Two days after the Continental Congress adopted it, the Declaration of Independence appeared in print for ordinary colonists to read. The Pennsylvania Evening Post's July 6 edition carried the full text, allowing the document to circulate beyond the delegates in Philadelphia and begin its journey toward towns, army camps, and eventually across the Atlantic.
Congress had approved the Declaration's text on July 4, but adoption by a legislative body and public knowledge were two very different things in the eighteenth century. John Dunlap's broadside printings went out first to officials and commanders, but it was the Pennsylvania Evening Post, a daily paper, that gave the document its first true newspaper publication on July 6, setting it in ordinary type alongside shipping notices and advertisements.
From Philadelphia the text spread by rider and ship, reaching New York in time for General Washington to have it read aloud to his troops on July 9, and reaching London only in mid-August. The gap between adoption, printing, and public reading is a reminder that the Fourth of July fireworks mythology compresses a slower, more analog process: a revolution announced not with a single dramatic reading but through the grinding, essential work of eighteenth-century print journalism.
Key people: John Dunlap, George Washington