Jonas Phillips had been living with the Declaration of Independence for a little more than three weeks by late July 1776, when one scorching Philadelphia day he decided he should go ahead and send a copy to his relative Gumpel.
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Gumpel Samson, a cousin and business partner who lived in Amsterdam, must have had a lively curiosity in such things as rebellion and independence. Enough so, anyway, that Phillips, a Jewish immigrant patriot and civil rights leader, folded a broadside of the declaration that he likely had torn from the window of a Market Street shop, stuffed it into an envelope, and sent it on the next tall ship out of Philly.
This copy of the declaration then took its own trip — one beginning in those feverish Philly days in 1776 when independence was still new, and spanning nearly two and a half centuries and a continent and an ocean, before finding its way back to Philadelphia.
It is a story that only recently has been pieced back together — and is now told at the Museum of the American Revolution, where Phillips’ copy of America’s most famous broadside is on display.
“It helps answer some of the ‘who’ and ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions about the initial spread of the Declaration of Independence,” Matthew Skic, director of collections and exhibitions at the museum, said of the rare founding document, now on special loan to the museum from the National Archives of the United Kingdom. “Who were the people that were in the crowd when the declaration was first read aloud on July 8? Who were the people that owned these broadsides and first read from them?”
‘A declaration of that whole country’
In July 1776, in his creased note to Gumpel Samson — written in Yiddish to confuse British naval officers searching ships — Phillips kept it brief, explaining only that he was sharing “a declaration of that whole country,” meaning the newly formed United States. He also included a bill of exchange for some money to send along to his mother in Germany.
There are 26 known surviving copies of the roughly 200 original broadside printings of the Declaration of Independence that Philly printer John Dunlap hastily produced on demand on the night of July 4, 1776. Known as “Dunlap Broadsides,” these rare finds represent a physical link to that summer in Philadelphia. These declarations were printed on imported Dutch paper to get the word out: America is free!
Phillips owned a shop just doors away from the printing office owned by Dunlap, an immigrant, too, from Northern Ireland. The German immigrant and his wife, Rebecca, had 21 children. A patriot — he would later join the Philadelphia militia — he helped found Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia. In 1787, Phillips addressed the Continental Convention in Philadelphia on religious freedom, even writing to George Washington on behalf of Jewish veterans.
At the time, the Jewish community in Philadelphia was small but thriving, said Emily Sneff, guest curator of the Museum of the American Revolution’s grand 250th exhibit, “The Declaration’s Journey,” which features Phillips’ copy of the declaration and runs through Jan. 3, 2027.
“He’s advocating to make sure that Jewish people who fought for independence, who pushed for independence and the rights that are promised in the declaration, are able to actually serve in civic life,” she said.
Connecting the dots
In 2022, Sneff, a Philly-based historian who grew up in Collegeville, was preparing the museum exhibit — and researching her new book, When the Declaration Was News, an account of how word of the declaration spread in 1776, which includes Jonas Phillips’ story — when she “connected the dots,” she said.
Despite his precaution, Phillips’ broadside of the declaration never made it to Samson’s doorstep. Along with the note and bill of exchange, it fell into the hands of the British, who stashed it away like a bad memory.
Sneff had already rifled through intercepted correspondences in the British archives, where the long known-about confiscated broadside had been stored.
Now, following tiny, jumbled filing codes that British paper pushers had inked onto the contraband documents sometime during the 19th-century reign of Queen Victoria, Sneff linked the broadside to Phillips’ letter and promissory note for his mother. She had provided what every historian wants — a backstory — for a confiscated copy of America’s creed stamped with the mark of “Her Majesty’s State Paper Office.”
“It’s such a Philadelphia story,” Sneff said during a recent afternoon at the museum. “It just shows how Philadelphia was part of the wider world in 1776. This declaration is emanating from Philadelphia, and it’s being enclosed in a letter that’s not written in English. It’s written in Yiddish. It’s a cool way of understanding the founding document from a different perspective.”
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