evidenced that Americans would rather die than live slaves!”īorn June 16, 1738, into a Connecticut family of printers and postmasters, Goddard was taught reading and math by her mother, Sarah, a well-tutored daughter of a wealthy landowner. “What think ye of Congress now? That day. “The ever memorable 19th of April gave a conclusive answer to the questions of American freedom,” Goddard wrote in the Journal after the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. In her 23-year publishing career, Goddard earned a place in history as one of the most prominent publishers during the nation’s revolutionary era. She’d editorialized against British brutality, reprinted Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and published extra editions about Congress’ call to arms and the Battle of Bunker Hill. At the bottom of the broadside, issued in January 1777, she too signed the Declaration: “Baltimore, in Maryland: Printed by Mary Katharine Goddard.”įor three years after taking over Baltimore’s six-month-old Maryland Journal from her vagabond, indebted brother, Goddard had advocated for the patriot cause. Also Baltimore’s postmaster, she was likely the United States government’s first female employee. Emboldened, the members of Congress ordered a second printing of the Declaration – and, for the first time, printed their names on it.įor the job, Congress turned to one of the most important journalists of America’s Revolutionary era. Weeks later, they learned that the Revolution had turned their way: Washington had crossed the Delaware River on Christmas Day and beaten the redcoats at Trenton and Princeton. As British forces chased George Washington’s Continental Army out of New Jersey in December 1776, a fearful Continental Congress packed the Declaration of Independence into a wagon and slipped out of Philadelphia to Baltimore.

Declaration of independence facts