Philadelphia was the birthplace of the Declaration in more than one sense. John Dunlap, an Irish-born printer at Second and Market Streets, was commissioned as Congress's official printer and produced the first authoritative printing—the Dunlap broadside—likely in the early hours of July 5, 1776. About two hundred copies were printed. Twenty-six survive, one bearing Jefferson's manuscript pacing marks for reading the text aloud. The Declaration received its first public reading on July 8, when John Nixon read it in the statehouse yard to a crowd that included the young free Black Philadelphian James Forten. The Pennsylvania Evening Post had printed the text first, on July 6, and it circulated rapidly in both English and German. The Declaration even left a trace in Latonia, a manuscript newspaper written by boys at the Quaker Latin School between 1777 and 1778, whose handwritten sheets recorded the disruptions of occupation—a rare youthful civilian perspective on what the Declaration had set in motion.
Interviewees
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David Brigham
- President and CEO, Historical Society of Pennsylvania
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William Ewald
- John J. O’Brien Professor of Comparative and International Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School
