This is the only one that’s still in the town it was sent to.”

Town Historian Jim Garman

PORTSMOUTH — “We’ve all read it,” Town Historian Jim Garman said of the Declaration of Independence. “Have you read it lately? It’s good to read it again.”

Residents had their chance to do just that during a public viewing of the town’s own copy of the 1776 document Thursday night at Town Hall. The event was made possible by the Portsmouth Historical Society — Mr. Garman’s also the president of that group — and Town Clerk Jennifer West.

Portsmouth’s copy, which is kept in a climate-controlled vault in the town clerk’s office every other day of the year, is one of only eight known surviving duplicates. Mr. Garman said Philadelphia printer John Dunlap made about 20 copies of the Declaration and one of them ended up in Rhode Island.

A Newport printer, Solomon Southwick, made a couple dozen copies of that copy on July 13, 1776, and circulated them to cites and towns across Rhode Island.

“So this is a third-generation copy,” Mr. Garman said of Portsmouth’s version. “This is the only one that’s still in the town it was sent to.” (The writing on the back of the document reads, “For Portsmouth Town Clerk, printed on July 13, 1776.”)

The copy was stored somewhere at Town Hall and a former town clerk, “not really understanding its value,” decided to hang it in a frame, Mr. Garman said. In 1984, Town Hall was repainted and “someone forgot to hang it back up,” said Mr. Garman, adding that he remembers later seeing it on the floor in a broken frame. 

John T. Pierce, Sr., the late police chief and history buff who always insisted the town’s copy was the real deal, worked with then-Town Clerk Carol Zinno to get it authenticated by the National Archives, he said.

In 1987 the auction house Sotheby's placed its value at $12,000, “so it’s probably over $50,000 today,” Mr. Garman said.

Like the other copies, Portsmouth’s bears none of the original signers — no Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin or John Hancock. The only signature on it is that of Henry Ward, Rhode Island’s secretary of state, who wrote his name after the General Assembly resolution below the Declaration.

Portsmouth’s copy also doesn’t contain the signatures of two Rhode Islanders who scrawled on the original: William Ellery and Stephen Hopkins, who represented the state at the Continental Congress.

‘Brilliant piece of propaganda’

As for the meaning behind the Declaration of Independence, Mr. Garman said its purpose was to justify why the American colonies were trying to separate themselves from the British. Its specific target was not the British Parliament, he said, but King George III.

“It’s a brilliant piece of propaganda, in the best sense of the word,” Mr. Garman said, noting that its principal author, Thomas Jefferson, was a brilliant crusader. “It was written to make the Americans realize that they had a common enemy. It’s a list of charges and it makes quite a dramatic case.”

Making note of the reaction to NPR’s Fourth of July tweeting of the entire Declaration of Independence — “Some people felt it was a personal criticism of the president of the United States" — Mr. Garman said perhaps more people need to go back and read the document from top to bottom.

“We need to be more familiar with it than we probably are,” he said.