Night had not yet descended over Philadelphia's State House when Printer Benjamin Towne's Pennsylvania Evening Post came streaming off the press with a terse announcement of the action: "This day the CONTINENTAL CONGRESS declared the UNITED COLONIES FREE and INDEPENDENT STATES." Thus was the fact of independence first spread among colonial readers. By early this week the city's five other newspapers—a concentration that makes Philadelphia the publishing capital of the former colonies—had either reported the Declaration or were preparing stories on it. The Evening Post and Dunlap's Pennsylvania Packet have published the entire text, and Printer Henrich Miller has translated the "Erklärung" into German for his Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote.*
Yet hardly a word of the Declaration could so far have appeared in the rest of the American press. Despite the development of post roads and fast packets between cities, news still takes weeks to travel from one end of the Colonies to the other. And because printing technology has advanced little since the Boston News-Letter became the first successful colonial newspaper in 1704, it still takes two men with a manual press ten hours to turn out a typical weekly run of 600 copies. Only three of the nation's 32 papers are printed more frequently than once a week. The most prolific: Benjamin Towne's Evening Post, which was able to insert that brief mention of the Declaration in the first of its thrice-weekly issues right at press time. As is the custom in colonial newspapers, however, the momentous late news was simply inserted on a back page of the Post; readers who paid their two coppers for the paper had to read through earlier dispatches from London, Halifax, Williamsburg and New York before learning of the Declaration.
A number of New York papers plan to print the full Declaration this week, and the news will probably appear in Williamsburg's two rival Virginia Gazettes and Boston's New England Chronicle next week. Readers in Delaware, South Carolina, Georgia and New Jersey—where there are at present no newspapers published—will have to rely on whatever journals eventually arrive from other states. In some places, publishers are making up in patriotic zeal what they lack in timeliness. New York's John Holt, for instance, plans to print the text of the Declaration on a special page of this week's Journal with an exhortation to readers "to separate it from the rest of the paper and fix it up, in open view, in their houses."