Declaration of Independence Preservation

JAMES MONROE MEMORIAL FOUNDATION

James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and the Preservation of the Declaration of Independence

A Reassessment of the Origins of the William J. Stone Facsimile, 1814–1824

Stanley Y. Klos
Prepared for the James Monroe Memorial Foundation

I · Introduction

The celebrated William J. Stone copperplate facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, completed in 1823, is conventionally associated with a single figure: Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. Stone himself engraved the government’s authority directly onto the plate: “ENGRAVED by W.I. STONE for the Dept. of State by order / of J.Q. ADAMS Secy of State July 4th 1823.”1 Adams unquestionably administered the project, employed Stone, supervised the work, and left the clearest surviving statement of why an archival facsimile was needed at all.

But the conventional account begins too late.

Adams did not inherit an untouched Declaration, nor an executive department confronting the problem of its preservation for the first time. He inherited a document that James Monroe had already helped save from probable destruction; a State Department that, under Monroe, had already become entangled in the business of reproducing the Declaration; two competing commercial facsimile projects each seeking the government’s blessing; and a mounting, publicly reported concern that repeated handling and the passage of time were visibly affecting the original parchment.2

Seen against that longer institutional background, Stone’s engraving looks less like an isolated act of Adams’s ingenuity and more like the culmination of a federal policy toward preservation, reproduction, and controlled dissemination of the Declaration that had been taking shape since Monroe’s own tenure at the Department of State, nearly a decade before Stone ever touched his plate.

The evidence located for this paper does not establish that Monroe personally commissioned Stone in 1820, or that he is a documented co-commissioner of the project; that immediate authority belongs to Adams. It does establish something broader: that Monroe helped create the preservation-and-reproduction precedent from which the Stone project emerged; that the Department of State converted that precedent into an authoritative, government-owned facsimile while Monroe was president; and that Monroe himself, as president, exercised direct and documented authority over the distribution of the finished impressions in 1824.

Scope and evidentiary method

Throughout, “commissioning authority” means the official authority that directed the Department of State’s engagement of Stone to produce the facsimile, not the later acquisition of the finished plate, the authorization of particular expenditures, or the 1824 distribution, each of which is treated separately below.

Three grades of claim recur in what follows, and the distinction between them is load-bearing rather than decorative. A documented claim rests on a contemporaneous primary source, consulted directly or through a reliable published reproduction. A traditional claim is one repeated across respected institutional, scholarly, or auction literature, but for which no underlying contemporary instrument has yet been identified. A possible claim is consistent with the surrounding circumstances but presently unsupported by direct evidence.

Under this framework, Adams’s 1819 proposal, his direction of Stone’s work, the Department’s 1823 acquisition of the plate, and the congressional and presidential roles in the 1824 distribution are documented. The precise July 1820 engagement date and the tradition of prior congressional approval remain traditional. Monroe’s personal knowledge of, or informal approval for, the Stone project remains possible, neither established nor excluded. Where a proposition rests on institutional history rather than an identified contemporary document, the text says so.

II · James Monroe and the Rescue of the Declaration, 1814

The story properly begins six years before Stone.

In August 1814, as a British expeditionary force advanced on Washington, James Monroe was serving as Madison’s secretary of state while also performing urgent reconnaissance and intelligence duties, riding out personally to track the British approach and reporting back to the capital as the danger sharpened.3 On August 22, the date is assigned conjecturally by the editors of the Madison Papers, Monroe wrote to the president with a stark instruction: “You had better remoove the records.”4

The Department of State held the Declaration of Independence along with the young nation’s other foundational papers. As the threat became immediate, department personnel, most famously the clerk Stephen Pleasonton, packed the Declaration and the rest of the department’s records and carried them out of Washington ahead of the British occupation and the burning of the public buildings.5 The National Archives credits Pleasonton with that physical evacuation; State Department institutional history situates the episode within the emergency Monroe’s warning had helped set in motion.6 The distinction is worth preserving rather than collapsing: Pleasonton executed the rescue; Monroe, as the responsible cabinet officer, supplied the warning and the departmental authority that helped set the evacuation in motion. No contemporary instruction running directly from Monroe to the clerks has yet been identified, the State Department’s later attribution of direct orders rests on subsequent institutional accounts rather than a document dated to August 1814 itself.7

The episode cannot be waved off as background color for a later project. Monroe had personally lived through the vulnerability of the nation’s founding manuscripts to sudden, total loss. Had the Declaration remained in the city, its survival through the British occupation would have been genuinely uncertain. It established, inside the Department of State, an unmistakable premise: that safeguarding the nation’s documentary heritage was an executive responsibility, not an afterthought.

