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Signing

The Declaration became official when Congress recorded its vote adopting the document on July 4; it was transposed on paper and signed by John Hancock, President of the Congress, on that day. Signatures of the other delegates were not needed to further authenticate it. The signatures of fifty-six delegates are affixed to the Declaration, though the exact date when each person signed became debatable. Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams all wrote that the Declaration was signed by Congress on July 4. But in 1796, signer Thomas McKean disputed that, because some signers were not then present, including several who were not even elected to Congress until after that date. Historians have generally accepted McKean's version of events. History particularly shows most delegates signed on August 2, 1776, and those who were not then present added their names later.

In an 1811 letter to Adams, Benjamin Rush recounted the signing on August 2 in stark fashion, describing it as a scene of "pensive and awful silence". Rush said the delegates were called up, one after another, and then filed forward somberly to subscribe what each thought was their ensuing death warrant. He related that the "gloom of the morning" was briefly interrupted when the rotund Benjamin Harrison of Virginia said to a diminutive Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, at the signing table, "I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes and be with the Angels, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead." According to Rush, Harrison's remark "procured a transient smile, but it was soon succeeded by the Solemnity with which the whole business was conducted."

The signatories include then future presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, though the most legendary signature is John Hancock's. His large, flamboyant signature became iconic, and the term John Hancock emerged in the United States as a metaphor of "signature". A commonly circulated but apocryphal account claims that, after Hancock signed, the delegate from Massachusetts commented, "The British ministry can read that name without spectacles." Another report indicates that Hancock proudly declared, "There! I guess King George will be able to read that!"

A legend emerged years later about the signing of the Declaration, after the document had become an important national symbol. John Hancock is supposed to have said that Congress, having signed the Declaration, must now "all hang together", and Benjamin Franklin replied: "Yes, we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately." That quotation first appeared in print in an 1837 London humor magazine.

The Syng inkstand used at the signing was also used at the signing of the United States Constitution in 1787.