SECRETS OF A RADICAL DUKE

How a lost copy of the Declaration unlocked a historical mystery

- BY DANIELLE ALLEN

The Sussex Declaration, discovered in the West Sussex Record Office in Chichester in 2015-the only known large-scale parchment of the Declaration of Independence other than the one on display at the National Archives

IN THE SUMMER of 2016, my family flew ahead of me to England for a vacation. Their taxi driver from the airport to London was chatty, and somehow the conversation drifted to the fact that he was from Lewes, in Sussex. This led to a bit of trivia about his hometown that the driver thought would be of interest to visitors from America: Thomas Paine, the Englishman turned American whose Common Sense would become the best-selling political pamphlet of the 18th century—and tilt America toward independence—had lived in Lewes for six years, working as a tax collector. When my husband relayed this to me by phone that evening, I sat up. I hadn't known that detail of Paine’s biography but immediately saw its possible relevance to a historical puzzle I was trying to solve.

The research team I directed at Harvard had just made a startling discovery.

As part of a project to find all copies of the Declaration of Independence produced between 1776 and 1826, we had stumbled on something special the previous year in the small West Sussex Record Office, in Chichester. Among its holdings was a large-scale ceremonial parchment of the Declaration of Independence. Prior to this find, it had been thought that a single large-scale parchment existed: the one tourists can see protectively encased at the National Archives, in Washington, D.C. Although the Sussex Declaration, as it is now called, has the names of the signatories written out in a single clerk's hand, rather than with actual signatures, and is engrossed on sheepskin rather than the more expensive calfskin, it is otherwise as grand and impressive as the parchment in Washington. The unanswered question was how it had found its way to West Sussex.