Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain Page 16

  The bulk of the draft, written in Philadelphia between June 11 and June 28, was the work of Thomas Jefferson, a scholarly lawyer also from Virginia, with some input from the other committee members: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman. The most profound influences on Jefferson probably came from the writings of the English philosopher John Locke, who, some ninety years earlier, had vigorously supported the right of Englishmen to rebel against the monarchy, and from George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights (some of the phraseology in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is strikingly similar to that of Mason’s doctrine). On June 28 the draft was presented to Congress, and three days later debate began on the resolution.* But except for a handful of men, the colonists were determined to break their political ties to the British immediately. On July 2 the Second Continental Congress voted to approve the committee’s resolution, effectively declaring independence on this day. (July fourth is traditionally celebrated as Independence Day possibly because the fourth is the date on which the Declaration was adopted and given to the printer to have official copies sent out.)

  Philadelphia, 1776: the Second Continental Congress shortly after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

  For two days the Congress worked on the draft, cutting out hundreds of words and adding some of their own. On the second day, July 4, the Congress in the Pennsylvania State House adopted the final draft of the Declaration. The draft was given to a Philadelphia newspaper editor named John Dunlap, who rushed to his press and printed paper broadsides, or sheets, of the colonies’ Declaration of Independence. These broadsides were then distributed to public officials so they could inform local citizens about it.* Fighting with the British had been going on for over a year now, and on July 9 the Declaration was read to General Washington’s army in New York City.

  Several days later the representatives from New York approved the resolution—they had not voted on July 2—and Congress commissioned an engrossed (formal and stylized) copy of the thirteen states’ “unanimous declaration.”

  Between July 19 and August 2, a penman, possibly Timothy Matlack of Philadelphia, inscribed Jefferson’s immortal words on the prepared skin of a young animal (either a sheep or a calf), in a style of calligraphy called copperplate hand, or English hand.

  With the engrossed copy completed, the Continental Congress met again on August 2, 1776, so its members could sign it. John Hancock, the president of the Congress, was the first to sign the Declaration of Independence (his was the largest signature); other signers included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson. Not all the representatives were present at this meeting, however, and some signatures were added to the fifty recorded ones over the next several months. Then the parchment was rolled up and tucked away in an office of the Pennsylvania State House.

  From here on, the Declaration was to lead a nomadic existence.

  The first of some twenty-five excursions to various resting places over 176 years commenced around December 12, 1776, when the document was dispatched on a carriage with other official papers to Baltimore, where Congress was meeting. Although it had been only a very short time since the Declaration was adopted and signed, it was already revered. In fact, the young American Congress recognized the importance of all its official documents and had them transported to whatever city in which it reconvened. Consequently, the Declaration was rolled up again and again and transported to Philadelphia, Lancaster, York, Annapolis, Trenton, and New York City, where it stayed for five years before being returned to Philadelphia in 1790. Then real trouble began.

  In 1800 the Declaration made a circuitous journey over water to bring it to the District of Columbia, the new seat of the federal government. In its first dozen years there, it went to no fewer than three sites: the Treasury Building, the “Seven Buildings,” and the War Office Building. When the War of 1812 broke out, the Declaration was seriously threatened. What satisfaction the British would get out of incinerating the Declaration of Independence! But action was taken before the British seized the capital and began torching government buildings. With the eruption of war, the document was whisked away—the first of two removals under such circumstances—to protect the original scroll bequeathed by the Revolutionary delegates, now almost all dead, as if it were a holy relic. Virginia seemed to be safe ground. First the document was sequestered in a gristmill on the Virginia side of the Potomac near Great Falls; then, with danger of a British raid in the area mounting, it found refuge in the basement of a private home in Leesburg.

  When the war ended, the Declaration was returned to the nation’s capital. But its troubles were not over. As early as 1817 it had begun to deteriorate physically. Richard Rush, the secretary of state, observed the signatures fading due to what he called “the hand of time.” Despite this, government officials were still somewhat reckless with the precious document. In the early 1820s Congress ordered facsimile copies made from the original Declaration for distribution to the surviving signers, the president and vice president, to governors of the country and of U.S. territories, to other officials and government buildings, and to various colleges selected by the president. Copies may have been made by a pantographic (tracing) process, or as one theory holds, by a “wet transfer” method that would have taken off some of the Declaration’s ink.

  Conditions at subsequent locations helped further the Declaration’s decline. In 1841 the parchment document went to the gaslit Patent Office of the Department of the Interior (now the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian). Exhibited in the Hall of Models (in the same frame as George Washington’s Commission as Commander-in-Chief of the American Revolutionary Army [Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.]) for more than thirty years, across from a sunlit window, the words of Jefferson were bleached away little by little, day after day. A reporter for the October 1870 issue of Historical Magazine called attention to the writing, deeming it so far gone “that in a few years only the naked parchments will remain.” In 1876 the Declaration was conferred to its old home in Philadelphia, the State House, now called Independence Hall, for the nation’s centennial. James McCabe, the author of a centennial souvenir book, noted that the document was “faded and crumbling.”

