On July 2, 1776 the news that “the CONTINENTAL CONGRESS declared the UNITED COLONIES FREE and INDEPENDENT STATES” appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post beside a notice about a local man who had declared his own independence. Ishmael, “twenty-five years of age, above six feet high, strong made, his colour between a Mulatto and a Black,” ran away from his Philadelphia owner despite being “somewhat lame, occasioned by his having his thigh bone broke when a boy.” The newspapers and state papers of the American Revolution made impassioned declarations about liberty and property, setting the stage for a civil war in the language of rights acted out by and upon unfree individuals like Ishmael. Modern readers cannot miss the proximity of liberty to slavery in the new nation, but would contemporaries have connected a slave's escape with the resolution that Congress passed on July 2 or with the Declaration explaining that resolution approved on July 4, published in the same newspaper on July 5, and celebrated in Philadelphia and elsewhere on July 8? More importantly, would Ishmael? To ask such questions is to confront a powerful narrative about the changing meaning of the Declaration of Independence. Scholars once confidently equated the Declaration with the statements that “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” But since the 1960s, and with increasing persuasiveness in book-length studies by historians Pauline Maier and David Armitage, scholars have contended that the self-evident truths of the second paragraph, so familiar to modern readers, did not constitute the core of the Declaration to contemporaries.