The Printer's Boy

Chapter 1

The Page That Was Not Dry

On the night of the fourth of July, 1776, Tom Hallett was asleep under the press table when the door of the print shop banged open.

"Up, boy! Up! Light every candle we own!"

It was Mr. Dunlap, the printer, and he was holding a sheet of paper as carefully as if it were a sleeping baby. Behind him came two men from the State House, still wearing their dusty traveling coats.

Tom was twelve. He had been Mr. Dunlap's apprentice for eight months, and in that time his jobs had been sweeping, fetching water, and mixing ink, which was made from soot and linseed oil and got into everything, including his hair. He had never once seen Mr. Dunlap hurry.

Tonight Mr. Dunlap was almost running.

"Congress has voted," said one of the men. His voice shook, and Tom could not tell if it was from fear or from joy. "The colonies are done being colonies. Every word is written here. By morning, people must be able to read it."

"By morning?" Tom said. "That's only a few hours."

"Then we had better not waste them," said Mr. Dunlap.

The men set the page on the table. Tom leaned over it. The writing was neat and flowing, and the first line he could read made the back of his neck prickle:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another...

"Does that mean what I think it means?" he whispered.

"If the king reads it," said Mr. Dunlap, "he will think it means treason. And so will every soldier he can send. Every man whose name is on this page has just put his neck in a noose." He looked at Tom. "That includes the man who prints it. Do you still want to stay?"

Tom thought about the cold floor, the soot, and the long mornings. He also thought about his father, who had gone off to join the militia in the spring and had written home only twice.

"I'll stay," he said.

"Good. Then you are the fastest pair of hands I have. Come here."

Setting type was slow work. Each letter was a tiny piece of metal, and each one had to be picked out of its box and set backwards, so that when it was inked and pressed it would read the right way round. Tom's job was to hand Mr. Dunlap the letters he asked for, quickly, and in the right order.

"E."

"E."

"T. No, backwards, boy, backwards."

Candles burned down. The men from the State House paced. A church bell somewhere across the city rang the hour, and then rang it again, and Tom's fingers were black to the wrist.

Just before dawn, Mr. Dunlap set the last line in place. He tightened the frame, rolled ink across the letters, laid a clean sheet of paper on top, and pulled the lever of the great wooden press.

The press groaned. Mr. Dunlap lifted the sheet and held it up to the candle.

Every word was there, crisp and black.

"It's perfect," breathed Tom.

"It is wet," said Mr. Dunlap, and he almost smiled. "One page is not enough, Tom. We need hundreds. And every one of them has to reach a town before the king's friends find out what we have done."

He hung the first sheet to dry and turned back to the press.

"Fetch more paper," he said. "It is going to be a long day."

Chapter 2

Ride to the Yard

By the fifth of July the shop smelled of ink, paper and hot candle wax, and a tall stack of printed sheets stood on the table.

Tom had not slept. He did not feel tired. He felt like a lantern that somebody had lit from the inside.

"These must go to the thirteen states," said Mr. Dunlap, tying the sheets into bundles. "To the generals, to the town leaders, to anyone who can read it out loud. Riders will carry them. But the first reading belongs to Philadelphia, and it is happening on the eighth, in the yard behind the State House. I want one clean copy there, and I want it carried by someone nobody will suspect."

"Who would suspect a printer's boy?" said Tom.

"Exactly."

So on the morning of the eighth, Tom tucked one perfect sheet inside his shirt, wrapped in an old apron, and walked down Market Street. The city was awake and humming. Wagons rattled by. People stood in doorways whispering. A woman at a baker's stall looked at his black fingers and said, "You've been up all night, lad."

"Yes, ma'am," said Tom. He kept walking.

At the State House yard a crowd was already gathering, hundreds of people, shoulder to shoulder in the summer heat. There were farmers and sailors, shopkeepers and clerks, women with babies on their hips, and boys perched on fences. At the front stood a man named Colonel Nixon, holding a paper of his own. Tom pushed through the crowd, ducking under elbows, until he reached him.

"Sir," he said, and pulled the page out of his shirt. "From Mr. Dunlap. It's the cleanest one."

The colonel took it, glanced at the crisp black print, and nodded. "Your master does fine work. Stay close, son. You earned a front seat."

A hush spread across the yard. Colonel Nixon climbed onto a platform and unfolded the page, and he began to read in a voice that carried over every head.

Tom had set those words himself, letter by backwards letter. He knew them the way he knew the creaks of the press. But hearing them said aloud, to hundreds of faces turned toward one voice, was a different thing altogether.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...

Tom looked around him. An old man was crying quietly. A sailor had taken off his hat. Somewhere behind him, someone began to cheer, and then everyone was cheering, and a bell started ringing over the rooftops, loud and bright and wild.

Years later, people would argue about which bell it had been, and who had rung it, and whether it rang at all that day. Tom never argued. He knew what he had heard.

There was one more thing he knew, and it was harder. Those words said all men are created equal, but not everyone in that yard was free, and not everyone who had been counted in those words would be counted in the new country. The promise had been written down. Keeping it would take a very long time, and a lot of people willing to hold the nation to what it had said.

Tom wiped his hands on his apron and watched the crowd. He felt proud, and he felt something else too, something that sat quietly under the pride.

It's only ink on paper, he thought. Now somebody has to make it true.

When he got back to the shop, Mr. Dunlap was waiting at the door.

"Well?" said the printer.

"They cheered," said Tom. "They all cheered."

Mr. Dunlap nodded slowly. He looked tired and happy, and a little afraid.

"Good," he said. "Then the easy part is over. Wash your hands, Tom. We have more printing to do."

The End