Who signed the Declaration of Independence?

The signing, briefly

Adoption and signing were separate events. On July 4, 1776 Congress adopted the final text of the Declaration and sent it to the printer John Dunlap. The broadside that circulated through the colonies that week carried exactly two printed names — John Hancock, the President of Congress, and Charles Thomson, its secretary — and no autographs at all. Only on July 19, after New York's convention had endorsed independence and made the decision unanimous, did Congress order the Declaration "fairly engrossed on parchment." That parchment, now in the National Archives, is the document the delegates signed.

The formal signing came on August 2, 1776. The journal of Congress records it in a single line: "The declaration of independence being engrossed and compared at the table was signed." Hancock, as President, signed first. But membership in Congress kept shifting, so even August 2 did not finish the job. At least five delegates signed later — Elbridge Gerry, Oliver Wolcott, Lewis Morris, Thomas McKean, and Matthew Thornton, a New Hampshire delegate who did not take his seat until November 1776. McKean was probably the last of all; by some accounts his signature was not added until 1781.

Two absences are worth naming. Robert R. Livingston of New York sat on the five-man committee that drafted the Declaration, but he considered the break premature and had left Congress before the signing — he never signed the document he helped write. And John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who had led the case for reconciliation with Britain to the end, refused to sign, then went off to serve in the militia for the cause he would not declare.

All 56 signers, by colony

The names below are verbatim from the National Archives transcription of the engrossed parchment. On the parchment the signatures are grouped by delegation and arranged geographically — reading right to left, the columns run from New Hampshire down to Georgia — and this list follows the same north-to-south order. John Hancock signed front and center, beneath the text itself, as President of Congress; the Archives groups him with his fellow Massachusetts delegates, and so does this list. Matthew Thornton, signing in November, found no room left beside the other New Hampshire men and put his name at the foot of the final column.

Signers worth knowing

Myths about the signing

The image most Americans carry of the signing comes from John Trumbull's painting in the Capitol Rotunda — the scene reproduced, slightly rearranged, on the back of the two-dollar bill. It is not a signing scene. Trumbull depicted June 28, 1776, the day the drafting committee presented Jefferson's draft to Congress; the men standing at the table are the Committee of Five, not a queue of signers. The painting holds 47 figures: 42 of the eventual 56 signers, plus five delegates — John Dickinson among them — who never signed. Fourteen signers are missing because Trumbull would only paint faces he could document. There was no crowded ceremony on July 4, and no day on which all 56 men stood in the same room.

What signing cost them

The Declaration ends with a promise that reads differently once you know it was made under threat of the gallows.

That was not rhetoric. In British law the signers were traitors, and treason was a capital crime — one reason the names stayed off the public printings for six months. Some paid heavily. Richard Stockton of New Jersey was captured in November 1776, jailed in New York under deliberately brutal conditions, and released in broken health; the British burned his library, one of the finest in the colonies, and stripped his estate. He died in 1781. Thomas Heyward, Jr., Edward Rutledge, and Arthur Middleton — three of South Carolina's four signers — were taken prisoner when Charleston fell in 1780. Francis Lewis's Long Island home was destroyed and his wife imprisoned.

Precision matters here, because an essay titled "The Price They Paid" goes viral every July with grimmer claims — signers tortured to death as traitors, nine killed in the war's fighting. None of that is true. No signer was executed for signing, none died in British custody, and none fell in battle. The real ledger — prison, burned homes, ruined fortunes, years of risk — is sober enough without invention.

What to read next

Primary sources and further reading

• Declaration of Independence: A Transcription | National Archives — the signer list on this page follows this transcription verbatim.
• Signers of the Declaration of Independence: Factsheet | National Archives — ages, occupations, and dates for all 56 signers.
• The Declaration of Independence: A History | National Archives — the July 19 engrossing order, the August 2 signing, the later signers, and the Goddard printing.
• Signers of the Declaration of Independence | ushistory.org — short biographies of each signer, including Stockton and Gwinnett.
• Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull | Architect of the Capitol — what the Rotunda painting actually depicts.