III · Monroe and the Binns Declaration, 1816

Two years later, with Monroe still at the head of the Department, a different kind of question presented itself, not how to protect the Declaration from fire, but how to reproduce it.

In June 1816 the Philadelphia publisher John Binns announced an ambitious subscription project: an elaborately engraved Declaration combining the full text and facsimile signatures with portraits, state seals, and patriotic ornament.8 Binns needed authoritative source material to work from. At the request of Pennsylvania senator Jonathan Roberts, Secretary of State Monroe furnished him with a copy of the Declaration.9

That seemingly routine administrative courtesy deserves more attention than it usually receives. It establishes that federal cooperation with private efforts to reproduce the Declaration predates Adams’s secretaryship by a full year. Monroe did not commission Binns’s engraving, and nothing in the record so far examined shows that he regarded Binns’s print as a preservation surrogate for the original. But his department had, by 1816, already lent its authority to an ambitious project meant to reproduce and disseminate the Declaration with a high degree of fidelity.

By that year, then, two of the eventual ingredients of the Stone project were already in place under Monroe’s stewardship: the preservation of the original, dramatized in 1814, and the facilitation of accurate reproduction, demonstrated through the government’s assistance to Binns.

IV · The Binns–Tyler “Declaration War” and the First Sign of Wear

Matters grew considerably more complicated before Adams ever took office.

Binns had announced first, but his elaborate composition needed years to complete. Benjamin Owen Tyler saw his opening. Concentrating on the text and signatures rather than Binns’s full decorative program, Tyler brought a competing facsimile to market first.10 The two projects became open commercial rivals, trading accusations, newspaper attacks, competing claims of priority and authenticity, and both courting endorsements from prominent Americans and, especially, from the federal government itself.11

Tyler secured the more valuable prize. On September 10, 1817, Acting Secretary of State Richard Rush certified that Tyler’s reproduction had been collated against the original Declaration and found correct, adding that the signatures had been imitated so precisely that they were difficult to distinguish from the originals, except for the marks left upon the parchment by the “hand of time.”12

That phrase deserves to be read slowly. It is contemporary, official evidence that the engrossed Declaration was already visibly aging by 1817, years before Adams proposed a facsimile and six years before Stone finished one.13

The timing that follows is almost too neat to be coincidental. John Quincy Adams became secretary of state on September 22, 1817, twelve days after Rush dated Tyler’s certificate.14 Adams therefore inherited far more than custody of a parchment. He inherited the Binns project Monroe’s department had already assisted; Tyler’s competing facsimile; a precedent of governmental authentication for private reproductions; an open commercial rivalry between the two publishers; and, not least, a document whose physical deterioration his own predecessor had just formally observed.

V · Adams Inherits and Sets Out to Solve Monroe’s Preservation Problem

At first Adams simply continued along the path already worn by his predecessor. Both Binns and Tyler kept seeking governmental and Founding-era endorsements, and Adams himself became involved in authenticating Binns’s work.15 But the cumulative cost of the existing arrangement was becoming harder to ignore. Every new “authentic” facsimile gave someone else a reason to consult, inspect, measure, or trace the original yet again.

The government faced a genuine contradiction. Public interest called for wide access to the Declaration and to faithful reproductions of it, while every additional consultation of the original increased the physical risk to the one manuscript that could never be replaced.

That was the problem Adams inherited from the reproduction environment Monroe’s department had helped create. Solving it permanently, and on the government’s own terms. This became Adams’s distinct and considerable achievement.

VI · Adams’s 1819 Preservation Proposal

On April 26, 1819, Adams recorded an unusually pointed idea in his diary. Having just described Tyler’s skill at imitating handwriting, he proposed to employ him:

“to take an exact fac simile, of the whole Declaration, including the signatures; to be kept separate from the original, and as an accurate likeness of it, in case of any accident happening to it.”16

This single sentence is the clearest surviving statement of the reasoning that eventually produced the Stone engraving. Adams was not contemplating another decorative commemorative print. He wanted what a modern archivist would recognize immediately as a preservation surrogate: a complete and exact copy, stored apart from the original, whose entire purpose was to survive an accident that the original might not.

