United States Declaration of Independence - Publication and Reaction

Publication and Reaction

After Congress approved the final wording of the Declaration on July 4, a handwritten copy was sent a few blocks away to the printing shop of John Dunlap. Through the night Dunlap printed about 200 broadsides for distribution. Before long, the Declaration was read to audiences and reprinted in newspapers across the thirteen states. The first official public reading of the document was by John Nixon in the yard of Independence Hall on July 8; public readings also took place on that day in Trenton, New Jersey, and Easton, Pennsylvania. A German translation of the Declaration was published in Philadelphia by July 9.

President of Congress John Hancock sent a broadside to General George Washington, instructing him to have it proclaimed "at the Head of the Army in the way you shall think it most proper". Washington had the Declaration read to his troops in New York City on July 9, with the British forces not far away. Washington and Congress hoped the Declaration would inspire the soldiers, and encourage others to join the army. After hearing the Declaration, crowds in many cities tore down and destroyed signs or statues representing royal authority. An equestrian statue of King George in New York City was pulled down and the lead used to make musket balls.

British officials in North America sent copies of the Declaration to Great Britain. It was published in British newspapers beginning in mid-August, it had reached Florence and Warsaw by mid-September, and a German translation appeared in Switzerland by October. The first copy of the Declaration sent to France got lost, and the second copy arrived only in November 1776. It reached Portuguese America by Brazilian medical student ‘Vendek’ José Joaquim Maia e Barbalho, who had met with Thomas Jefferson in Nîmes in 1786. Though the Spanish-American authorities banned the circulation of the Declaration, it was widely transmitted and translated, by the Venezuelan Manuel García de Sena, by the Colombian Miguel de Pombo, by the Ecuadorian Vicente Rocafuerte and by the New Englanders Richard Cleveland and William Shaler, who distributed the Declaration and the United States Constitution among creoles in Chile and Indians in Mexico in 1821. The North Ministry did not give an official answer to the Declaration, but instead secretly commissioned pamphleteer John Lind to publish a response, which was entitled Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress. British Tories denounced the signers of the Declaration for not applying the same principles of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" to African Americans. Thomas Hutchinson, the former royal governor of Massachusetts, also published a rebuttal. These pamphlets challenged various aspects of the Declaration. Hutchinson argued that the American Revolution was the work of a few conspirators who wanted independence from the outset, and who had finally achieved it by inducing otherwise loyal colonists to rebel. Lind's pamphlet had an anonymous attack on the concept of natural rights, written by Jeremy Bentham, an argument which he would repeat during the French Revolution. Both pamphlets asked how the American slaveholders in Congress could proclaim that "all men are created equal" without freeing their own slaves.

Enslaved African Americans also heard the call to liberty and freedom. Tens of thousands of slaves left plantations in the South and farms in the North to join the British lines, or to escape during the disruption of war. The British kept their promise and evacuated thousands of Black Loyalists with their troops in the closing days of the war, for resettlement as freedmen in Nova Scotia, Jamaica or England. Four to five thousand African Americans served in the Continental Army fighting for American Independence. The revolutionary government freed slaves who enlisted with the Continentals; 5% of George Washington's forces consisted of African-American troops.

William Whipple, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who had fought in the war, freed his slave, Prince Whipple, because of revolutionary ideals. In the postwar decades, so many other slaveholders also freed their slaves that from 1790-1810, the percentage of free blacks in the Upper South increased to 8.3 percent from less than one percent of the black population. Most Northern states abolished slavery; although with gradual emancipation, slaves were still listed in some mid-Atlantic state censuses in 1840.

Having fought for independence, after the war freedmen faced housing and job discrimination, were denied voting rights in several states, and needed passes to travel between the states.