James Forten heard the Declaration read at nine — and held the country to it

A Dunlap broadside of the Declaration of Independence. National Archives, Papers of the Continental Congress (M247, roll 8).

On July 8, 1776, a nine-year-old Black boy stood in the yard behind the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia and heard the Declaration of Independence read aloud for the first time in public. His name was James Forten. He would become a wealthy businessman and an abolitionist — and for the rest of his life he would hold the country to the words he heard that day.

The printing that spread it

The Second Continental Congress approved the Declaration on July 4 and had it printed that evening by John Dunlap. His broadsides — single printed sheets, meant to be posted and read aloud — carried the text through the colonies. He printed more than 100; 26 survive. The one pictured is in the National Archives, among the papers of the Continental Congress.

Four days after the printing, Colonel John Nixon read it to the crowd behind the State House, the building now called Independence Hall, in the yard now called Independence Square. Forten was there.

How we know

Forten himself said he heard it. The detail survives because two abolitionist papers thought it worth printing when they honoured him: Henry Clarke Wright's tribute in William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator (March 11, 1842) and a piece titled "Great Men" in Frederick Douglass's The North Star (March 10, 1848). Both wrote about him because of his standing as a businessman and an activist; the boy in the crowd was, to them, part of the story of the man.

What he did with it

As an adult, Forten argued for the unalienable rights of emancipated Black people, and he argued from the Declaration — returning again and again to the principle that "God created all men equal." It is easy to read the document's promise as something the founders made and later generations collected on. Forten heard it the week it was new, as a child in a city where slavery was still legal, and spent a career insisting it meant what it said.

Sources

Written from the National Park Service (Independence National Historical Park) object record James Forten and the Dunlap Broadside Declaration of Independence, July 1776, a work of the United States government in the public domain. The broadside is National Archives Microfilm Publication M247, "Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789", roll 8.