Did the Founding Fathers sign their names to the Declaration of Independence on, July 4, 1776? No. Only two, John Hancock and Charles Thomson signed on July 4. On August 2, the majority of delegates signed it. Thomas McKean is thought to be the last to sign the Declaration of Independence, but the evidence in inconclusive. He left Philadelphia shortly after July 4 and did not return until late August 1776 and some historians say his signing date could have been as late as 1781.
Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, who, at age 33, was the youngest member of the Continental Congress. Eighty-six changes were made to Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration. Do to pressure Jefferson's anti-slavery paragraph was deleted from the original Declaration, had it not been deleted slavery would have been abolished. It read:
“(King George III) has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
The First Public reading of the Declarations was in Philadelphia's Independence Square, on July 8 1776,
The fact as stated on many websites cannot be verified "Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 years later."