Unsung Architects: Voices from the Shadows of History

On January eighteenth, 1777, a woman named Mary Katharine Goddard printed the first official version of the Declaration of Independence that actually included the names of the signers. Right. Not July fourth, 1776. It took months. And that detail, that name—Mary Katharine Goddard—is exactly why we do this show. It reminds me of what we talked about last week with Hussein Abdel-Rasoul at King Tut’s tomb. The person who enables the entire historical moment, but gets forgotten. Completely. Because everyone thinks of the Declaration as this one, single event. But getting it from a secret parchment in a closed room to a public proclamation… that was a whole separate battle.

So why did it take so long to get the names out there? Well, because signing that document was an act of treason. Publicly attaching your name to it was basically signing your own death warrant if the revolution failed. The first prints, the Dunlap Broadsides, were anonymous for a reason. Okay, so who was Mary Katharine Goddard that the Continental Congress trusted her with this… this incredibly dangerous list of names? She was a force. She was the printer for the Congress, but also Baltimore's postmaster. And this was all happening because the British were threatening Philadelphia, so the entire Congress had picked up and moved to Baltimore in December 1776.

Ah, so they were refugees, essentially. And they needed a printer in their new city. Exactly. And they needed a propaganda win. They’d just had a victory at Trenton, and this was the moment to rally support, to show the world—and the colonies—who was ALL in. So they commissioned Goddard to print an official copy, this time with the names. And what she printed was different. Totally different. It had this decorative border, two columns of text… and fifty-five of the fifty-six signers’ names printed for all to see. One guy, Thomas McKean, probably signed after it went to press. But here’s the thing that gets me. At the bottom of this document, full of names like John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson… she puts her own name.

“Printed by Mary Katharine Goddard.” Yes. And that is the whole story. She wasn't just a hired hand. By putting her full name on it, she was openly aligning herself with the revolution. She was taking the exact same risk as the men who signed it. Wow. So if things went south, that document was evidence against her, too. Absolutely. It was a profound act of courage that’s just… been completely overshadowed. So, she’s this patriot, an official printer for the government, the postmaster for a major city during a war. She must have been celebrated afterward. You would think. But in 1789, she was removed from her postmaster position. What? Why? The Postmaster General, a man named Samuel Osgood, claimed the job now required travel that, and I'm quoting here, "a woman could not undertake." Hold on.

A woman who had been running communications and printing treasonous documents through the entire Revolutionary War… suddenly couldn't handle the job in peacetime? Right. It makes no sense. Over two hundred prominent citizens of Baltimore signed a petition protesting it. She even petitioned President George Washington directly. And? The dismissal stood. It was almost certainly a political move, not a practical one. The job was given to a man. So this woman whose name is literally on the Declaration of Independence—the only woman whose name is on any copy—gets pushed out of her government role because of her gender. That's the pattern, isn't it?

After her dismissal, she ran a bookstore for a couple of decades, and then her story just… fades out. We know so little about her later life. It's incredible. She risked her life to publish the names of the founders, and in the end, her own story was nearly erased. It’s like she printed her own name on that broadside, trying to make sure she wouldn't be forgotten. I think that's exactly what she was doing. Securing her place in the story. And it's just sitting there, in collections like the New York Public Library, waiting for us to read it. It makes you wonder how many other names are hiding in plain sight on the documents we think we know so well.