A rare copy of the Declaration of Independence was discovered by a volunteer at the United Kingdom’s National Archives. It is the only known copy outside of the United States.
According to the UK National Archives, the document was among papers seized upon the capture of an American privateer in 1776. “The find was made during a cataloguing project exploring Royal Navy captains’ papers from the American Revolutionary War, part of The National Archives’ work marking the United States’ 250th anniversary,” the Archives explained.
Revolution 250 curator at The National Archives, Dr. Graham Moore, said in a statement, “This is one of the rarest forms of the Declaration we know about. It wasn’t meant to be preserved – it was printed quickly and distributed widely.”
He explained, “What makes this discovery even more exceptional is that, as the only known copy taken by military action, we know much more about it – thanks to the bureaucratic processes of war.” Graham noted that “[e]vidence taken from captured ships was preserved as part of Admiralty court proceedings, and we hold those records at The National Archives. So we can present an unusually rich backstory that most surviving declarations do not have.”
Chief Executive of The National Archives and Keeper of Public Records Saul Nassé called the discovery “vanishingly rare” and noted that the finding serves as a “powerful reminder that the history of the American Revolution is fundamentally transatlantic.”
According to data tracker Circana, copies of the United States’ core documents sold in 2025 at their fastest rates since the organization began tracking the data in 2004. An estimated 162,000 combined copies have been sold through mid-April, according to the Associated Press. During this same period in 2024, 58,000 copies were sold. In 2023, the number was around 33,000.
