<P> In 1777, Congress commissioned Mary Katherine Goddard to print a new broadside that listed the signers of the Declaration, unlike the Dunlap broadside . Nine copies of the Goddard broadside are known to still exist . A variety of broadsides printed by the states are also extant . </P> <P> Several early handwritten copies and drafts of the Declaration have also been preserved . Jefferson kept a four - page draft that late in life he called the "original Rough draught". It is not known how many drafts Jefferson wrote prior to this one, and how much of the text was contributed by other committee members . In 1947, Boyd discovered a fragment of an earlier draft in Jefferson's handwriting . Jefferson and Adams sent copies of the rough draft to friends, with slight variations . </P> <P> During the writing process, Jefferson showed the rough draft to Adams and Franklin, and perhaps to other members of the drafting committee, who made a few more changes . Franklin, for example, may have been responsible for changing Jefferson's original phrase "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" to "We hold these truths to be self - evident". Jefferson incorporated these changes into a copy that was submitted to Congress in the name of the committee . The copy that was submitted to Congress on June 28 has been lost, and was perhaps destroyed in the printing process, or destroyed during the debates in accordance with Congress's secrecy rule . </P> <P> On April 21, 2017 it was announced that a second engrossed copy had been discovered in an archive in Sussex, England . Named by its finders the "Sussex Declaration", it differs from the National Archives copy (which the finders refer to as the "Matlack Declaration") in that the signatures on it are not grouped by States . How it came to be in England is not yet known, but the finders believe that the randomness of the signatures points to an origin with signatory James Wilson, who had argued strongly that the Declaration was made not by the States but by the whole people . </P>

Who was the declaration of independence approved by