An enlightening new book provides the history and context for how the Declaration of Independence became the genre-defining document that changed the world.
Memorial Day calls on us to remember the more than 1.3 million American soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice in U.S. wars and military conflicts since 1775. An estimated 4,435 men and women died in the Revolutionary War when we broke our ties with England and established a new nation. A fascinating new book, published just in time for the 250th anniversary, focuses on that period.
As we move through the turbulence of our era and toward the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of our nation, this Memorial Day is an especially fitting time to reflect upon the values of sacrifice and community as well as the ideals that shaped us as a people. We are judged not just by what we build, but by what we choose to save and remember from the past.
When the Declaration of Independence Was News (2026) by Emily Sneff begins in Philadelphia in May 1776 and ends in Baltimore in January 1777. A historian of the founding era and an expert on the Declaration of Independence, Sneff wants her readers to understand why the context in which the text of the Declaration was communicated is so crucial to our understanding of history. Too often we assume that the Declaration of Independence came out of whole cloth. But that is the story in hindsight. The news of the action taken by the Continental Congress had to be spread by “printers, post riders, ship captains, civic leaders, soldiers, clerks, orators, preachers, diplomats, and translators.” As this new work makes clear, both the declaration and its dissemination are important. The Declaration’s story—told in 187 pages of insightful and well-written prose—is much more complex and fascinating than many imagine.
As Sneff writes in her introduction, “July 4th marks a rupture, a point of no return, and a national birthday. The Declaration of Independence is remembered as a genre-defining document. But that is only because, eventually, it worked.”
Through ten chapters that move around the country and Europe she asks straightforward questions: who knew what, where, and when, and why did that knowledge matter? Along the way she shows us how there was no single authoritative text, as almost every printed or manuscript copy of the Declaration produced in 1776 varies in format, type size, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. Many Americans first heard the Declaration at public readings around county courthouse steps.
Sneff begins with a resolution that passed the Continental Congress in May of 1776. Some, including the king of Portugal, understood it to be a declaration of independence. And there were members of that Congress, including John Adams, who were certainly pushing towards that goal. News of King George III’s speech to open Parliament late in 1775 and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense arrived in Philadelphia early in the new year. Both helped set in motion the push towards independence.
The May resolution was fairly measured in tone but Adams then added a fiery preamble. While it didn’t declare independence, it made the strong case as to why this resolution recommending new governments was necessary at this moment. The fuse was lit—further sparked by a call that month from Virginia’s colonial assembly to make the break—that would lead to the writing and passage of the document we know today as the Declaration of Independence.
Getting to the Declaration wasn’t easy as the political situation in the colonies was challenging. In New Jersey, for instance, the royal governor was Benjamin Franklin’s son, William. He was soon headed for prison in Connecticut and a new delegation in favor of independence was headed to Philadelphia. That type of rapid change and shifting loyalties was occurring up and down the eastern seaboard. When the Congress agreed to the Declaration of Independence on the morning of July 4, 1776, the New York delegates abstained from the vote, coming around later to add their names and make it “unanimous.”
Simply declaring independence wasn’t enough. The new resolution needed to be published and distributed. And that’s where the body of Sneff’s book focuses. Many people learned about the Declaration through public readings and printed broadsides and newspapers. Sneff has a fascinating account of how the reading in New York led directly to the destruction of the statue of King George III, which was then melted down to make musket balls for the revolutionaries. That image, Sneff suggests, captures what it was like in New York in July 1776 as British troops amassed offshore.
In the following chapters we learn how smallpox profoundly impacted the news and reception of the Declaration in Boston. Clergymen, especially for the Church of England, were forced to make decisions around their oaths, faith, livelihood, and country. “Words and Wampum” describes how the Wolastoqey Indian nation became the first to recognize U.S. independence. It is ironic that the Declaration of Independence “asserted the sovereignty of the United States but it failed to represent the sovereignty of Indigenous nations, and instead painted those people as ‘Savages’ wreaking havoc on the ‘Frontiers.'”
Sneff is also effective in showing how ineffective the Continental Congress was in getting a copy of the Declaration to the foreign power that needed it most: France. The British actually had several copies in London—one of which was printed incorrectly and with some measure of misdirection in the British press—before an “official” copy reached the American envoy in Paris. The Congress’s “inability to get a copy of the Declaration of Independence to [envoy] Silas Deane, and their naïveté about the formality expected by European courts, hurt the United States” and may have prolonged the war.
It was in Baltimore in January of 1777 that the Continental Congress finally got around to having a new printing of the Declaration made as an “authenticated copy.” That version was known as the Goddard broadside because the printer was Mary Katharine Goddard. It marked the transition for the Declaration of Independence from “news to archival treasure.” Thirteen copies were made, all of which bore Goddard’s full name at the bottom as the printer of record, and were circulated to the thirteen states. Rhode Island’s copy is still in the state archives in Providence, although for some unknown reason a black ink stain blots out the name of Mary Katherine Goddard.
In the introduction, Sneff recounts the story of a letter John Adams writes to a female friend on July 5th, in which he encloses one of the earliest copies of the Declaration known to exist. In the letter he uses what Sneff describes as “his standard tone of well-meaning condescension toward the women in his life.” The book’s final story of Mary Katherine Goddard brings this worldview full circle. It took until 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment, for women to finally become recognized political actors in the United States, changing figuratively if not literally the Declaration’s “all men” to simply “all.”
The ideals first expressed in the Declaration have led men and women over the past 250 years to sacrifice their lives to protect—and yes, expand—the self-evident truth that all are created equal with certain unalienable rights. Places of sacrifice are sacred, even if current public officials have no understanding of what that means.
The sacrifice of ordinary men and women for the values and ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence is why Memorial Day is so important.
More to come . . .
DJB
Image of John Trumbull’s famous 1818 portrait is often identified as a depiction of the Declaration’s signing, but it actually shows the drafting committee presenting its work to the Second Continental Congress. Credit: Wikimedia. Photo of Daniel Chester French’s Minuteman Statue at Concord by Ning Shi on Unsplash.
MORE TO COME... 