“The Instrument Has Suffered Very Seriously”
Tuesday, July 4, 1876, Philadelphia
Gazing at the thousands of people sprawled before him, Richard Henry Lee—grandson of the Virginia delegate who a century earlier offered the resolution in the Continental Congress that America’s “United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States”—clutched the fading, original, engrossed parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence and prepared to read the historic document that his grandfather had signed.
It was the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration, and the sprawling international Centennial Exhibition of 1876, the first world’s fair held in the United States, had been under way in grand fashion since opening ceremonies on May 10. Lee was among the more than 8 million people who would travel to Philadelphia during the exhibition’s stirring six-month run to celebrate the centennial year of America’s independence and its growth and emergence as a world power.
Years in the planning, the massive exhibition was intended to unite the country riven by Civil War and Reconstruction by showcasing the country’s industrial prowess, geographic expansion, and material and spiritual growth in the 100 years since it had adopted the Declaration of Independence. Even the opening day of the event was orchestrated to symbolize the country’s progress; organizers chose May 10 since it marked the seventh anniversary of a watershed moment in American history; on that day in 1869, the presidents of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads met in Promontory, Utah, to drive the ceremonial final spike into the track that connected their lines and marked the completion of the transcontinental railroad. For the first time in U.S. history, the American continent was connected through modern rail traffic. What better date to open the world’s fair, whose goal was to highlight America’s advancement and innovation?
More than 180,000 people attended the opening ceremonies, hosted by the president, Ulysses S. Grant, and those who thronged to Philadelphia by train, horseback, horse-drawn carriage, or steamboat on the Schuylkill River beheld the vast exhibit halls spread over more than 450 acres in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. Most were awestruck by the massive Corliss steam engine that anchored the exhibition, the largest such engine ever built, standing nearly seventy feet high, weighing 650 tons, and powering all the machines in the exhibition’s Machinery Hall. Attendees witnessed the wonders of technology in other ways too: they watched printing presses run off copies of the New York papers, which published editions from the exhibition floor; they were introduced to the typewriter and a mechanical calculator; and they were fascinated when inventor Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his telephone. Only two months earlier, Bell had uttered the words to his partner, “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you,” and Watson had heard him through the device handset, proof that the invention had worked. In that moment at his Boston workshop, Bell had advanced the evolution of mass communications well beyond Samuel Morse’s telegraph, invented thirty-two years earlier; Bell’s famous words had supplanted Morse’s first telegraph message—“What hath God wrought?”—as the iconic description of modern and rapid human communications.
After opening ceremonies, attendance at the exposition dipped somewhat, averaging about 20,000 each day during the early weeks. But as word spread across the country of the marvels in Philadelphia, interest and attendance picked up. Americans were enthusiastic, proud, and eager to make the pilgrimage to the city where so much of the nation’s heritage and history had taken shape.
This excitement reached a fever pitch as the “day of days,” the centennial Fourth of July, approached.
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BY THE TIME RICHARD HENRY LEE read the Declaration from the reviewing stand in Independence Square on July 4, the tens of thousands of visitors who had converged on Philadelphia had enjoyed several days of commemorations. Businesses and stores had been closed since Saturday, July 1, when dignitaries offered speeches and good wishes to the crowd. Several private celebrations were held on Sunday; public festivities were limited due to the Sabbath. On Monday, thousands more visitors arrived, mostly by train, and Philadelphia was pulsating with excitement. That night, 5,000 veterans led a magnificent torchlight procession, nearly 15,000 marchers strong and seven miles long, through the city to Independence Hall.
On the morning of the Fourth, more than half a million people watched a second procession wind through city streets, pass under an enormous archway last used during Lafayette’s visit in 1824, and approach the reviewing stand near Independence Hall.
After silencing the throng, Lee began his public reading. One hundred years earlier, from virtually the same spot upon which they now stood, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Caesar Rodney, John Hancock, and other brave delegates had risked so much to create a new nation. The original engrossed document that each of these men had signed, the document that had nearly been destroyed during the War of 1812, had been entrusted by President Grant to Philadelphia’s mayor, William S. Stokley, for display at the Centennial Exhibition.
The reality of the Declaration’s physical condition quickly became apparent to visitors and journalists alike. It was certainly now treated with more care than in previous years. It was “framed and glazed for protection” and then deposited in a fireproof safe “especially designed for both preservation and convenient display,” according to the Public Ledger. “When the outer doors of the safe were opened, the parchment was visible behind a heavy plate-glass inner door; the doors were closed at night.” But the public display also revealed the Declaration’s physical flaws; the Centennial Exposition was a celebration of American progress, but the country’s founding document was deteriorating badly. Its lengthy exposure to sunlight and smoke from fireplaces, and perhaps the wet-press process that it had been subjected to earlier in the century, had left the Declaration “faded and time-worn” and “age-dimmed.” Although the text was “fully legible,” the signatures were “so pale as to be only dimly discernible in the strongest light.” Worse, while some were readable, “some are wholly invisible, the spaces which contained them presenting only a blank.”
Richard Henry Lee had electrified the crowd with his reading of the Declaration—he held it aloft when he finished and was greeted with “cheer after cheer”—but even the account of his performance noted that Lee clung to “the faded and crumbling manuscript, held together by a simple frame.”
Colonel Frank Etting, chairman of the Committee on the Restoration of Independence Hall and of the National Centennial Commemoration, found the Declaration’s condition deplorable and depressing, and was struck by the irony that age, light, and atmosphere had done something the British could not do.
“Yonder parchment … scarce bears trace of the signatures,” Etting lamented, “the execution of which made fifty-six names imperishable.”
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THE DECLARATION’S HIGHLY VISIBLE display at the centennial celebration initially served as a wake-up call; by late summer, the document’s physical condition had become a matter of public concern.
