[American Revolution]:

$2,500 · Offered by William Reese Company

THE PENNSYLVANIA EVENING POST...THURSDAY, APRIL 4, 1776.... An issue of the Pennsylvania Evening Post, published April 4, 1776, three months prior to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, featuring content pertaining to the Revolution, the military defense of the colony, and legislative debates that would lead directly the following September to the ratification of "the most radical constitution of the Revolutionary era" (Wood). Occupying the issue's entire front page, and extending onto the second, is a letter to the publisher, signed "A Friend to Government by Assembly," concerning an issue then consuming Pennsylvania politics. Even in the wake of Lexington and Concord the previous April, the Pennsylvania Assembly, maintaining the colony's longstanding commitment to Quaker pacifism and demonstrating its continued reluctance to embrace independence, refused to organize a state-sponsored militia. In response, explains historian Jessica Choppin Roney, "Radicals and ordinary Philadelphians together...created a new, powerful institution, one that was able to agitate for mandatory universal military service." The Pennsylvania Associators, as they were known, were members of the Military Association, an extra-legal, all-volunteer, civilian militia. Among the Associators' demands were an end to all military service exemptions, including those based on freedom of religious conscience; the imposition of steep fines on all non-Associators; and the abolition of all property

• Printing: first

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