Though the Continental Congress had approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, it took days to print copies and organize a public announcement. On July 8, Colonel John Nixon read the document aloud to a crowd gathered in the State House Yard in Philadelphia, one of the first times ordinary citizens heard the colonies' break from Britain proclaimed in public.
News in 1776 traveled at the speed of a horse or a ship, so the gap between Congress's vote on July 2 and 4, and the public proclamation, was not unusual — it reflected the practical work of printing broadsides and arranging a crowd. Philadelphia's bells, later mythologized as including the Liberty Bell, reportedly rang that day to summon citizens to the State House Yard.
John Nixon, a militia colonel and merchant, stood on a wooden platform erected for the occasion and read the entire text, including its long list of grievances against George III, to a crowd that included soldiers preparing to march to New York to face the British Army. Accounts describe cheering, and that evening some celebrants tore down and destroyed a royal coat of arms.
The same week, similar readings occurred in other colonies as copies of the printed Declaration fanned out by courier. The document that Americans now celebrate every July 4 as the day of adoption was, for most colonists who actually heard it, first encountered on this day or later — a reminder that the founding of the United States was a process stretched across weeks, not a single afternoon.