Then the Congress adjourned and young Joe went home, completely tired out with the day’s anxiety and excitement. And though on that notable night of the third of July a nation had been born, Philadelphia lay quietly asleep knowing little or nothing of the great happening. Next day--the first Fourth of July ever specially known to Americans--Joe was about the only privileged character who, slipping into the secret session heard, from his seat by the side of his friend the doorkeeper, the order given by Mr. Hancock as president of the Congress that “copies of the Declaration be sent to the several assemblies, conventions, and committees or Councils of Safety, and to the several commanding officers of the Continental troops; that it be proclaimed in each of the United States and at the head of the army.” This was all that was done on the Fourth of July, 1776, as young Joe Nixon could testify. But the printed copies of the Declaration prepared for transmission to the several States and to the army and signed by Mr. Hancock, the president of the Congress, and by Mr. Thomson, the secretary, all bore the heading: “In Congress, July 4, 1776,” and thus that date has come down to us as the one to be especially remembered. That very night Joe heard, at his uncle’s big house on the Water Street, that the Committee of Safety in Philadelphia--of which, as I have said, Mr. John Nixon was a member--had ordered that “the Sheriff of Philadelphia read or cause to be read and proclaimed at the State House, in the city of Philadelphia, on Monday the 8th day of July instant, at 12 o’clock at noon of this same day, the Declaration of the Representatives of the United States of America, and that he cause all his officers and the constables of the said city to attend to the reading thereof.” Here was a new treat in store for young Joe; and when he learned that the Worshipful Sheriff had designated his uncle, Mr. John Nixon, as the reader, Joe knew that this meant a front seat for him and was appropriately jubilant. The day came. Monday, the eighth of July, 1776. “A warm and sunshiny morning” again reads the truthful journal, and twelve o’clock, noon, must have been hot indeed. But not all the heat of a Philadelphia July could wither the ardor of such patriots as young Joe Nixon. He was therefore a very “live” portion of the procession which, forming at the hall of the Committee of Inspection in Second Street, joined the Committee of Safety at their lodge, and, to the stirring sounds of fife and drum, marched into the State House square. Out from the rear door of the State House came the Congress and other dignitaries and then, standing upon the balcony of Mr. Rittenhouse’s astronomical observatory just south of the State House, Mr. John Nixon in a voice both loud and clear read to the assembled throng the paper which declared the United States of America “Free and Independent.”