The conceptual link to 1814 is hard to miss. In 1814 the department had protected the Declaration against catastrophic physical loss by moving it out of harm’s way. In 1819 Adams proposed protecting its informational and visual content against a future catastrophe by making an exact duplicate and keeping it somewhere else entirely. No document yet identified shows Monroe instructing Adams to arrive at this idea, the diary records it in the first person, as Adams’s own. But Adams was working on a preservation problem whose institutional history plainly predated his own secretaryship.

The proposal did not immediately bear fruit. On May 13, 1819, Adams recorded that Tyler wanted $150, roughly $4,000 in today’s consumer purchasing power, to undertake the work. Adams considered the price excessive and concluded flatly, “I therefore gave up the project.”17 The particular arrangement lapsed. The underlying idea did not.

VII · From Tyler to Stone

Sometime around 1820, Adams turned instead to William J. Stone, a Washington engraver the department already employed for other work. Stone was given access to the engrossed Declaration and began the long, exacting labor of producing a full-scale copperplate facsimile.18 The precise instrument by which Stone received the commission, contract, letter, or memorandum, has not yet surfaced in the sources examined for this paper, and the traditional July 1820 date rests on later secondary accounts rather than an identified contemporary document.19

What is not in serious dispute is the authority under which Stone worked once the plate was finished. It says so, in his own hand, at the top of the completed engraving:

“ENGRAVED by W.I. STONE for the Dept. of State by order / of J.Q. ADAMS Secy of State July 4th 1823.”20

Adams’s later recollections corroborate the contemporary record rather than complicating it. On December 30, 1830, he recalled Stone as an engraver “whom I employed much, while I was in the department of State,” specifically crediting him with the Declaration facsimile; on February 16, 1846, he was still more direct: “I employed him, among many other things, to engrave a perfect fac-simile, of the original Declaration of Independence.”21

The immediate commissioning authority, then, was Adams’s. That conclusion does not require treating the project as detached from the administration in which it occurred. Stone was not working for Adams personally; he was working for the Department of State, using a manuscript that belonged to the United States, to produce a copperplate that would itself become federal property, all of it unfolding while Adams served as Monroe’s secretary of state.

VIII · Completion, the Plate, and the Announcement That Reached the Country

By the spring of 1823 the long labor was nearly finished. On April 11, Adams recorded in his diary that Stone “has finished his fac-simile of the original Declaration of Independence.”22 On May 28, Chief Clerk Daniel Brent instructed Stone to strike two hundred impressions from the completed plate and then deliver the copperplate itself to the department for the government’s own future use.23

Word reached the public within days. The story that broke first, on the evidence contemporaries themselves supply, was not the department’s own announcement but a report in a local Washington newspaper, the City Gazette, published by Jonathan Elliot and cataloged today as the Washington Gazette (1821–1826).24 The Washington National Intelligencer picked the item up almost immediately, running it on June 5, 1823, under the heading “Declaration of Independence,” and opening exactly as its rival had written it:

“The City Gazette informs us, that Mr. Wm. J. Stone, a respectable and enterprizing Engraver of this City, has, after a labor of three years, completed a fac simile of the Original of the Declaration of Independence, now in the archives of the government; that it is executed with the greatest exactness and fidelity; and that the Department of State has become the purchaser of the plate.”25

The Intelligencer added its own editorial relief: the original, “which ought to be immortal and imperishable,” had been so “much handled by copyists and curious visitors” that it “might receive serious injury,” and Stone’s plate would finally make further exposure of the original unnecessary.26

That condensed item then traveled. The Richmond Enquirer reprinted it almost verbatim on June 11, six days after the Intelligencer ran it.27 Niles’ Weekly Register, published in Baltimore, reprinted the same text on June 14, vol. 24, no. 613, p. 237, explicitly crediting “Nat. Int.” as its source, the standard shorthand contemporary editors used to mark a borrowed item.28

