That the Southwick Broadside version of the Declaration of Independence isn’t as famous as the Dunlap Broadside shouldn’t be a surprise, since the Dunlap is the first one, and the one on which all the others are based. The the Southwick has the wrong date on it is an interesting nugget of information.

It’s worth noting, however, that while John Dunlap spent the better part of the night of July 4 setting the type, making a copy, making corrections, rinse and repeat, there are still mistakes on his as well. Some copies are on the “wrong” side of the paper (i.e. the watermark is reversed). Some have ink smudges, as though they were folded or rolled up before the ink was quite dry, and according to Ted Widmer in an Op-Ed he wrote for the New York Times (soft paywalled link), the punctuation doesn’t necessarily agree from one copy to another.

Historians have identified nineteen different versions of the Declaration of Independence printed around that time, though there may be a few more idenfied since that initial survey, which was in the late 1940s. Of those nineteen, 71 copies were known to exist. That said, when the survey was published, only 14 of those copies were the Dunlap Broadside. Now that there are 26 Dunlaps, we’re up to 84 contemporary copies of the Declaration, with another few whose provenance or source are unknown.

Interestingly, three copies of the Dunlap Broadside are in the hands of the British. One was seized by Richard Howe in New York, another accidentally fell into Howe’s hands while he was on Staten Island, and the third one was part of a larger Customs seizure from a man named Jonas Phillips, who was sending a box of documents to Great Britain from Philadelphia in late July 1776. Phillips’ note to his relative in Britain was in Yiddish, which the Customs agents thought was a code, so he seized the documents without examining them. It was only a couple of years ago that the contents were examined and identified.

Accidents of history, I tell you what.

For what it’s worth, only seven copies of the Southwick Declaration are known to exist today.

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