The Declaration of Independence was printed for the first time on the night of July 4, 1776, in Philadelphia, as a broadside. The second printing of the Declaration was published almost immediately after that. This second printing was made for Benjamin Townes’s newspaper, The Pennsylvania Evening Post, where it appeared in the July 6 issue.
These two formats—broadsides and newspapers—were how most inhabitants of the colonies first read about independence. And as politicians, couriers, and ordinary citizens rushed copies of the Declaration through the colonies, printers who received them often republished the text in both formats. In New Haven, Connecticut, for example, Thomas and Samuel Green published the Declaration in the July 17 issue of their newspaper, The Connecticut Journal. Around that same time, they also printed a broadside of the Declaration, displayed here.