A separate and considerably fuller account, headed “Fac Simile Edition of the Declaration of Independence” and attributed directly to “The Washington City Gazette” rather than to the Intelligencer, appeared in the Hillsborough Recorder of Hillsborough, North Carolina, on June 18.29 That version carries detail entirely absent from the Intelligencer’s condensed rewrite that the original had been transferred to the plate “letter for letter and dot for dot,” that the signers’ handwriting had been “hit off with striking fidelity,” and that Stone’s undertaking was, in the writer’s estimation, “the first attempt . . . ever made to accomplish such an interesting task.” Its length and specificity suggest it preserves considerably more of the original City Gazette article than the Intelligencer’s abbreviated version does making it, on present evidence, the closest surviving approximation of what the City Gazette itself actually printed. For now, the fullest surviving trace of the paper that broke the story survives secondhand, in a North Carolina weekly three states and nearly two weeks removed from Washington.

Two things about this newspaper trail matter for the larger argument. First, the timing confirms the documentary sequence already established from Adams’s diary and Brent’s instruction: completion in April, transfer of the plate in late May, public announcement in the first days of June. Second, and more substantively, the announcement itself, in both its condensed and its fuller forms, already frames Stone’s achievement in exactly the terms Adams had used privately four years earlier: an exact, faithful copy made so that the fragile original would no longer need to be handled at all. Contemporaries outside the department understood immediately, and said so in print, that this was a preservation measure, not merely a technical curiosity or a commemorative flourish.

Federal ownership of the copperplate carried a further, quieter consequence: the relationship between reproduction and preservation had effectively been reversed. Under the earlier system, every fresh reproduction or authentication of the Declaration required renewed consultation of the original. After Stone, authoritative copies could be produced indefinitely while the original itself was never touched again.

IX · The Unresolved Financial Trail and Stephen Pleasonton

One important question remains open: exactly how the department paid for all of this.

Congress routinely appropriated funds for the department’s “incidental and contingent expenses,” and surviving State Department ledgers beginning in 1820 include entries for both contingent expenses and copperplate printing.30 Under the Act of March 3, 1817, the Fifth Auditor of the Treasury bore responsibility for examining “all accounts accruing in, or relative to, the department of state,” certifying them, and forwarding the accounts and vouchers to the First Comptroller for final decision.31 The Fifth Auditor throughout Stone’s project, as it happens, was Stephen Pleasonton, the same clerk celebrated for carrying the Declaration out of Washington in 1814.32

The coincidence is tempting, and it should be stated carefully rather than overstated. If Stone’s voucher or account can eventually be located in the surviving Treasury records and shown to have passed through Pleasonton’s hands, then the man who physically saved the Declaration in 1814 also participated, less than a decade later, in the federal accounting machinery that paid for its permanent engraved surrogate. That connection is plausible under the ordinary operation of the statute. It has not yet been documented.33 The relevant series, Department of State financial records in Record Group 59, and Fifth Auditor records in Record Group 217, remain to be searched for Stone’s specific transaction. The $18,800 appropriated for the department’s incidental and contingent expenses under the Act of March 3, 1823 establishes only that funds of the relevant kind existed that year, not which account paid Stone, in what amount, or on what schedule.34

X · The Tradition of Prior Congressional Approval

A persistent secondary-source tradition describes Stone’s original 1820 engagement as having received congressional approval in advance. Versions of the claim appear across institutional, scholarly, and auction literature, Harvard’s Declaration Resources Project, Sotheby’s, and Seth Kaller’s dealer catalogs among them.35 The research conducted for this paper has not located a resolution, appropriation provision, committee report, journal entry, or piece of correspondence that documents project-specific approval before Stone began his work. These sources attest to an established historiographical tradition; their repetition, by itself, does not supply that tradition’s primary foundation.

Related accounts sometimes attribute the printing of the first edition to Congress outright. That claim should be kept distinct from the narrower and more specific one that Congress approved the original engagement in advance. The one document that is beyond dispute, the joint resolution of May 26, 1824, addressed the distribution of impressions already sitting in the department; it cannot, by itself, demonstrate that Congress had authorized the engraving years earlier.36 This paper accordingly does not describe Stone’s initial commission as “ordered by Congress” not because the tradition is necessarily wrong, but because its documentary foundation has not yet been recovered.

