Don Wildman

Is this true?

Would they have suffered the worst possible fate?

Hanging, loss of property, the ruin of your family.

The quote that is attributed to Ben Franklin, whether he said it or not, is famous.

We must indeed all hang together or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that's made up.

I think that has to do with the snake diagram.

But anyway.

As you mentioned before, they approved this document on the 2nd of July, 1776.

The final text is adopted the 4th of July and signed, but not all signatures happen at once.

That's a fiction of that famous painting.

Yeah.

So after the break, Michael and I are going to discuss the reactions to the Declaration and how this will play out through history.

All right.

After the Declaration was published, Michael, there is a reaction, of course, from the British.

Tell me what the Crown had to say about this.

I've never really read anything about when English attitudes about the promise of North America, you know, like the resources of it and the great riches that were going to be made and all that stuff must have been an enormous school of thinking at that time in the middle 1700s.

Across the colonies, the challenge of getting this document out and proliferated amongst all is a matter of printing, which is laborious anyway, and then getting it printed into broadsides and into the newspapers and so forth.

I mean, tell me how long it took for people across all these colonies to understand what this document said.