  The symbol of a free and independent nation, the Declaration of Independence was placed in pouches and moved around Virginia in 1814 as British soldiers set fire to Washington.

  The Patent Office requested to be the custodian of the Declaration once again, but instead—luckily—it was exhibited in the library of the State, War, and Navy Building in March 1877. Shortly after, the Patent Office was beset by fire.

  Government officials grew increasingly distressed about the document’s deteriorated condition. A committee of the National Academy of Sciences was summoned to determine whether the document could be restored, but concluded that chemical treatment might cause even more damage. They recommended that officials either “cover the present receptacle of the manuscript with an opaque lid or remove the manuscript from its frame and place it in a portfolio.” In 1894 the Declaration was deposited in a steel safe of the State Department.

  In 1921 President Warren G. Harding decided that American documents of importance, including the Declaration and Constitution, should be made available for the public to see, and he issued an executive order to this effect on September 29. The librarian of Congress received a phone call the next day from the State Department informing him of the president’s decision, and that a transfer of the documents could be made when he was ready. Naturally, a celebration of some sort would be expected to mark the conveyance of America’s cherished documents from the State Department (which had had physical custody of the records of the U.S. government since 1789, when Thomas Jefferson was the first secretary of state) to the Library of Congress, 132 years later. But so excited was the librarian that he immediately appropriated a mail truck and collected the documents himself. A simple but spirited ceremony fina
lly took place a couple of years later when a shrine for the documents was unveiled. With the president and several dignitaries present, Herbert Putnam, the librarian of Congress, adjusted the Declaration and the Constitution in their holders and locked their display cases; shortly afterward, the guests moved to another room and sang “America.”

  These original documents continued to be exhibited at the Library of Congress until December 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Again, government officials took heed of the potential danger and dispatched the Declaration and the Constitution (and other records) to the Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where they were safeguarded. In April 1943 the Declaration was brought back to Washington, D.C., where it was exhibited at the Jefferson Memorial for the bicentennial of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, then was returned to the Library of Congress, where it was displayed.

  Although it was presumed by many that the Declaration and Constitution would reside at the Library of Congress, there was a movement, begun several years earlier, to bring these documents to the National Archives. Arguments were proffered as to why the National Archives would better be able to safeguard, preserve, and display the documents than the Library of Congress, and that the documents in fact legally belonged in the National Archives, which was established in 1934 to preserve America’s historical records. Perceived legal obstacles and the competition for custody of America’s revered documents—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wouldn’t take action until Herbert Putnam retired as librarian of Congress—delayed any transfer.

  Finally, after a long and protracted effort, the documents were moved to the National Archives in 1952. On December 13 the documents were conveyed along a parade route, and two days later, they were installed in their shrines, accompanied by an official ceremony, with a speech by President Harry Truman. This brought the three Charters of Freedom—the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—together under one roof, and exhibited for the first time ever together.

  In their new—and presumably permanent—home, the Charters of Freedom emerge each morning from a fifty-ton steel vault. The vault’s two-part lid opens, gears engage, and the mechanism holding the containers in which the documents are encased comes out of the vault and raises the containers (and documents) up into the mezzanine-level Rotunda Shrine and into their bulletproof glass cases, where they are held in place for viewing. In their containers, the documents are conserved according to the latest preservation technology. At the end of the day the precious documents are returned to their steel vault for the night.

  The signatures of the Declaration are now nearly invisible, but the text is still readable, especially under the special green filters that protect it from light. Indeed, conservators report that when the document is viewed out of its vault under regular examination light, the text is clear.

  The vision of Jefferson and his colleagues thus lives on in a literal, as well as a figurative, sense. Those eloquent words learned by every young student in America—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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”—can be visually and emotionally savored in their original form. Protected by the devoted wardens of America’s heritage, the hallowed Declaration has survived a multitude of hazards so that all future generations may bear witness to the noble ideals set out by the country’s founders in 1776.

  LOCATION: National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

  Footnotes

  *Jefferson’s draft submitted on June 28 is not known to exist anymore, but at the Library of Congress is a fragment (one page) of the earliest known draft of the Declaration, and a “Rough Draught,” as Jefferson called it, with emendations he made prior and subsequent to the delivery of the submitted copy (it includes changes made in Congress). After June 28 Jefferson wrote out other copies, five of which still exist today. One was for Richard Henry Lee, which is now at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia; another was for George Wythe, a lawyer from Williamsburg and professor at the College of William and Mary under whom Jefferson had studied law, which is at the New York Public Library; a copy now called the Washburn copy, named after the manuscript collector Alexander C. Washburn, which exists as a fragment, is at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston; another copy he retained is at the Library of Congress; and a copy he made in 1783 for James Madison is also at the Library of Congress.

