Carter Braxton

Benjamin Franklin's supposed remark that the delegates must all hang together or they would most assuredly all hang separately doesn't appear in any contemporary record of the signing at all.

The earliest documented trace of anything resembling it is a letter written months before the Declaration existed, in April 1776, in which a Virginia delegate named Carter Braxton mentioned the sentiment as an old joke already circulating in Congress, attributing it to an unnamed wit, rather than to Franklin specifically.

The line's first attachment to Franklin's name in print doesn't surface until decades after his death, in a 19th century biography that offered no source for the attribution, by which point a good witticism had simply migrated, as good witticisms tend to toward the most famous available wit in the room, one of the earliest full versions of the anecdote even has Hancock delivering the setup line insisting the delegates must be unanimous and hang together before Franklin supplies the punchline a two-man exchange that reads suspiciously like a piece of stage business invented well after the fact rather than a moment anyone in the room actually transcribed.

Franklin may well have said something like it.