XI · Congress and President Monroe Enter the Record Directly, 1824

By January 1, 1824, Stone’s work was complete and two hundred impressions had already been struck. Adams reported to the president of the Senate that “an exact facsimile, engraved in copperplate, has been made by direction of this Department,” and that the two hundred copies were “now at the office of this Department, subject to the disposal of Congress.”37 The language settles the chronology beyond argument: Congress did not initiate Stone’s engraving and did not order the original two hundred impressions. Both already existed by the time Congress acted.

Congress then adopted the joint resolution of May 26, 1824, directing the distribution of “the two hundred copies of the Declaration of Independence, now in the Department of State”, to the surviving signers, to President Monroe, to Vice President Daniel D. Tompkins, to former president Madison, to Lafayette, to both houses of Congress, to the executive departments, to the President’s House, to the Supreme Court, to the state and territorial governments, and to colleges and universities, the last group to be chosen at the president’s own discretion.38 Two copies were assigned to Monroe by name, and Congress formally requested that the president himself see to the distribution.

Here Monroe’s involvement stops being inferential and becomes documentary. Adams’s transmittal letter of June 24, 1824, sending copies to Thomas Jefferson, states plainly that he was acting under the joint resolution and “by direction of the President of the United States.”39 The president under whose administration the facsimile had been produced now personally directed its national distribution.

XII · Monroe, Adams, and Institutional Continuity

Historical narrative tends to look for a single author of events. The evidence assembled here suggests something more interesting: two secretaries of state, occupying the same office in succession, confronting different stages of the same slowly developing problem.

Monroe confronted the Declaration’s vulnerability to sudden physical destruction, and helped save it. His department then assisted the first serious postwar effort to reproduce and circulate the document widely. Adams inherited the consequences of that reproduction environment, competing commercial facsimiles, a documented sign of the original’s aging, and continuing demands for access to a manuscript that could not safely bear much more of it. Adams supplied the decisive administrative and technical answer: an exact, government-owned facsimile capable of standing in for the original on every occasion that mattered. Stone executed that answer with extraordinary skill. And Monroe, now president, presided over the administration in which it was finished and then personally directed the authority Congress gave him for its national distribution.

This close working relationship between the two men is itself documented, if only in general terms. Daniel Preston, writing for the Miller Center, and Harry Ammon both describe daily conferences between Monroe and Adams when both were in the capital, and Monroe’s habit of scrutinizing and frequently revising Adams’s diplomatic correspondence, a close relationship that nonetheless left considerable latitude to a capable department head.40 Monroe’s own first inaugural address had promised exactly this kind of oversight of departmental expenditures, in general terms; it does not, however, mention Stone or resolve the handling of any particular voucher.41

None of this diminishes Adams. It places his achievement inside its proper lineage. Adams deserves the credit for articulating the archival-surrogate strategy in 1819 and for commissioning and directing Stone’s work. Stone deserves credit for the technical achievement itself, a task contemporaries, on the evidence of the newspapers that announced it, immediately recognized as unprecedented. Pleasonton deserves recognition for his role in the 1814 rescue, with his possible further role in auditing Stone’s expenditures still to be confirmed. And Monroe deserves recognition for a role in the Declaration’s preservation history that began years before Stone ever touched his copperplate, and that did not end until Monroe, as president, put the finished facsimiles into the hands of the men who had signed the original.

XIII · Conclusion

The William J. Stone facsimile belongs inside a preservation continuum running from the War of 1812 through the whole of the Monroe presidency, not inside a single administrator’s biography. The documentary evidence presently supports the following account: James Monroe, as secretary of state, helped establish the federal precedent for preserving and reproducing the Declaration of Independence, participating in the 1814 emergency evacuation of the department’s records and later facilitating John Binns’s reproduction project. John Quincy Adams inherited that developing policy, the Binns–Tyler rivalry it had helped provoke, and clear evidence that the original parchment was visibly aging. Adams turned those inherited circumstances into a deliberate preservation strategy, commissioning William J. Stone to produce an exact, government-owned facsimile.

The completed copperplate and its first two hundred impressions became the property of the Department of State during Monroe’s presidency; newspapers as far away as North Carolina were reporting the achievement, in language that already called it a preservation measure, within two weeks of its completion; and in 1824 Monroe exercised direct presidential authority over the congressionally prescribed distribution of the finished facsimiles.

Whether Monroe personally ordered Stone’s commission in 1820 remains an open question, not a settled one, on the evidence located so far. But the larger record makes one thing reasonably clear: the federal government’s effort to preserve the Declaration of Independence did not begin with Adams and Stone. It began earlier — and James Monroe stands near its beginning.

