The Proclamation, Reading, and Immediate Reception of the Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence, which the Second Continental Congress adopted on July 4, 1776, is America’s birth certificate, and patriots greeted it with joy similar to that surrounding the birth of a child.

The Declaration renounced the ties between the thirteen lower North American English colonies and the British king. Relying on the doctrine of “no taxation without representation,” which they traced to the Magna Carta of 1215, colonists had already denied the authority of the British Parliament, in which no Americans sat, to tax them.

Even after American militiamen fought British troops at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775, and Congress appointed George Washington to command the Continental Army that June 19, many hoped that King George III might side with them. Instead, he rejected the Olive Branch Petition that Congress sent to him and declared them to be in rebellion. In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, which advocated independence and pointed to the ills of hereditary monarchy.

In May 1776, the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia encouraged states to write constitutions to replace the colonial charters that the king had granted to them. On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia asked Congress to declare “that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.” Accordingly, few colonists were surprised when Congress declared independence from Britain on July 2. Two days later, Congress explained this decision to fellow countrymen and to other nations, whose military support Americans needed, in the Declaration of Independence, which enumerated American grievances against the king.

Congress ordered the document to be “proclaimed in each of the United States and at the head of the army.” The need for unity was essential. As Benjamin Franklin reputedly told fellow members of Congress, whom the English considered to be treasonous, “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration to be read aloud. Historians believe that either Charles Thomson, the Secretary of the Congress, or his senior clerk and penman, Timothy Matlack, was the first person to read the Declaration to a group of artisans and laborers gathered at the Pennsylvania State House (today’s Independence Hall) on July 4. One of them may also have read it again later that day at the courthouse.

On July 4, Congress commissioned John Dunlap of Philadelphia to print copies of the Declaration to distribute throughout the colonies, which he did that evening. On July 6, the Pennsylvania Evening Post became the first newspaper to print the document. Colonel James Nixon, the son of an Irish immigrant, read the document outside Independence Hall on July 8 to a group of merchants and lawyers, who were wealthier than the men who had attended on the 4th.

On July 8, which was also an election day in Pennsylvania, individuals publicly read the document in Easton, Pennsylvania, and in Trenton, New Jersey. From there, it was read up and down the colonies, in public squares and from church pulpits, to both military and civilian groups.  

The attempt to remain loyal to a king against whose forces the colonies were fighting had been difficult. After listening to the Declaration, Joseph Barton of Sussex County, New Jersey, expressed relief that “his heart and hand shall [now] move together.” The opening words of the Declaration elevated the revolutionary discourse from a dispute about taxes to a higher plane of equal human claims to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Celebrations varied from city to city and from state to state. Public readings were frequently accompanied by cheering, the firing of cannons, the ringing of bells (a popular mid-nineteenth-century story by novelist George Lippard focuses on the ringing of the Liberty Bell, although it is uncertain whether it could have been safely rung, given the condition of the tower that housed it at the time), and dinners and toasts—often one for each of the thirteen states. Some readings were also accompanied by parades, the erection of liberty poles, and the destruction of royal symbols like the king’s coats of arms or the royal flag.

After the reading of the Declaration to George Washington’s troops in New York on July 9, the troops toppled a gilded lead statue of George III on horseback and melted it down into bullets. When the Declaration was read in Savannah, Georgia, on August 10, 1776, the crowd parodied the Church of England’s (Anglican) “Service for the Burial of the Dead,” for King George and the tyranny they thought he represented.

The Declaration forced Loyalist supporters of Britain, also called Tories, to decide whether to lie low, join Patriot or Tory military forces, or flee. For their part, some British troops, who now faced a protracted war, burned effigies of US generals and other leaders.

Thomas Hutchinson, the former governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who remained a Loyalist and returned to England, wrote a refutation of the Declaration, as did the English barrister John Lind. Tories who had fled to St. Augustine, Florida, burned Patriot leaders John Hancock and Samuel Adams in effigy.

A few individuals like the English parliamentarian John Wilkes welcomed the Declaration of Independence as a legitimate defense of rights, but most British subjects sided with their king. Even before the Declaration, the great English writer Samuel Johnson, referencing the revolutionaries who owned slaves, had rhetorically asked in his 1775 pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Canadians rejected colonial overtures to join the fight in an expanded union.

African Americans served on both sides in the Revolutionary War. Enslaved people who learned about the Declaration surely wondered if they were included among the men the Declaration had declared to be created equal. If not, they might have asked, as Frederick Douglass later did in a historic speech of July 5, 1852, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” On March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams had written to her husband John to “remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors,” but most American women did not gain the right to vote until states ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

The French, who would launch their own internal revolution in 1789, responded favorably to the document. King Louis XVI viewed the war as a chance to weaken Britain, which had acquired Canada in 1763 by defeating France in the Seven Years’ War. By declaring their national independence, the thirteen states opened the door under international law for France, Spain, Holland, and other countries to ally themselves with Americans in what had previously been considered a civil war.

Future state bills and declarations of rights echoed the opening language of the Declaration, which Jefferson had partly modeled on the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Throughout the nation’s early history, Americans memorialized Independence Day with processions, celebratory dinners, and orations glorifying the Declaration, its authors, and the American Revolution. Once political parties emerged, they sometimes celebrated separately. When John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who had headed rival Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, both died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration in 1826, many Americans realized the contributions both their parties had made. The nation held major commemorations of the Declaration on its centennial (1876) and bicentennial (1976) and is preparing for similar events for the semiquincentennial (2026).

Today Independence Day is more often celebrated with picnics, ball games, and displays of fireworks than with speeches and military exercises. Public schools and universities mark Constitution Week with readings from that document in September, whereas most such schools are not in session on July 4.

The Declaration’s elegant sentiments and the brave actions it signified continue to inspire Americans and anti-colonial movements throughout the world.

John R. Vile is a professor of political science and dean of the University Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University. His many books include The Declaration of Independence: America’s First Founding Document in US History and Culture (ABC-CLIO, 2019).

Sources

Chris Coelho, “The First Public Reading of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.” Journal of the American Revolution, July 1, 2021. https://allthingsliberty.com/2021/07/the-first-public-reading-of-the-declaration-of-independence-july-4-1776/.

Charles D. Desbler. “How the Declaration Was Received in the Old Thirteen.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 84 (July 6, 1892): 165–187.

Larrie D. Ferreiro, “At Its Core, the Declaration of Independence Was a Plea for Help from Britain’s Enemies.” Smithsonian Magazine, June 28, 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/its-core-declaration-independence-was-plea-help-britains-enemies-180963857/.

John R. Vile. The Declaration of Independence: America’s First Founding Document in U.S. History and Culture. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2019.