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We agree, as I’ve stated above, that it is vitally important to be accurate on this as in anything. However, too much de-bunking can also miss the significance of the overall point, that the signers did in fact accept great personal risks for a glorious cause.

I won’t accept any “fake but accurate” defense, for sure, but there is a large truth that the signers put it all on the line and risked their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” because all sorts of terrible things MIGHT have happened to them for committing treason in the eyes of the British govt.

In some sense any suffering or hardship that individual signers faced because of the WAR of Independence (regardless of which army caused , whether it was accidental or intentional, etc.) can be said to be a consequence of their courageous act in affirming and signing the Declaration.

No War of Independence, no new risks and hardships for them (other than those faced by everyone living in that era).

Thus, even if the signers were not specifically targeted by the British (and there seems to be no reason to believe that most of them were targeted), every misfortune that followed from being willing to pursue independence (rather than accept accommodation on British terms) does follow from their act of declaring independence. In this their fellow-citizens shared the risks and burdens, but that does not mean that the signers did NOT also bear great risks and burdens (which the signers most specifically and publicly embraced by affixing their names to the Declaration of Independence).

Although the stories circulated since Paul Harvey (1956) get much of their emotional ‘kick’ from the
mistaken belief that the signers were widely and specifically persecuted by the British for signing, I do not find that their courage or even the actual risks they ran are at all diminished by the corrections of the historical record. De-bunking can always leave us with a sense of diminishment, yet the signers surely do not deserve to be diminished.

Finally, in a bit of speculation, note that the greatest risks would have arisen if the revolution had turned out to be a losing cause (which certainly seemed possible, even probable to many, in 1776!). If the British had vanquished the colonials many of the signers could THEN have found themselves in great danger indeed (danger of being hung for treason, etc.). That “what if” outcome may not seem to bear upon these email stories, but in fact a decisive British victory (which was a strong possibility at times, at least in the short term) threatened the signers with very great personal risks - and they surely knew that in signing their names. They COULD easily have been persecuted and/or executed even if it turns out that most of them were not harmed specifically for signing the Declaration of Independence.

Is this what you see as the offending statement that the Signers were singled out?’ “Even before the list was published, the British marked down every member of Congress suspected of having put his name to treason. All of them became the objects of vicious manhunts. ... . “ Otherwise, I’ve missed the passage where he said they were particularly singled out.

In any case, the psychology of warfare would seem to have been (then as now) to capture high visibility targets. Like Jefferson, some of my anacestors were farmers in VA ... now, if you are the Crown, to make your point are you going to go after TJ or after a small no-name farmer who supports him and his mission ? Both could have been hanged for treason. One’s imprisonment or hanging would have had far more value to opponents of the Revolution.

Whether or not they were specifically singled out for torment by the British, they deserve to be singled out for the highest praise for their role in our country’s founding... and 99.9% of Americans would be hard pressed to name even 5 of the Signers. Regretably.