Just filedThe debtForty trillion, and nobody signed for it
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The rules
The Roll

The first constitution, sewn together

The Declaration is one skin. The Articles are six, stitched head to foot into a single roll and written across all of them in a clerk's roundhand — a working instrument of government rather than a proclamation, and it looks like one. Every word here is the National Archives transcript of the engrossed document, set onto the sheet rather than printed over it, and the roll is drawn as it stood the day the hands went on it: new calfskin, fresh blue-black gall, no fade and no foxing. Those came later.

The engrossed Articles of Confederation, skin 6 — the signing skin, before the ink
0/1On the part & behalf of New HampshireNew Hampshire · July 9, 1778
Fig. 1 — The engrossed Articles, six skins stitched

The hands

Forty-eight men signed, and not on one day. Eight delegations wrote on July 9, 1778; North Carolina followed twelve days later, Georgia a fortnight after that, New Jersey in November, Delaware the following February, and Maryland — the last holdout, and the reason the union waited — on March 1, 1781, which is the day the Articles finally took effect. 16 of them had already put their names to the Declaration. Every hand can also be watched large, one at a time, on The Roll Signed, and the faces on file — with the archival candidates for the men still without one — on The Company.

  1. New Hampshire

    signed July 9, 1778

  2. Massachusetts Bay

    signed July 9, 1778

  3. Rhode Island and Providence Plantations

    signed July 9, 1778

  4. Connecticut

    signed July 9, 1778

  5. New York

    signed July 9, 1778

  6. New Jersey

    signed November 26, 1778

  7. Pennsylvania

    signed July 9, 1778

  8. Delaware

    signed February 12, 1779

  9. Maryland

    signed March 1, 1781

  10. Virginia

    signed July 9, 1778

  11. North Carolina

    signed July 21, 1778

  12. South Carolina

    signed July 9, 1778

  13. Georgia

    signed July 24, 1778

The record

  • Text: National Archives, "Articles of Confederation (1777)" (transcript of the engrossed document), retrieved 2026-08-22 — archives.gov. 3,509 words, agreed in Congress November 15, 1777, in force March 1, 1781.
  • Sheet: parchment, six sheets stitched together — Library of Congress, research guide, "Articles of Confederation: Primary Documents in American History", guides.loc.gov. The surface is drawn from its own profile, not the Declaration's.
  • Roll: 48 signers — Wikipedia, 'Articles of Confederation' (Signers), cross-keyed to Wikidata, retrieved 2026-08-22.
  • Hand: the clerk's text is broken where he broke it. Every ruled line on every skin — where the writing starts, where it stops — was measured off the Archives' 400-dpi scans, and the transcript is poured into those lines, so each skin carries exactly the lines it carries on the original and the short lines fall where his did.
  • The forty-eight hands are traced off the same scan of the last skin as pure ink coverage and pushed into the drawn membrane, the way the fifty-six are on The Parchment. Each man keeps his own hand, his delegation brace and his place on the sheet.