Declaration of Independence: unalienable rights

Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, and approved the wording two days later, so the fourth is the holiday. Thomas Jefferson wrote the draft. Congress cut about a quarter of it before adopting the text. This sentence carries the claim the rest of the document depends on, that rights come before governments. The version here follows the first volume of the United States Statutes at Large, whose punctuation differs a little from the parchment copy.

Where this text comes fromThere is no single official text of this document. The engrossed parchment that hangs in Washington, the printed broadsides sent out in July, and the version entered into the official statute record all differ in small ways, mostly in punctuation and capitalization, and none of them is a copy of the others. What you type here is the statute record version, linked below. Anyone comparing it word by word with the photograph they remember will find the commas in different places, and neither one is wrong.

What you might not noticeThe Statutes at Large printing sets off by their Creator with commas on both sides, a pause the parchment copy does not have. Small differences like that run through every official version of the Declaration. Source

What it trainsAt 212 characters this is the shortest founding document on the shelf and the punctuation does all the work: a colon after self-evident, then two semicolons dividing the three claims, then a single full stop. Four commas do the rest of the work. The hyphen in self-evident is the only one in the passage and it is the word most likely to be typed as two. Just two capitals appear in the whole sentence, which after the Constitution passages here feels like typing in a different century, and the two are only eleven years apart.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource