John freakin' Hancock, bitch. I heard he always signed his name in big letters, though.
And here's the lost paragraph of the Declaration, which was excised so that the worthless, hypocritical, unworthy, uneducated, backward, decrepit, slavist, Tory-loving, oppressive, illiberal, tyrannical southern colonies would join the rebellion and unanimous could be attached to the bottom:
This is a condemnation of slavery in the larger sense and then of course the Lord Dunmore Proclamation after that. It never should have been removed. We should not have revolted with the Southern colonies, it wasn't worth sullying the Constitution with the phrases "other persons" and "three-fifths." Horrendous. The South would've joined us later, after abandoning slavery or else not at all. Too bad, we probably could've gotten Virginia (thousands and thousands of slaves were freed in the 3 Chesapeake states during and after 1776, and the largest population of black freedmen was in Virginia) and let the Carolinas and Georgia go their own way. Those were the least pro-independence sections of the country anyway. Across income, education, profession, and everything else it was impossible to find a clear preference for or against independence. The only clear anti-independence trend was moving southward, and the clearest pro-independence trend was moving closer to Boston.
New England (CT, NH, RI, MA) was hugely pro-independence to the tune of 80 and 90 percent of the population; the middle states (roughly NY, NJ, PA, MD, DE, VA) were more in the 2 to 1 area, with PA and VA moreso, NY somewhat less so; and the Southern states were closer to 50-50 split in a lot of areas.
Anyway, huzzah for the Declaration, a truly historic document of immense importance to political and world history.
