This was all that was done on the Fourth of July, 1776, as young Joe Nixon could testify. But the printed copies of the Declaration prepared for transmission to the several States and to the army and signed by Mr. Hancock, the president of the Congress, and by Mr. Thomson, the secretary, all bore the heading: “In Congress, July 4, 1776,� and thus that date has come down to us as the one to be especially remembered.
That very night Joe heard, at his uncle’s big house on the Water Street, that the Committee of Safety in Philadelphia—of which, as I have said, Mr. John Nixon was a member—had ordered that “the Sheriff of Philadelphia read or cause to be read and proclaimed at the State House, in the city of Philadelphia, on Monday the 8th day of July instant, at 12 o’clock at noon of this same day, the Declaration of the Representatives of the United States of America, and that he cause all his officers and the constables of the said city to attend to the reading thereof.�
Here was a new treat in store for young Joe; and when he learned that the Worshipful Sheriff had designated his uncle, Mr. John Nixon, as the reader, Joe knew that this meant a front seat for him and was appropriately jubilant.
The day came. Monday, the eighth of July, 1776. “A warm and sunshiny morning� again reads the truthful journal, and twelve o’clock, noon, must have been hot indeed. But not all the heat of a Philadelphia July could wither the ardor of such patriots as young Joe Nixon. He was therefore a very “live� portion of the procession which, forming at the hall of the Committee of Inspection in Second Street, joined the Committee of Safety at their lodge, and, to the stirring sounds of fife and drum, marched into the State House square. Out from the rear door of the State House came the Congress and other dignitaries and then, standing upon the balcony of Mr. Rittenhouse’s astronomical observatory just south of the State House, Mr. John Nixon in a voice both loud and clear read to the assembled throng the paper which declared the United States of America “Free and Independent.�
The reader concluded with the glorious words: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,� and, as his voice ceased, the listening throng, so the record says, “broke out into cheers and repeated huzzas.� Then the Royal arms were torn down from above the seats of the King’s Judges in the State House, and Joe, like a wild young Indian, danced frantically around the bonfire which destroyed these “insignia of Royalty.�
Again, at five o’clock, the Declaration was read to the troops then present in the town, and the evening was given up to bonfires and fireworks which you may be certain young Joe enjoyed to his full content.
And peal upon peal, sounding above all the shouts and the hurrahing, rang out loud and clear, at both the noon reading and the night’s celebration, the joyous clang of the big bell of the State House telling the glad tidings of freedom, as well befitted a bell on whose brazen rim men had read for twenty-four years the almost prophetic motto:
“Proclaim liberty through all the land to all the inhabitants thereof.�
To his dying day Joe Nixon never forgot the glory and exultation of that jubilant first Independence Day—the eighth of July, 1776.
One other notable scene also lived long in his memory—a day and a date new to many of us who have always supposed that the Declaration of Independence was passed, signed, and proclaimed on the Fourth of July. It was the morning of Tuesday, the second of August, that same historic summer of 1776. From his customary seat by the doorkeeper Joe saw Mr. Thomson, the secretary of the Congress, lay upon the president’s table a great sheet of parchment. And on this sheet carefully and beautifully copied was the Declaration of Independence. Then, one by one, beginning with Mr. Hancock the president, the delegates to the Congress signed the great paper and by that act sent their names down to posterity—famous and honored forever.