Today's Reading
PART ONE
THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS:
THE WOMEN BEHIND AMERICA'S FIGHT FOR INDEPENDENCE, 1776-1826
CHAPTER ONE
Mary Katherine Goddard:
The Printer
Two days before Christmas in 1789, Mary Katherine Goddard was seething with anger—and for good reason. She was not a member of the nascent country's elite, but she knew that she had done enough to justify taking her case straight to the top. In a letter to the newly elected president, George Washington, she decried an "extraordinary Act of oppression towards her."
At age fifty-one, she had earned her position as the first female postmaster in the United States. Yet after fourteen years of service, she was suddenly dismissed due to political cronyism, cast aside so that a powerful man could return a political favor.
What stung even more was that she had risked everything for her country, including her life. A dedicated patriot, Mary Katherine Goddard was the woman Congress had trusted in the early days of the Republic to complete one of the country's most important jobs: printing and distributing its founding documents.
On January 18, 1777, the Second Continental Congress ordered the printing of an authentic copy of the Declaration of Independence, with the names of the signers, so that each of the states could put the founding document into its archives. It was the first time that the country would learn the names of almost every signer of the Declaration. America was at war, and they needed to know the men leading the charge.
The lawmakers were meeting in Baltimore because British troops were in New Jersey, and getting close to Philadelphia, "the seat of war" and the nation's then capital. Baltimore was the home of Mary Katherine Goddard, and the printing shop she had inherited from her family was just a few blocks away from the new Congress. Since the move south, Mary Katherine had printed a number of resolutions and notices for Congress, so when it was time to quickly print the country's most important document, they called on her.
In just two weeks, she gathered the names, printed copies, and sent them to the thirteen colonies. Earlier versions of the Declaration had circulated without all the signatories' names to avoid British detection. Printing the version with nearly all the signers' names was an act of defiance and extraordinary bravery.
And that's not all. There under the large signature of John Hancock, clearly printed, is the name Mary Katherine Goddard. Mary Katherine stood alongside the nation's founders, taking a tremendous risk at a time when the outcome of the American Revolution was uncertain.
Today her work is known as the Goddard Broadside, and only a handful of copies still exist, including ones at the New York Public Library and at the Library of Congress. It was the first printed version of the Declaration of Independence specifically intended for preservation.
How ironic that Mary Katherine's work was meant to be remembered forever, yet she herself has largely been forgotten.
The broadside was the first to use the title "The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America." It is also the first version to contain almost every signer's name, fifty-five of them—all men, including John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. And then at the bottom, in bold type, is the only woman's name on the nation's founding documents: Mary Katherine Goddard.
It's significant that she used her full name. She could have left it blank or used her initials, as she had done earlier when signing her newspapers as "MK Goddard." Including her full name opened her up to the risk of being imprisoned by the British. That's not an overstatement, as Richard Stockton, one of the signers from New Jersey, was captured and imprisoned "under harsh conditions" for adding his name to the Declaration.
In 1777, many women could not write; they often signed documents with an X because they were not literate. Even decades later, French political observer Alexis de Tocqueville noted that American society confined women to domestic roles, writing that "inexorable public opinion carefully keeps woman within the little sphere of domestic interests and duties."
Mary Katherine defied those expectations, becoming one of the most prominent publishers during the nation's founding. Even before the statement of freedom from the king of England, Mary Katherine's newspaper, the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, published editorials and documents that challenged unpopular taxation and control of the colonies by the British monarch. She devoted pages of her newspaper to Thomas Paine's "Common Sense"—the Revolutionary pamphlet that galvanized support for independence and rebuked the tyrannical rule of the king.
Furthermore, she wrote editorials herself. Following the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, considered the beginning of the Revolutionary War, she wrote, "What think ye of Congress now? That day...evidenced that Americans would rather die than live [as] slaves!" As a wartime printer, she brought the front lines of the battlefield to the front pages, telling the colonies about the "savage barbarity" of the British soldiers. Printing these words was clearly dangerous. Yet she persisted.
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