Who was There?

The events of the night of July 4, 1776 unfolded in the cramped quarters of a small printing shop on Market Street, and the historical record allows us to reconstruct, with reasonable confidence, who was in the room. John Dunlap himself was certainly present, working alongside several members of his crew — apprentices and journeymen compositors whose names have not come down to us, but whose hands did the bulk of the typesetting. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were also there: both men described the experience in letters and reminiscences written later in life, and their accounts remain the most direct surviving witness to what happened that night. The other members of the Committee of Five — Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston — were ordered by Congress to oversee the printing, and there is every reason to believe that they, too, were present, at least for the proofing and approval of the first sheets. Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress whose duty it was to convey the approved text from the State House to Dunlap's shop, almost certainly made the trip himself and may have remained to ensure that the printer's work matched the manuscript he had delivered. For the recreation of the event, the Colonial Heritage Foundation has arranged for first-person historical interpreters to portray each of these figures on the night of the reenactment — the full Committee of Five, John Dunlap, and Charles Thomson — so that visitors will encounter not only the press and the paper and the ink, but the men whose decisions, words, and labor brought the Dunlap Broadside into being.