The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America

The United States Declaration of Independence was the first E-text released by Project Gutenberg, early in 1971. The title was stored in an emailed instruction set which required a tape or diskpack be hand mounted for retrieval. The disk pack was the size of a large cake in a cake carrier, cost $1500, and contained 5 megabytes, of which this file took 1-2%. Two tape backups were kept plus one on paper tape. The 10,000 files we hope to have online by the end of 2001 should take about 1-2% of a comparably priced drive in 2001.

This file was never copyrighted, Sharewared, etc., and is thus for all to use and copy in any manner they choose. Please feel free to make your own edition using this as a base.

In my research for creating this transcription of our first Etext, I have come across enough discrepancies [even within that official documentation provided by the United States] to conclude that even “facsimiles” of the Declaration of Independence are nary identical to the original, nor of other “facsimiles.” There is a plethora of variations in capitalizations, punctuation, and where names appear on the documents [which names I have left out].

The resulting document has several misspellings removed from those parchment “facsimiles” I used back in 1971, and which I should not be able to easily find at this time, including “Brittain.”

[JT, Apr 2005: “Brittish” is spelled as in the original.]

[RO, Aug 2025: Dr. Hart’s original fully-justified columns of text in the plain text version have been restored for the introduction. Minor text alterations were made to do so.]

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Transcribers’ Notes

NOTE: This file contains the original contents of the very first eBook in the Project Gutenberg collection, the Declaration of Independence. This file previously contained a compilation of etexts from #2 to #9. Also it contained a duplicate of the Declaration - as part of preserving the history of the contents which isn’t necessary any longer. The historical variations of #1 are included in the “old” subdirectory accessed under the “More Files” listing in the landing page for this file. No edits or changes have been made to them.

All of the original Project Gutenberg Etexts from the 1970’s were produced in ALL CAPS, no lower case. The computers we used then didn’t have lower case at all.

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THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.