Two hundred forty-nine years ago, a series of events culminated in America’s Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. On June 7, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia put forth a resolution for independence before the Second Continental Congress. On June 10, Congress postponed consideration of Lee’s resolution for three weeks as members struggled to build a consensus. Despite this uncertainty, more vocal proponents for independence persuaded Congress on June 11 to appoint a committee to draft a formal declaration.
That committee — consisting of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston — worked from June 12 to June 27. Or, more accurately, Jefferson worked on the Declaration, while Franklin and Adams provided several meaningful edits. On June 28, a draft of the committee’s work was read in Congress. After much debate and cajoling among representatives, the colonies officially severed ties with Great Britain on July 2. (This is the date that John Adams believed would be celebrated as an American holiday.)
With additional revisions to Jefferson’s work, Congress unanimously approved the final wording of the Declaration of Independence on July 4 and ordered it printed. After the printing of about two hundred broadsides from John Dunlap’s Philadelphia print shop, The Pennsylvania Evening Post became the first newspaper to publish the Declaration on July 6. Finally, Colonel John Nixon is credited as having given the first public reading of the Declaration to a crowd on July 8 in the Pennsylvania State House Yard (now Independence Square).
In honor of that last event, park rangers from the National Park Service hold a re-enactment of the Declaration’s first public reading outside Independence Hall (formerly the State House) on July 8 each year. It is a grand spectacle and well worth attending. It is also most likely an incorrect commemoration of history. The July 8 reading definitely occurred, but there was an earlier reading on July 4 that was lost to history for two hundred years.
In a 1992 academic paper entitled “From the Here of Jefferson’s Handwritten Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence to the There of the Printed Dunlap Broadside,” historian Wilfred J. Ritz provides evidence of a public reading on July 4, 1776 — the day Americans actually celebrate as their country’s birthday. Ritz highlights the eyewitness testimony of Charles Biddle, who wrote in his autobiography, “On the memorable Fourth of July, 1776, I was at the Old State-House yard when the Declaration of Independence was read. There were very few respectable citizens present.”
Ritz also notes the personal diary entries of Quaker historian Deborah Norris Logan. Logan describes the Declaration’s reading on July 4 thusly:
It took place a little after twelve at noon and they then proceeded down the street, (I understood) to read it at the Court House. It was a time of fearful doubt and great anxiety with the people, many of whom were appalled at the boldness of the measure, and the first audience was neither very numerous, nor composed of the most respectable class of citizens.
The accounts of Biddle and Logan are significant because they both describe the gathering as filled with less than “respectable” citizens. In other words, those Americans who first heard the Declaration of Independence were most likely common laborers and artisans — and not the wealthier Philadelphians who attended the festive official ceremony on July 8.
In a research paper published four years ago, scholar Chris Coelho provides additional testimonial evidence that the July 4, 1776 reading took place and argues persuasively that the likely orator was either the secretary of Congress, Charles Thomson, or his senior clerk, Timothy Matlack. Coelho produces enough circumstantial evidence for a reasonable person to conclude that the revolutionary firebrand Matlack was the man who first publicly declared America’s independence from Great Britain.
Matlack was a delegate to Pennsylvania’s constitutional convention, a colonel in Philadelphia’s fifth militia battalion, and a well known public orator. As Congress’s established penman, Matlack penned several petitions to King George III; George Washington’s formal commission as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army; and the signed, engrossed parchment now recognized as the official Declaration of Independence. In other words, Matlack likely created and delivered a clean copy of the Declaration to the print shop of John Dunlap. And Matlack was likely the speaker who addressed local Philadelphians on July 4, 1776 and read the Declaration of Independence publicly for the first time.
Why is it important to get this little bit of history right? As Coelho argues, “the people who gathered outside Independence Hall” on July 4, 1776 “were the ones who drove the revolution in Pennsylvania. Led by radicals including Timothy Matlack, the ‘lower sort’ forced Pennsylvania’s elite to accept independence. Thanks to the pressure they applied in their colony, Congress was able to adopt the Declaration of Independence unanimously.” What happened outside the Pennsylvania State House around noon on July 4, 1776 is much more than an esoteric footnote to a forgotten moment in history. It rightly realigns that moment in history back to the common Americans, whose uncommon achievements birthed the United States.
