UsefulCharts Gets the Fourth of July Wrong—and Misses the History Behind the Signatures
Fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted, two former American presidents died on the same day. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both passed away on July 4, 1826. It is one of the most extraordinary coincidences in American political history.
In his video I Found An Old Chart About The Signers Of The Declaration Of Independence, UsefulCharts creator Matt Baker describes that anniversary as occurring exactly 50 years after the Declaration was signed.
That is historically incorrect.
The Declaration was adopted on July 4, 1776. Most of its signatures were added on August 2. Others appeared later, and the precise timing of the final signature remains a subject of historical investigation.
The distinction matters because the Declaration was not a single ceremony involving 56 men. It was a political decision, followed by a developing process of documenting, endorsing and publicizing that decision.
Baker's mistake is straightforward to correct. The more consequential problem is that his treatment of an 1858 statistical chart turns the founding generation into a collection of entertaining personal facts while leaving much of its political history unexplained.
The Fourth of July Was Not the Signing Day
The National Archives establishes a sequence that should be central to any account of the Declaration's signers.
On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress approved independence from Great Britain.
On July 4, Congress adopted the Declaration's final wording.
On July 19, Congress ordered an official parchment copy prepared for signatures.
On August 2, most delegates signed that parchment. Others signed afterward.
This was not merely a technical difference between two dates.
On July 3, John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, predicting that July 2 would become America's great annual celebration.
He was celebrating the congressional decision to separate from Britain, not a signing ceremony that had yet to occur.
That detail makes the deaths of Adams and Jefferson even more interesting.
They died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration's adoption, not the fiftieth anniversary of their signatures.
Baker had a remarkable historical coincidence. By describing it incorrectly, he attached that coincidence to an event that happened later.
For a video specifically examining the people who signed the Declaration, the distinction deserves more care.
The 56 Signatures Were Not Even a Fixed List in 1776
The historical record becomes considerably more interesting once the Declaration is treated as an actual document rather than a familiar image.
Consider Thomas McKean of Delaware.
McKean supported independence, but his name was absent from the first official printing that publicly identified the Declaration's signers.
That printing was produced in Baltimore in January 1777 by Mary Katharine Goddard, a printer and postmaster whose contribution rarely features in popular accounts of the founding generation.
The Library of Congress preserves a copy. Its catalog specifically identifies McKean as the missing signer.
The omission matters.
The celebrated list of 56 names was not necessarily complete when Americans first learned who had signed.
Research by Harvard University's Declaration Resources Project places McKean's signature sometime after January 1777, possibly as late as 1781. His name first appeared in a printed list of signers in 1782.
The exact date remains uncertain.
This is the sort of historical discovery that changes how we understand the Declaration. Its signatures accumulated over time, and the printed record of its signers developed afterward.
It also introduces a neglected participant.
Goddard did not sign the Declaration as a congressional delegate. She helped transform its signers into publicly identifiable historical figures.
The National Archives records that her printing disclosed their names after months in which they had not been publicly listed together, partly because of the risk of British retaliation.
That is considerably more revealing than another statistic about a signer's age.
The 1858 Chart Was a Historical Argument, Not Just a Beautiful Design
Baker begins by explaining his affection for charts produced before computers. He finds them visually appealing and believes they offer insight into how earlier generations understood history.
That is a promising starting point.
But the chart he examines has a creator and a history of its own.
It was produced in 1858 by John Carroll Power, a historian who later became associated with the preservation of Abraham Lincoln's tomb.
Its full title was Diagram and Statistical Record of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.
The large lithograph, approximately 120 by 90 centimeters, assembled biographical information about the 56 signers into an elaborate network of connecting lines.
Power wanted to create a dependable historical reference. According to the chart's own explanatory material, he gathered information through existing publications and contact with descendants of the signers.
Yet the chart was never simply an exercise in neutral documentation.
Its creator decided which details deserved attention.
The number of marriages, children, dates of birth, professions and ages at death became the information through which readers encountered the founding generation.
Other questions received no comparable statistical treatment.
Who possessed substantial political influence? Who controlled large estates? Who depended on enslaved labor? What were the signers' conflicting ideas about government?
Those questions would have offered a very different portrait.
A 2022 scholarly examination by Sebastian M. Herrmann explains another striking feature of Power's design.
The complex lines operated almost like a game. Readers could begin with a mysterious statistic, trace the corresponding line and discover the person behind it.
