Twenty-six of John Dunlap’s original broadsides of the United States Declaration of Independence are known to survive.
After Congress approved the Declaration’s wording on July 4, 1776, Philadelphia printer John Dunlap produced the first printed copies during the night. A broadside was a large sheet printed on one side, making the text easy to distribute and display. Dunlap printed about 200 copies for Congress and the colonies.
The surviving examples are exceptionally important because they preserve the earliest public printing of the Declaration. The original source copy used by Dunlap has not been found, but the surviving broadsides show how the document was circulated immediately after adoption.
The total has changed as discoveries were made. Fourteen copies were known in 1949, and a twenty-fifth was found behind a painting in 1989. The twenty-sixth known copy was discovered in the United Kingdom’s National Archives in 2009. These are different from the later Mary Katherine Goddard broadsides, which included the names of the signers.