The Artifact
The Declaration of Independence
The same parchment Timothy Matlack engrossed in iron-gall ink in the summer of 1776. Drag to pan. Pinch or scroll to zoom. Click a signature to meet its signer. Flip the document and warm the candle to bring the cipher through.
Unrolling parchment
What you’re looking at
The Matlack engrossing
On July 19, 1776, the Continental Congress ordered the Declaration “fairly engrossed on parchment.” Timothy Matlack, a Pennsylvania State House clerk and former assistant to the Secretary, was almost certainly the penman. Iron-gall ink. Copperplate hand. Roughly two weeks of work. Signing began August 2.
By 1832 only one signer was still alive: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland’s Catholic delegate, ninety-five years old. The franchise begins with what he was supposed to have whispered.
About the back
What the cipher is doing
On the real document the only writing on the back is a clerk’s docket — “Original Declaration of Independence dated 4th July 1776.” That’s the line you can always read here. The cipher poem and the compass rose are the franchise’s invention, drawn here in lemon-juice ink. Bring the candle close and they warm into view.
The triplets at the foot are the homepage Ottendorf cipher. Decode them against the right key text and you’ll get VAULT.
Image source: U.S. National Archives, public domain. Brought to you by 1776 and Adobe Photoshop 7.0.
Decode the cipher →