Appendix A · Archival Research Agenda

The following searches would most directly test the propositions left open above. Series-level descriptions identify promising repositories; they are not evidence that a Stone-specific record survives in any particular box or volume.

Archival research questions, records, and evidence sought
Research questionPrincipal recordsEvidence sought
Date and terms of Stone’s engagementRG 59 domestic correspondence, letter books, and departmental memoranda, ca. 1819–1823A contract, instruction, price, memorandum, or acknowledgment naming Stone
Source and settlement of paymentRG 59 Entries 271–272 (appropriation estimates and ledgers); RG 217 Fifth Auditor recordsA ledger entry, voucher, certification, or comptroller decision
Monroe’s knowledge or approvalMonroe Papers; Adams’s diary; cabinet memorandaAny Stone-specific consultation, direction, or approval
Basis of the congressional-approval traditionCongressional journals, committee papers, and appropriation estimates, 1819–1820A project-specific approval predating or accompanying Stone’s engagement
The Brent instruction of May 28, 1823Department of State correspondence and Stone’s papersThe original letter or an official copy confirming the 200 impressions and plate delivery
The original City Gazette reportSurviving files of the Washington City Gazette / Washington Gazette, late May– early June 1823, outside Library of Congress holdingsThe precise date and full text of the item later condensed by the National Intelligencer

Acknowledgments

This paper combines and revises two earlier drafts prepared for the James Monroe Memorial Foundation, integrating primary-source newspaper research into the account of the June 1823 announcement of Stone’s completed facsimile. The author acknowledges the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI), accessed through Codex, and of Claude (Anthropic) in researching, organizing, editing, and preparing this paper. These tools served as research and editorial aids, not as independent historical authorities; the author retains responsibility for the paper’s interpretations and submission.