Thousands of Americans had viewed the document; countless others had read about its deteriorated state in newspapers and other publications. On August 3, Congress responded, adopting a joint resolution “that a commission, consisting of the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and the Librarian of Congress be empowered to … resort to such means as will most effectually restore the writing of the original manuscript of the Declaration of Independence—with the signatures appended thereto.”
The resolution had actually been proposed the previous January but had stalled in Congress. The time line is important considering that in April—a month before the Declaration’s sojourn to Philadelphia—William J. Canby, an employee of the Washington Gas Light Company, believed he had a solution to restoring the Declaration to its former glory. In a letter to the Library of Congress, Canby declared himself as the right man for the job. “I have over thirty years experience in handling the pen upon parchment, and in that time, as an expert, have engrossed hundreds of ornamental, special documents.” Once establishing his credentials, Canby offered his recommendation: “The only feasible plan is to replenish the original with a supply of ink, which has been destroyed by the action of light and time, with an ink well known to be, for all practical purposes, imperishable.”
Canby’s suggestion seems to have fallen on deaf ears—likely a good outcome for the future of the Declaration—as the special commission took no action on the parchment itself. Despite initial resolve to improve the Declaration’s physical condition after the centennial, bureaucratic inertia stalled any meaningful efforts to tackle the job for the next two decades. However, with the approval of President Grant, the Declaration was moved from the Patent Office into the new fireproof building that now housed the State, War, and Navy departments (which later became the Old Executive Office Building). In early March 1877, the Declaration was mounted in an open cabinet in the State Department library—still exposed to light—where it would be exhibited for the next seventeen years. Officials seemed unconcerned with the irony that, within a so-called fireproof building, smoking was allowed in the library and the room contained an open fireplace located just a short distance from the Declaration.
But the Declaration’s travels are filled with such ironies—its new home proved far safer than its previous domicile. The Patent Office was gutted by fire just a few months after the document was moved. Once again, the original engrossed and signed copy of the Declaration of Independence had narrowly escaped destruction.
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NEGLECT, HOWEVER, WAS ANOTHER matter. Committees and commissions studied the Declaration, offered opinions, and made recommendations throughout the 1880s, but still it hung in the State Department library and nothing was done to improve its condition. Fading and parchment deterioration continued. Finally, in 1894, the State Department issued the following sober announcement: “The rapid fading of the text of the original Declaration of Independence and the deterioration of the parchment upon which it is engrossed, from exposure to light and lapse of time, render it impracticable for the Department longer to exhibit it or to handle it.” Thus, State Department officials had reached an unfortunate decision: “For the secure preservation of its present condition, so far as may be possible, it has been carefully wrapped and placed in a steel case.” The Declaration was removed from the case briefly in 1898 to produce a photograph for the Ladies’ Home Journal and the parchment was described as “still in good legible condition,” although “some of the signatures” were “necessarily blurred.”
Five years after the photo appeared in the magazine, the secretary of state, John Hay—President Lincoln’s former secretary—deeply concerned about the Declaration’s physical condition, asked the National Academy of Sciences for help. The organization, established by Congress and signed into law by President Lincoln, consisted of scientific scholars who provided the nation with counsel on the issues of science and technology. Hay’s April 1903 letter requested “such recommendations as may seem practicable.… touching [the Declaration’s] preservation.” He explained how the document had been kept out of the light, sealed between two pieces of glass, and locked in a steel safe. Still, despite these precautions, he was “unable to say that the text is not continuing to fade and the parchment to wrinkle and perhaps to break.”
Ten days later, after examining the Declaration closely, the National Academy issued its report to Hay. “The instrument has suffered very seriously from the very harsh treatment to which it was exposed in the earlier years of the Republic,” lamented Charles F. Chandler. “Folding and rolling have creased and broken the parchment.” In addition, the wet-press process, which Chandler presumed occurred in the early 1820s to produce a facsimile, “removed a large portion of the ink.” Moreover, Chandler reported, “exposure to the action of light for more than thirty years, while the instrument was placed on exhibition, has resulted in the fading of the ink, particularly in the signature[s].”
There was some good news. The academy’s examination had uncovered no evidence of mold or other disintegrating agents, nor did it find evidence that further deterioration was in progress. Chandler and the committee were reluctant to apply any chemicals to the document to attempt to restore the ink, fearing such treatment would present a dangerous risk. Perhaps some ink could be restored, but chemicals could also result in “serious discoloration of the parchment.” And for similar reasons, the committee warned that it was inadvisable for any “solution, such as collodion, paraffin, etc.” to be applied in the misguided attempt to “strengthen the parchment or making it moisture proof.”
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IN ESSENCE, THE SCIENTIFIC experts were stumped.
“The present method of caring for the instrument seems to be the best that can be suggested,” the academy report stated, not the conclusion Hay had sought, since that method meant that the Declaration was hidden from the American people who had grown to cherish it as the indisputable symbol of the freedoms they enjoyed. Indeed, said Chandler, that was exactly what the scientists were recommending. The Declaration “should be kept in the dark and as dry as possible, and never placed on exhibition.”
Hay apparently heeded the National Academy’s recommendation. A 1904 book about the Declaration alluded to the fact that the document had been “locked and sealed, by order of Secretary Hay” and, further, “is no longer shown to anyone except by his direction.”
Hay’s decision meant that at the dawn of the twentieth century, both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution—the country’s two most important founding documents—were sealed in cases, placed in drawers, no longer available for Americans to see, even out of sight and perhaps out of mind of the State Department employees entrusted with their safekeeping.
Both documents would remain under lock and key at the State Department for nearly two decades, before they were finally unveiled during a ceremony that attendees would describe as nothing less than extraordinary.