Broadside of the Declaration of Independence

The second official printing of the Declaration of Independence appeared on January 18, 1777, by order of the Continental Congress, which had recently evacuated to Baltimore to escape the British w Army. Mary Katherine Goddard, a prominent printer and bookseller and Baltimore’s first postmaster, undertook the printing. In publishing and appending her name to the Declaration, Goddard openly aligned herself with the cause of the newly formed United States and invited the same risks to her life and property as those that members of Congress faced. Today the “Goddard Broadside” is notable not only as the first edition of the Declaration of Independence to be printed by a woman, but also as the first to publicly announce the names of nearly all of the document’s signatories.