Herrmann argues that the unusual design encouraged readers to transform isolated information into personal stories, even though the complexity made the chart less effective as a straightforward reference.
That is almost exactly what Baker does.
He begins with dots and follows the lines to reveal Franklin, Hopkins, Rutledge, Braxton and others.
The modern video effectively performs the activity that the nineteenth-century chart was designed to encourage.
But reproducing the chart's method also reproduces much of its selective attention.
A chart can be ingenious without being a sufficient explanation of history.
And a modern historian should be particularly alert to what an old statistical document chooses not to count.
Carter Braxton's 18 Children Are the Least Interesting Part of His Political Story
One of Baker's discoveries concerns Carter Braxton of Virginia.
Braxton, the video explains, had 18 children—the most of any signer.
Baker also identifies his connection to Robert King Carter, the wealthy Virginia patriarch whose descendants included another signer, Benjamin Harrison.
These details are substantially consistent with the National Archives' biographical records.
But Braxton's life contains a far more revealing combination of wealth, political power and ideological conflict.
According to Encyclopedia Virginia, Braxton owned more than 12,000 acres and approximately 165 enslaved people during the 1770s.
His wealth came partly through landownership, tobacco production and commerce, supported by a substantial enslaved workforce.
In the spring of 1776, Braxton also published a pamphlet challenging what he considered the excessively democratic ideas in John Adams's proposed approach to government.
His arguments contributed to tensions with other Virginia revolutionary leaders.
Virginia's convention subsequently reduced its congressional delegation in a move intended to remove Braxton and Benjamin Harrison. Braxton nevertheless supported independence and signed the Declaration.
Consider what disappears when this man becomes principally a statistic about children.
Braxton supported independence from Britain while opposing a more democratic vision of government.
He belonged to a wealthy political class whose economic position depended substantially on enslaved labor.
His political disagreements had consequences for his position in Congress.
Those details help explain the composition and internal disagreements of the revolutionary leadership.
The number of children he fathered tells us comparatively little about any of that.
The contrast becomes even sharper with Thomas Jefferson.
Baker identifies Jefferson as one of the two signers who became presidents and emphasizes his remarkable death on July 4, 1826.
But the principal author of the Declaration also enslaved more than 610 people over his lifetime, according to Monticello's historical research.
Jefferson's estate depended on their labor, and he sold more than 110 enslaved people during his lifetime.
These facts are not peripheral to the Declaration's history.
They expose the contradiction between the document's declaration of human equality and the institutions maintained by some of the men who endorsed it.
Not every video about the Declaration needs to become a comprehensive history of slavery.
But when a presentation offers a statistical portrait of the signers, including their professions, family connections and children, the absence of their economic relationships and enslaved laborers becomes a consequential limitation.
The Year 1858 Was Not an Innocent Moment to Remember the Founders
There is another reason Power's chart deserves more historical scrutiny.
It was published in 1858.
That was the year Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held their famous Illinois Senate debates.
One of their central disagreements concerned slavery and the meaning of the Declaration's assertion of human equality.
Lincoln argued that excluding Black Americans from the Declaration's principles undermined the moral foundation of American independence.
Douglas defended a narrower understanding of the founding principles and maintained that political communities should determine their own policies concerning slavery.
The National Park Service preserves their arguments, including Lincoln's repeated insistence that the Declaration's principles could not be separated from the nation's debate over slavery.
In other words, while Power was assembling his statistical portrait of the founders, Americans were publicly fighting over what those founders' most famous words meant.
The coincidence of dates does not establish that Power intended his chart to advance a particular position on slavery.
There is no basis here for accusing him of deliberately concealing uncomfortable facts.
But the historical setting changes how the chart should be read.
Its information is selective, and its original audience lived in a country approaching civil war over questions that the Declaration had not resolved.
A chart that emphasized the signers' marriages, children and longevity offered one way to commemorate a supposedly shared national inheritance.
The political arguments occurring in 1858 exposed how deeply divided that inheritance had become.
Baker's stated interest in how earlier generations understood history makes this missing context especially important.
The chart's publication year was not merely a vintage label.
It was part of the story.
The Problem Is Not That Every Statistic Is Wrong
The most defensible criticism of Baker is not that his entire presentation is factually unreliable.
Many of its central biographical details agree with modern historical records.
Benjamin Franklin was the oldest signer at 70.
Edward Rutledge and Thomas Lynch Jr. were both 26.