Notes & sources

  1. William J. Stone, engraved facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, Washington, D.C., 1823, original plate inscription. Catherine Nicholson, “The Stone Engraving: Icon of the Declaration,” Prologue 35, no. 3 (Fall 2003), https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2003/fall/stone-engraving.html; National Park Service, “The Declaration of Independence—Stone Facsimile,” https://www.nps.gov/articles/stone.htm. ↩ Return to text
  2. National Archives and Records Administration, “The Declaration of Independence: A History,” America’s Founding Documents, discussion of the Declaration’s custody, evacuation from Washington, early reproductions, deterioration, and the Stone facsimile, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-history. ↩ Return to text
  3. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, historical accounts of James Monroe and the Department during the British advance on Washington; National Archives, “The Declaration of Independence: A History.” ↩ Return to text
  4. James Monroe to James Madison, [22 August 1814], Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/03-08-02-0134 (the editors identify a transcript in RG 233, Committee Reports and Papers, 13A–D15.3, and assign the date conjecturally); see also National Archives, ‘P.S.: You Had Better Remove the Records,’ Prologue 46, no. 2 (Summer 2014), https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2014/summer/war-of-1812-save-records. ↩ Return to text
  5. National Archives and Records Administration, “The Declaration of Independence: A History,” account of Stephen Pleasonton’s removal of the Declaration and other State Department records from Washington. ↩ Return to text
  6. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Buildings of the Department of State, § 22, pp. 31–32, https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/buildings/section22. ↩ Return to text
  7. The State Department history’s attribution of direct orders rests on later secondary accounts, including Ingraham and Bryan, cited in its note 20; no primary instruction from Monroe to the clerks has been located in the materials examined for this paper. ↩ Return to text
  8. Jessie Kratz, “The Binns Engraving of the Declaration of Independence,” National Archives, Pieces of History, July 1, 2022, https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2022/07/01/the-binns-engraving-of-the-declaration-of-independence/; National Park Service, “Binns Declaration of Independence,” https://www.nps.gov/articles/binns.htm. ↩ Return to text
  9. Kratz, “The Binns Engraving of the Declaration of Independence,” documenting Senator Roberts’s request and Monroe’s provision of a copy of the Declaration to Binns; a specific 1816 transmittal letter has not been separately identified, and the attribution rests on this institutional history. ↩ Return to text
  10. National Archives, “The Binns Engraving of the Declaration of Independence”; National Archives, “The Stone Engraving”; American Historical Print Collectors Society, “Zooming In on the Declaration of Independence,” July 2021, https://ahpcs.org/2021/07/zooming-in-on-the-declaration-of-independence/. ↩ Return to text
  11. National Archives, “The Stone Engraving”; National Archives, “The Binns Engraving of the Declaration of Independence.” ↩ Return to text
  12. Richard Rush, certificate concerning Benjamin Owen Tyler’s facsimile, September 10, 1817, reproduced with Tyler’s Declaration project; Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-13-02-0014. ↩ Return to text
  13. Catherine Nicholson, “Parchment and Ink: The Declaration of Independence,” Prologue, Fall 2016, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/fall/declaration, discussing Rush’s “hand of time” observation and the deterioration history of the engrossed Declaration. ↩ Return to text
  14. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “John Quincy Adams,” biographical and tenure information; Adams served as secretary of state from September 22, 1817, through March 3, 1825, https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/adams-john-quincy. ↩ Return to text
  15. National Archives, “The Binns Engraving of the Declaration of Independence”; National Archives, “The Stone Engraving.” ↩ Return to text
  16. John Quincy Adams, diary, April 26, 1819, vol. 31, manuscript p. 96, John Quincy Adams Digital Diary, Massachusetts Historical Society, Primary Source Cooperative, https://www.primarysourcecoop.org/publications/jqa/document/jqadiaries-v31-1819-04-p076--entry26 (the site’s image identifier p076 is distinct from the manuscript page number 96). ↩ Return to text
  17. John Quincy Adams, diary, May 13, 1819, vol. 31, manuscript p. 109, https://www.primarysourcecoop.org/publications/jqa/document/jqadiaries-v31-1819-05-p102. The quotation is Adams’s own characterization of his decision and should not be silently reduced to a routine change of engravers. ↩ Return to text
  18. National Archives, “The Stone Engraving,” dating Adams’s commission of Stone to approximately 1820; American Historical Print Collectors Society, “Zooming In on the Declaration of Independence.” ↩ Return to text
  19. Brandon Truett, “Stone Declaration of Independence Descended in Family of James Madison (1823),” David Rubenstein Forum, University of Chicago, https://davidrubensteinforum.uchicago.edu/doi/. A contemporary report placed Stone’s labor at approximately three years; see § VIII below on the June 1823 newspaper announcements. ↩ Return to text
  20. See note 1 above. The slash in the transcription marks the division between the two portions of the original imprint; this original imprint must be distinguished from the later altered plate state discussed in § VIII below. ↩ Return to text
  21. John Quincy Adams, diary, December 30, 1830, vol. 38, manuscript pp. 72–74, https://www.primarysourcecoop.org/publications/jqa/document/jqadiaries-v38-1830-12-p048--entry30; and February 16, 1846, vol. 45, manuscript p. 430, https://www.primarysourcecoop.org/publications/jqa/document/jqadiaries-v45-1846-02-p406--entry16. ↩ Return to text
  22. John Quincy Adams, diary, April 11, 1823, quoted in Harvard University, Declaration Resources Project, “August Highlight: Son of a Signer,” August 4, 2017, https://declaration.fas.harvard.edu/blog/august-jqa. ↩ Return to text
