The identification as American, from the mid-1780s, he added, “looks pretty watertight.”
William Ewald, a legal historian at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who is writing a biography of Wilson, said he found the case for Wilson — one of six men who signed both the Declaration
and the Constitution, and the rare founder to invoke the earlier document in the 1780s — “very plausible.”
Even if that attribution is wrong, Mr. Ewald added, the parchment is still “the discovery of a lifetime.”
“Every 20 years or so, someone discovers an unknown copy of one of the newspaper printings,” he said.
“But a new formal parchment — how many people can say they found that?”
The new discovery grew out of the Declaration Resources Project, which Ms. Allen, the author of the book “Our Declaration,” created in 2015 as a clearinghouse
for information about the myriad versions — newspaper printings, broadsides, ornamental engravings — that circulated in the decades after independence.
“I thought we would turn it over and the back would say, ‘Ha, ha, we fooled you!’”
The parchment — the only known iteration of the Declaration oriented horizontally — was stylistically similar to 18th-century American legal
and mercantile documents, suggesting it was made by a commercial clerk, probably in New York or Philadelphia.
“Is it for men, or for the imaginary beings called states?”
He was also the rare politician of the 1780s to repeatedly cite the Declaration — a document whose history he would have had the chance to ponder, Ms. Allen
and Ms. Sneff note, during research he is known to have done in 1785 in the archives of the Continental Congress.
