued in 1776.

The document “is the only other contemporary manuscript copy of the Declaration of Independence on parchment apart from the signed copy at the National Archives in Washington DC”, known as the Matlack Declaration, a council statement said earlier this week.

Adopted on July 4, 1776, the declaration states that 13 American colonies then at war with Britain would regard themselves as independent sovereign states no longer under British rule. July 4 is celebrated as Independence Day in the United States.

The Harvard Gazette said the most interesting feature of the document was its treatment of the list of signatories. “On this parchment the list of signatories was not grouped by states. The team hypothesises that this detail supported efforts ... to argue that the authority of the declaration rested on a unitary national people, and not on a federation of states,” it said.

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2018