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{{tropelist}}
* [[Absentee Actor]]: On the original Broadway cast recording, thanks to Howard da Silva's heart attack just before opening night. That's his understudy, Rex Everhart, singing Franklin.
* [[AcCENT Upon the Wrong SylLABle]]:
** The period-correct pronunciation of "Maryland" as "Mary-Land" to the modern ear.
** Deliberate-LEE done throughout "The Lees of Old Virginia."
* [[Acting for Two]]: Standard practice in the straw hat circuit tours during the 1970s. Livingston and Morris, the delegates from New York, were frequently played by the same actor. And in a production number cut after the initial tryout, most of the cast doubled as (mostly incompetent) soldiers.
* [[Aluminum Christmas Trees]]: The show is filled with odd or bizarre details that are ''true'', discovered because its authors [[Shown Their Work|did an amazing amount of research]]. For instance, Benjamin Franklin is carried into Congress in a sedan chair, but it's not because he's [[Too Important to Walk]] -- it's because his gout is acting up and he ''can't'' walk (and the servants carrying him were prisoners from the local jail). Sometimes the details were so hard to believe, the writers had to ignore or change them [[Reality Is Unrealistic|because they were afraid the audience would think they had made it up.]] The most significant example of this would be a line taken from something [[John Adams]] wrote in one of his letters -- that if the Founding Fathers did not ban slavery, "there will be trouble a hundred years hence." The writers had to modify the line because if they quoted it word-for-word no one would believe they hadn't put those words in Adams' mouth with the clarity of a century of hindsight.
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** Caesar Rodney riding eighty miles in failing health to show up just in time for the vote (a real event, famous enough that it's on the Delaware quarter).
* [[Big "Never!"]]: Adams does a few of these.
* [[Bittersweet Ending]]: The film ends with the Declaration signed and
* [[Blood on the Debate Floor]]: Adams and Dickinson calmly talking out their differences. With [[Cane Fu|canes]].
* [[Bowdlerise]]: Up until recently, the only version of the movie to reach TV was a severely-edited copy that obscured or completely removed many of the raunchier bits, including the whole "New Brunswick" sequence and the latter half of Franklin's "it's like calling an ox a bull" exchange with Dickinson. Even the version that hit the theatres was badly chopped, among other things excluding lines that made it clear Rutledge's opposition to the slavery clause was not due to mindless evil, but because he saw it as a betrayal of a promise that the independence faction would allow states to govern themselves as they saw fit.
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