See the broadside at The Charleston Museum
We all know what July 4 means to our country—the date of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence that celebrates its 250th anniversary this year. Yet the date August 5, 1776—a month and a day later—also holds significance to Charleston and the Lowcountry. It was only then that news of that historic signing became known in the Holy City.
While some storytellers have tried to link the June 28 victory over the British at Sullivan’s Island to a signal of encouragment for delegates gathered in Philadelphia to sign on to liberty, that certainly was not the case. It took weeks for our news to reach the Continental Congress, and likewise, the knowledge of what South Carolinians Arthur Middleton, Thomas Lynch Jr., Edward Rutledge, and Thomas Heyward Jr. had endorsed took time to travel here.
As soon as the ink was dry on the original document, Congress ordered the text of the Declaration to be printed as a broadside. John Dunlap, a Philadelphia printer, produced it overnight, and copies were dispatched to state assemblies, committees of safety, and to some military commanders. Messengers took off on horseback, and it appears likely that a Dunlap copy arrived here on August 2, or so. (That, coincidentally, is the day that the fair copy, the parchment document we all know of today, written in a fine script, was signed by all the delegates who had approved it.)
Local Huguenot printer Peter Timothy copied the Dunlap style, and his broadside took the news like wildfire through the streets. There were three public readings by August 5, 1776: at the Exchange Building, at what is now the County Courthouse on Broad and Meeting streets, and under the Liberty Tree on Alexander Street, where patriots had first gathered to whisper about and later demand liberty. Timothy printed his name at the bottom of the broadside, declaring which side he was on. He would pay for that when the British took the city in 1780, and he was sent by ship to prison in St. Augustine.
No doubt, scores of copies were printed by Dunlap, but less than 30 survive. Of the many that Timothy produced, only one is known today. Owned by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City, it is now on display at The Charleston Museum, thanks to a partnership with the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, returned after 250 years—a tangible piece of history, indeed.
