The Dunlap Broadside

In the eighteenth century, a broadside was a single sheet of paper printed on one side only, intended to be read at a glance, posted in a public place, or passed from hand to hand. Broadsides were the rapid-response medium of their day — used for proclamations, ballads, advertisements, and urgent news — and the Continental Congress chose precisely this format to announce its decision to break from Great Britain. On the evening of July 4, 1776, just hours after Congress approved the final text of the Declaration of Independence, the manuscript was carried a few blocks through Philadelphia to the shop of John Dunlap, a 29-year-old Irish-born printer who served as the official printer to Congress. Working through the night by candlelight, Dunlap and his assistants set the text by hand in metal type, locked it into the bed of a wooden common press, inked the forme, and pulled sheet after sheet until, by the morning of July 5, roughly 200 copies of what would come to be known as the Dunlap Broadside had been produced. These were the first printed copies of the Declaration ever made, and they were dispatched at once — to General Washington and his troops, to the legislatures of the thirteen colonies, and to newspapers up and down the Atlantic seaboard — carrying the news of American independence to the world.