Philadelphia likes to get into a tussle. As the country celebrates its 250th anniversary, Philly is locking horns with Boston.
“There is 100% a rivalry between Boston and Philadelphia,” said Emily Sneff, author of “When the Declaration of Independence was News.” “It is sure to come up at almost any historical conference or any sort of event where you’re talking about, ‘Where did the Revolution really happen? Where was Ben Franklin really from?’ Those kinds of questions.”
A question for the nation’s semiquincentennial: Which city has the most historic copies of the Declaration of Independence? In Boston, four institutions have collaborated on an online map showing the curious how to take the subway to six exhibits of Declarations.
“They have a whole Declaration Trail linking different institutions together, so you can see different copies in different places,” Sneff said. “But I think in terms of raw numbers, Philadelphia wins out.”
There are at least 15 historic Declarations of Independence on view in Philadelphia this summer, according to a count done by the National Constitution Center. They are all within a few blocks of each other: At the NCC, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Museum of the American Revolution, the American Philosophical Society and the Weitzman Museum of American Jewish History.
The original Declaration did not stand the test of time
The NCC has a copy of the Declaration of Independence in its exhibition “America’s Founding.” An 1833 copy published by Washington, D.C., printer Peter Force is on display in a gallery modeled after an 18th century Boston tavern.
The Force printing looks remarkably similar to the original hand-written version, down to the familiar swoop of John Hancock’s signature. It is a meticulously copied version because, by the 1820s, the original, which is held at the National Archive in Washington, was already badly deteriorated. It was, and still is, indecipherable.
“It was put on display in less-than-ideal conditions,” said Elena Popchock, NCC senior manager of exhibit content. “There was lots of light. Light is not friendly to paper documents, particularly ink. So, it ultimately is very illegible. This is already happening several decades after 1776.”
To preserve the image of the original document on its 50th anniversary, Congress commissioned printer William Stone to engrave an exact copy onto a copper plate. The 1833 print was taken from that plate, for retail. It would have been folded into quadrants and added into a packet of facsimiles of founding documents that consumers in the early 19th century could buy and keep at home.
Why do we need to see multiple versions of the same document?
“The Declaration’s Journey,” an exhibition at the Museum of the American Revolution, has what is believed to be the largest concentration of early printed copies, anywhere. Six are dated to 1776, including the first broadside printed by John Dunlap just hours after Congress approved the language, the first newspaper publication two days later, immediately followed by the first foreign language version, in German.
“It’s really exciting to think about this moment, about how the word spreads,” said Matthew Skic, director of collections. “Through these printings we can see it spreading in physical form.”
Sneff said the various print versions of the Declaration of Independence reflect the democratic nature of the document: Regardless of its signatories, its power was not realized until the American people heard it, read it, understood it and embraced it.
“It takes us beyond just the 56 guys who signed the parchment and includes a lot more people in a lot more places,” she said. “It’s great when we have particular copies of the Declaration which are annotated or have some sort of physical evidence that we can figure out who owned it, who tried to send it to someone else, who had it posted up in their business or their home.”
The first Dunlap prints of the Declaration were sent from Philadelphia to other cities, where local printers would run off their own copies. It took about two weeks for news to reach Boston. The Museum of the American Revolution has the first Beantown Declaration.
In Newport, Rhode Island, printer Solomon Southwick received a copy and immediately set type for his version, released July 6. That version is on display at the Weitzman Museum of American Jewish History.
Shortly after running off copies of the Declaration, Southwick’s printing press went underground, literally. In December 1776, the British army occupied Newport, so Southwick buried his press in his backyard so it could not be used for British propaganda. It didn’t work: the British found the press, disinterred it and used it to publish the Loyalist newspaper “The Newport Gazette.”
The Declaration takes on a life of its own
The American Philosophical Society exhibition “These Truths: The Declarations of Independence” features five early versions, including Thomas Jefferson’s “Fair Copy,” in which he rewrote the Declaration to bring it back to his own wording.
After the language for the Declaration was modified and agreed upon by Congress, Jefferson believed his original wording was superior to the final version and sent it out to his friends for review.
“Basically, fishing for compliments,” Sneff said. “He sent it to Richard Henry Lee in Virginia. I love Lee’s response, because he agrees with Jefferson that, yes, Congress mangled the Declaration, the draft is better. But he says, ‘The thing in its nature is so good that no cookery can spoil the dish for the palates of free men.’”
The “These Truths” exhibition also features later printings of the Declaration in its first 50 years, some highly ornate like the 1819 Binns version, which rings the familiar text with portraits of prominent Americans, and a broadside of unrelated text for which the words of the Declaration are used as a decorative border.
Caroline O’Connell, a curator at the Philosophical Society, said the Declaration of Independence came to represent not just the birth of a national ideal, but also a tool used for social and political rhetoric.
“That continues to this day. These words don’t change, but I think their meanings have. The gravitas has and their interpretations by various audiences, be they Americans, folks abroad, and those in various positions of government,” O’Connell said.
“It just goes to show even extremely powerful language can be, at various times, up for interpretation. Language has power, malleable power.”
Read more and see more versions of the Declaration of Independence from our partner, WHYY.