  *About two dozen copies of Dunlap’s first printing of the Declaration are known to exist today. In 1991 a Dunlap copy found in the back of a picture frame that a Philadelphia man paid four dollars for at a flea market was sold at auction for $2.2 million. Several days after Dunlap printed the Declaration on paper broadsides, he printed it on parchment, but almost all these copies became lost over time and today there is only one known Dunlap parchment broadside (American Philosophical Society).

  GEORGE WASHINGTON’S FALSE TEETH

  DATE: 1789.

  WHAT IT IS: The lower, or mandibular, denture worn by the great American statesman when he served as first president of the United States. It was made by John Greenwood of New York.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The plate, made of hippopotamus ivory, has accommodations for eight natural human teeth, six of which survive and are connected to the base by gold pins. Inscriptions appear on the surfaces of the denture.

  To clarify a popular misconception from the start, let it be said that George Washington never owned and never wore wooden teeth. He did wear false teeth—when he was inaugurated he had only two natural teeth left—but in their various incarnations these were fashioned out of ivory, the teeth of other animals, and human teeth, including his own.

  The provenance of the spurious wooden tooth tale is not known, but various explanations have been offered: an artist painting Washington’s portrait gave the toothless president a wooden set to hold his cheeks to a normal facial contour; the ivory bases of Washington’s dentures somewhat resembled wood; wooden dowels used to repair Washington’s appliances were mistaken for wooden teeth; nineteenth-century viewers of the late president’s dentures mistook them for wooden teeth. But not only has no evidence of Washington wearing wooden teeth ever turned up, such dental prosthetic restorations were not known in the United States in his day (they have never been a part of the American dental profession). However, wooden teeth were known in the Orient—they were fashioned from hardwood in nineteenth-century Japan, a practice probably imported from China.

  George Washington was born in Virginia on February 22, 1732. His dental problems began in his youth and worsened over time. Why were Washington’s teeth so bad?

  It was a combination of the stressful conditions of the time—of anxiety, responsibility, and frustration, lack of needed medical and dental care, and diet; it is unlikely that heredity was a factor. Washington was prodigiously fond of nuts; John Adams noted that as a young man Washington was in the habit of cracking walnuts with his teeth.

  Washington’s adult life was one of constant struggle. From the time he served in the Virginia militia as a young man until his leadership of the American forces in the Revolutionary War, his life seemed a perpetual battle against exigencies of the frontier wilderness, the natural elements, and human foes. Ironically for such a rugged and triumphant leader of men, Washington was defeated by tooth decay and periodontal disease: one by one his teeth fell out or had to be removed.

  When exactly Washington started wearing false teeth is not known, but he undoubtedly had a combination of false and natural teeth in 1783, when he was fifty-one and commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. In that year, while stationed in Newburgh, New York, he wrote a letter to Major Andrew Billings asking for sealing wax and making a fervent request: “I pray you to send me a small file or two, one of which to be very thin, so much so as to pass between the teeth if occasion should require it.” Washington was known to apply to fellow officers for pincers for faste
ning dental wires, scrapers for cleaning his teeth, and other dental paraphernalia, and he had already visited a number of colonial dentists.

  The bottom of a denture worn by George Washington when he was president. Washington's false teeth were carved from the teeth of sheep, deer, elephants, and other animals; contrary to popular belief, they were not made of wood.

  In colonial America, dentistry was entirely unregulated. Some physicians practiced it, as did others trained as dentists by knowledgeable and skilled preceptors, but virtually anyone could call himself a dentist. Many who did were primarily silver- or goldsmiths, ivory turners, or manually dexterous artists. The practice grew more sophisticated over time, as indicated in one dentist’s January 9, 1772, advertisement in the Virginia Gazette:

  Mr. Baker, Surgeon Dentist, Begs Leave to inform the Gentry that he is now at Mr. Maupin’s, in Williamsburg, and will wait on them on receiving their Commands. He cures the SCURVY in the GUMS, be it ever so bad; first cleans and scales the Teeth from that corrosive, tartarous, gritty Substance which hinders the Gums from growing, infects the Breath, and is one of principal Causes of the Scurvy, which, if not timely prevented, eats away the Gums, so that Peoples Teeth fall out fresh. He prevents Teeth from growing rotten . . . fills up, with Lead or Gold, those that are hollow . . . transplants natural Teeth from one person to another . . . makes and fixes artificial Teeth with the greatest Exactness and Nicety, without Pain or the least Inconvenience, so that they may eat, drink, or sleep, with them in their Mouths as Natural Ones, from which they cannot be discovered by the sharpest Eye.