Timothy Matlack: Scribe of the Declaration of Independence

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On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud to a crowd gathered outside the State House in Pennsylvania. Later in the month the proclamation was engrossed on vellum. Delegates began signing that finely penned document in early August.

The man who read the Declaration and then later embossed it - the man with perhaps the most famous penmanship in American history - was Timothy Matlack. He was a Philadelphia beer bottler who strongly believed in the American cause and inflamed the citizenry in town meetings and taverns. A disowned Quaker and the grandson of an indentured servant, he rose from obscurity to become a delegate to Congress. He led a militia battalion at Princeton during the Revolutionary War and his unflagging dedication to the American cause earned him the admiration of men like Thomas Jefferson and Richard Henry Lee. In 1776 Matlack and his radical allies deposed Pennsylvania’s oligarchy. His revolutionary government’s abolition law - the first in the western hemisphere - began the long struggle for equality in America. This biography is a full account of an American patriot.