Declaration of Independence receives its first public reading, July 8, 1776
After the Second Continental Congress approved it, an estimated two hundred copies of the Declaration of Independence, bearing only the names of John Hancock and Charles Thomson, the congress’s secretary, were printed and distributed to the colonies. Because signing the declaration was an act of treason, punishable by hanging, the names of the fifty-six delegates were kept secret until the next year. In the yard of Independence Hall, the Philadelphia financier John Nixon gives the Declaration its first public reading. George Washington ordered it read to his troops in Bowling Green the next day.