America’s First Drafts

When the Declaration of Independence Was News, by Emily Sneff, Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $29.99

The men who drafted the Declaration of Independence read the newspapers in Philadelphia, and they were influenced by the rumors being reported. When the Continental Congress voted to declare independence, the delegates knew they were making news that would be circulated throughout the world. Yet scholars haven’t described American independence narrowly and specifically as a news event—until now.

In When the Declaration of Independence Was News, Emily Sneff interweaves many distinct events into a holistic account of how the news of American independence was produced, distributed, and received from May 1776 through January 1777. This tight time frame serves the book’s purpose well, as it focuses attention on the brief period when reports of the colonies breaking away excited, angered, delighted, and confused audiences around the world.

The “news” of the colonies’ secession from Great Britain first spread prematurely, as people misinterpreted a May 15, 1776, resolution passed by the Continental Congress. That resolution, reprinted in colonial newspapers in May and June of 1776, made its way to Europe, where it persuaded some readers, including King José I of Portugal, that the colonies had formally rejected British rule. In response, the king sought to preserve Portugal’s friendly relations with Britain by issuing an edict—on July 4, 1776, of all days—prohibiting trade between his nation and the rebelling American colonies.

An impressive researcher and talented storyteller, Sneff follows the news as it radiates out of Philadelphia throughout North America, to London, Lisbon, Paris, Dublin, Leiden, and beyond. News of independence, and even the text of the declaration itself, was often situationally determined. For example, most British printers, fearing charges of sedition, altered the document by redacting such words as tyranny and tyrant and hiding specific references to the crown behind initials and dashes. Copies of the London version of the Declaration of Independence, as mediated by British printers, would influence versions produced on the European continent.

British printers weren’t alone in altering, editing, or erroneously reporting the declaration’s text. Within the colonies, plenty of newspapers introduced errors in the text as well. The version printed by Massachusetts Spy, published in Worcester, included numerous misspellings and copy-editing glitches (“We hold these truths to us self-evident…”). Sneff closely examines errors in different newspapers, and she concludes that several resulted from printers transcribing the declaration as it was read aloud rather than reprinting published versions arriving from Philadelphia.

Indeed, the book’s most interesting episodes originate in the colonies. The news from Philadelphia diffused unevenly across time, thanks to large distances and the interruption of communication networks by British forces. Though Sneff’s chronicle recounts many joyous celebrations recorded when the declaration was read in public spaces, it also includes the reactions of those for whom the news proved unwelcome and threatening.

Like all news, the reports from Philadelphia were filtered through local loyalties and personal biases. For many loyalists—and Anglican clergy, who swore oaths of allegiance to the crown—news of independence sparked new tensions with their neighbors. A typical story occurred in Maryland, where Baltimore County Sheriff Robert Christie was detailed to read the declaration aloud to a crowd gathered in front of the county courthouse at noon on July 29, 1776. “Having promised to read the Declaration,” Sneff notes, “he instead fled town.” Christie retained his position for a few months, but he was constantly threatened and menaced, went into hiding, and eventually left Maryland altogether. Christie eventually petitioned the Loyalist Claims Commission—a British government agency created by Parliament in 1783 to compensate loyalists after the war—and Sneff cites Christie’s petition to confirm the sheriff’s opposition to the rebellion in his own words.

Due to the fortuitous timing of the newspaper’s printing schedule, the first report that the Continental Congress approved a Declaration of Independence appeared in a German-language newspaper, the Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote, on the morning of Friday, July 5, 1776. Henry Miller, a German printer, had scooped the thrice-weekly Pennsylvania Evening Post. In a chapter titled “Words and Wampum,” Sneff recounts how patriots relayed news of independence to Native American representatives in Watertown, Massachusetts, and German Flatts, New York (near Albany). On July 16, 1776, in Massachusetts, an “interpreter ‘fully explained’ the Declaration of Independence in French to the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqey representatives who understood that language,” Sneff writes. Wolastoqey Chief Ambrose Bear “responded simply, ‘We like it well,'” which, Sneff concludes, marks “the first formal acknowledgment of the independent and sovereign United States of America by another nation.”

Sneff’s book is an excellent reminder that even the most historic and influential events (and documents) once began as news that had to be reported, distributed, and read to achieve any impact. And though the book recounts events that occurred for a few months 250 years ago, many of the stories in it still feel timely. The communicative dynamic of news consumption in 1776 involved many pathologies that still plague the U.S. today. Upon hearing of the creation of the United States of America, some audiences welcomed the news because it confirmed their biases, and some audiences rejected the unwelcome and discomforting realities enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, no matter how well documented. 

Several London newspapers assumed the Declaration of Independence itself was an absurd and nefarious plot planned in France or Spain. The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser reported that “when the Congress resolved upon independence there were present several foreigners of different nations, amongst whom were some persons of distinction from the Courts of Versailles and Madrid.” (It also fantasized that “as soon as the Colonies declared themselves independent states, two foreign vessels, which were at Philadelphia, slipped their cables, and sailed with the intelligence to the above Courts.”) The Morning Chronicle claimed that Continental Congress President John Hancock had been duped by the “arch rebel and crafty pettifogger, [Samuel] Adams.” 

Other London newspapers disputed the specified grievances in the declaration. In “A Reply to the Declaration of the Representatives of the Disunited States in America, in Congress Assembled,” published in The Morning Post, the pseudonymous “X.Y.” argued—in Sneff’s words—”that the British colonists were a people who were made to be subdued. They had no sovereignty or authority, and they had turned against a king whose character was ‘great and merciful,’ not tyrannical.”

And so different identities and loyalties, both within the new nation and around the world, filtered news of the colonies’ independence in different ways. This enjoyable and incisive book reminds us that since the birth of the United States, the news has both reflected and amplified a host of American divisions.