  23. Daniel Brent to William J. Stone, May 28, 1823, quoted in Sotheby’s, “The Declaration of Independence: The Celebrated William J. Stone Facsimile, 1823,” https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy-sell/private-sales/the-declaration-of-independence-the-celebrated-william-j-stone-facsimile-1823. This item is cited through a published reproduction; an original archival locator remains to be supplied. ↩ Return to text
  24. Library of Congress, catalog record for the Washington Gazette (City of Washington, D.C.), 1821–1826, LCCN sn82014409, listing Jonathan Elliot as publisher, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82014409/. The record is a bibliographic listing drawn from the Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries; it identifies no Library of Congress holdings, digitized or otherwise, for this title, so the original item’s precise wording has not been independently verified against the City Gazette itself. ↩ Return to text
  25. Daily National Intelligencer (Washington City, D.C.), June 5, 1823, “Declaration of Independence,” Library of Congress, Chronicling America, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83026172/1823-06-05/ed-1/; quoted and discussed in editorial notes to The Papers of James Madison, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/04-03-02-0335, and in American Historical Print Collectors Society, “Zooming In on the Declaration of Independence.” ↩ Return to text
  26. Daily National Intelligencer, June 5, 1823, continuing the passage quoted above. ↩ Return to text
  27. Richmond Enquirer (Richmond, Va.), June 11, 1823, reprinting the National Intelligencer item under the same heading, Library of Congress, Chronicling America. ↩ Return to text
  28. Niles’ Weekly Register (Baltimore), June 14, 1823, vol. 24, no. 613, p. 237, “Declaration of Independence,” reprinting the National Intelligencer text and citing “Nat. Int.” as its source, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/sim_niles-national-register_1823-06-14_24_613. ↩ Return to text
  29. Hillsborough Recorder (Hillsborough, N.C.), June 18, 1823, “Fac Simile Edition of the Declaration of Independence,” Library of Congress, Chronicling America, https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84026472/1823-06-18/ed-1/. ↩ Return to text
  30. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State, Inventory 15, Part II, Entry 272, “General and Special Ledgers, 1820–74,” and Entry 271, “Appropriation Estimates, 1820–74,” https://www.archives.gov/files/research/foreign-policy/state-dept/finding-aids/inventory15-part2.pdf. ↩ Return to text
  31. Act of March 3, 1817, ch. 45, § 4, “An Act to provide for the prompt settlement of public accounts,” 3 Stat. 366. ↩ Return to text
  32. National Archives, Guide to Federal Records, RG 217, § 217.10, “Records of the Office of the Fifth Auditor,” https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/217.html. ↩ Return to text
  33. Institutional jurisdiction does not by itself establish a personal signature on any individual account; see Adams’s diary entries of May 15 and May 17, 1819, on arrears and reconciliation difficulties in the same contingent-fund account, discussed with Pleasonton, vol. 31, manuscript pp. 110–111, https://www.primarysourcecoop.org/publications/jqa/document/jqadiaries-v31-1819-05-p102. ↩ Return to text
  34. Act of March 3, 1823, ch. 31, “An Act making appropriations for the support of government, for the year one thousand eight hundred and twenty-three,” 3 Stat. 756, 757. ↩ Return to text
  35. Harvard, Declaration Resources Project, “August Highlight: Son of a Signer”; Sotheby’s, “The Declaration of Independence: The Celebrated William J. Stone Facsimile, 1823”; Seth Kaller, “The Declaration of Independence—William J. Stone Engraving,” https://www.sethkaller.com/declaration-of-independence/william-stone/; and Kaller, “A Stone/Force Printing of the Declaration of Independence,” item 2407, https://www.sethkaller.com/item/2407-27694-A-Stone-Force-Printing-of-the-Declaration-of-Independence. ↩ Return to text
  36. Seth Kaller, “William J. Stone, First ‘Exact’ Facsimile of the Declaration: Current Working Census,” https://www.sethkaller.com/stone-census; Christie’s, “[Declaration of Independence] … Washington: W. I. Stone for the Department of State, 4 July 1823,” lot 6116270, https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-6116270. These examples concern the first printing; they are not all statements of prior approval in 1820, and are cited here to document the range of later formulations rather than to establish a congressional commissioning instrument. ↩ Return to text
  37. John Quincy Adams, secretary of state, communication to the president of the Senate, January 1, 1824, quoted in Catherine Nicholson, “Finding the Stones,” Prologue 44, no. 2 (Summer 2012), https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/summer/stone.html. ↩ Return to text
  38. Joint Resolution of May 26, 1824, “Resolution providing a place of deposit for the portrait of Columbus, and directing the distribution of certain copies of the Declaration of Independence, now in the Department of State,” Res. 2, 18th Cong., 1st sess., 4 Stat. 78. ↩ Return to text
  39. John Quincy Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 24, 1824, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-4347. ↩ Return to text
  40. Daniel Preston, ‘James Monroe: Impact and Legacy,’ Miller Center, University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/president/monroe/impact-and-legacy; Harry Ammon, ‘Monroe, James,’ Presidents: A Reference History, reproduced at Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/us-history-biographies/james-monroe. This describes their general working relationship in foreign affairs, not a Stone-specific consultation. ↩ Return to text
  41. James Monroe, first inaugural address, March 4, 1817, in James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Project Gutenberg edition, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10919/10919-h/10919-h.htm. ↩ Return to text

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