by Rachel Bohlmann, American History Librarian and Curator
To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States, Rare Books and Special Collections offers a look at a series of copies of the Declaration of Independence held in our collections. The process of creating the Declaration of Independence has been written about widely and even celebrated on Broadway (1776 [1969; revivals in 1997 and 2022]). But what happened after Congressional delegates agreed on the text and consented to sign the document? How did Congress disseminate the Declaration?
During the late eighteenth century, news was broadcast through broadsides (posters) and newspapers, as well as orally. The first copies of the Declaration of Independence were designed and printed by John Dunlap, a Philadelphia printer and newspaper publisher. He typeset a large broadside version of the document on the night of July 4th and had printed at least several hundred copies by late morning on July 5th. Today, only 25 copies of Dunlap’s broadside exist.
It took time for the Declaration of Independence to reach all of the newly united states. RBSC holds a facsimile copy of one such later printing: the July 26, 1776 issue of the Virginia Gazette, which published the Declaration in full. The Virginia Gazette was published in Virginia’s capital, Williamsburg, and the paper published official news and business of the colony, and the state, of Virginia.
The same Virginia Gazette issue also reported on where the Declaration of Independence had been read publicly. Between early July and mid-August 1776 the document was printed and proclaimed across the United States, which was news in itself. The first public reading occurred on Monday, July 8th, in Philadelphia and other cities in Pennsylvania, and in New Jersey, using Dunlap’s broadside copy. In most places, the reading took on trappings of a ceremony. The local sheriff would read the Declaration on the steps of the courthouse, the gathered crowd would cheer, bells would ring, and soldiers would fire a salute. Coats of arms and other symbols of the British crown were also removed from buildings and burned.
By the middle of August 1776 the Declaration of Independence had reached London, where its text was changed by newspaper publishers worried about the document’s seditious content. Publishers excerpted, censored, and suppressed the text. These changes were reprinted in turn by printers and publishers beyond London to Europe, where the Declaration appeared in local newspapers by the end of August.
Rare Books and Special Collections holds a London printing of the Declaration of Independence. The Gentleman’s Magazine, a widely-read, general interest periodical, published the Declaration in its August issue. The magazine’s editor followed the pattern of some London newspapers, censoring words that criticised the monarch. As a result, “King,” “tyranny,” “Prince” and “tyrant” have been suppressed in this copy.
Some British editors altered the text of the Declaration to soften its criticism of George III. This might explain the marginal annotation in Hesburgh Library’s copy of the Gentleman’s Magazine. The handwritten note moderates Jefferson’s language to make the monarch appear less negligent. In referring to laws for which colonists petitioned the king, the annotator changed “he [the king] has utterly neglected to attend to them” to “he has utterly neglected to assent to them.” Did the editor believe that George III preferred to have denied rather than ignored his subjects?
Copies of the Declaration of Independence also circulated within the United States. As the United States expanded during the first decades of the nineteenth century, citizens needed to be informed about their government and the state of the nation; publishers and booksellers supplied. Hesburgh Libraries holds a number of these early nineteenth-century copies, including this 1811 copy published by Robert Harper, a printer in south central Pennsylvania. He published the nation’s founding documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—along with the constitutions of all 17 states. Among the purchasers was a bookseller in Pittsburgh that ordered 500 copies—a huge supply that the seller believed they could sell to newcomers to the frontier city.
Rare Books and Special Collections also holds a copy of the Declaration of Independence that was reprinted by the National Archives in 1952, along with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Published together as The Charters of Freedom and at the height of the Cold War, it celebrates the inauguration of the documents’ shared, permanent exhibition at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. In this publication, the National Archives reproduced the Declaration of Independence in its most formal and famous form: the engrossed copy of the Declaration that was completed and signed on August 2, 1776. An engrossed copy is text written on parchment in a large hand.
All of these copies are different—in format and sometimes in content. Yet in aggregate they represent Americans’ adherence—for two and a half centuries–to the idea that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Happy Fourth of July!
Bibliography
Sneff, Emily. When the Declaration of Independence Was News. New York: Oxford University Press, 2026.
The National Archives, Charters of Freedom; the Declaration of Independence.