Carter Braxton had 18 children.
Charles Carroll of Carrollton was the last surviving signer, dying in 1832 at 95.
The National Archives confirms these details.
The criticism is therefore more specific.
Baker makes a definite historical error about the Declaration's signing date.
He also presents a nineteenth-century selection of biographical curiosities without adequately examining the assumptions behind that selection.
The video's format rewards whichever facts produce the most satisfying visual discoveries.
A line leads to a name. A name leads to an anecdote. The anecdote becomes the history the audience remembers.
This approach can make historical material accessible.
But it also creates an illusion of understanding.
Knowing which signer lived longest does not explain which ideas prevailed in Congress.
Knowing who had the most children does not explain the economic foundations of his political power.
And identifying all 56 signatures does not explain how those signatures accumulated or when their owners' identities became public.
These are different kinds of historical knowledge, and the video gives the first kind nearly all the attention.
The Verdict: A Beautiful Chart Cannot Substitute for Historical Judgment
UsefulCharts offers an entertaining introduction to a remarkable nineteenth-century visual artifact.
But the episode's central weakness is the ease with which historical curiosity becomes historical explanation.
Its incorrect anniversary claim is the clearest factual failure. The larger missed opportunity is its treatment of a selectively constructed statistical record as though tracing its lines were enough to understand the people represented.
Independent evidence provides a far richer account.
The Declaration was adopted before most signatures were added. Mary Katharine Goddard helped disclose the signers' identities. Thomas McKean's signature entered the historical record later than the others. Carter Braxton's political beliefs and enslaved workforce complicate the harmless family trivia. And the chart itself emerged in a nation bitterly divided over the meaning of its founding principles.
None of this requires inventing wrongdoing or questioning Baker's intentions.
It requires asking a better historical question.
Instead of merely discovering which person belongs to each statistic, we should ask why those statistics were selected—and what understanding of American history they leave behind.
The most important information in a historical chart is not always what it contains.
Sometimes it is what nobody thought to count.
References
1. Original work — I Found An Old Chart About The Signers Of The Declaration Of Independence. UsefulCharts, Matt Baker; publication date not established in the supplied transcript.
Watch the original video
The primary source for Baker's statements, biographical selections and description of the July 4 anniversary.
2. Creating the Declaration: A Timeline. U.S. National Archives; undated institutional reference.
National Archives timeline
Establishes the separate dates of independence, adoption, preparation of the parchment and subsequent signing.
3. John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776. Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; July 3, 1776.
Read the historical correspondence
Documents Adams's expectation that July 2 would become the anniversary of American independence.
4. The Declaration of Independence: A History. U.S. National Archives; undated institutional reference.
National Archives history
Explains the Declaration's production, later signatures and delayed public disclosure of their owners' names.
5. In Congress, July 4, 1776: The Unanimous Declaration. Library of Congress; printed by Mary Katharine Goddard, 1777.
Examine the original 1777 broadside
Preserves the early official printed list of signers and documents Thomas McKean's omission.
6. April Highlight: Missing McKean. Declaration Resources Project, Harvard University; 2016.
Read the historical investigation
Examines why McKean's name appeared later and why the exact date of his signature remains uncertain.
7. Unnecessary Complications? The Interplay of Symbolic Forms in John Carroll Power's Diagram and Statistical Record. Sebastian M. Herrmann, transcript Verlag; April 4, 2022.
Read the scholarly analysis
Identifies the chart's creator, examines its original design and explains how its connecting lines encourage biographical storytelling.
8. The Signers' Gallery. U.S. National Archives; undated institutional reference.
Review the signers' biographical statistics
Confirms the principal ages, family statistics, European birthplaces and longevity claims discussed in the video.
9. Carter Braxton (1736–1797). Encyclopedia Virginia; published 2020.
Read Braxton's documented biography
Establishes his landholdings, approximately 165 enslaved people, political disagreements and removal from Virginia's congressional delegation.
10. Slavery FAQs. Thomas Jefferson's Monticello; undated institutional research resource.
Examine Monticello's slavery research
Documents Jefferson's lifetime ownership of more than 610 enslaved people and the economic importance of their labor.
11. Lincoln on Slavery. Lincoln Home National Historic Site, U.S. National Park Service; historical document collection.
Read the 1858 debate evidence
Preserves contemporary arguments over whether the Declaration's principles of equality extended to Black Americans.