Rescuing the People’s Parchment

It is safe to say that most of the 1.1 million annual visitors to the National Archives Museum, in Washington, D.C., enter John Russell Pope’s magnificent temple on Pennsylvania Avenue to see the permanent exhibition, “Charters of Freedom,” which includes the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and, shown separately, the Bill of Rights. After some displays relating to the Revolutionary War, they encounter the stone-and-bronze case holding the parchment of the Declaration, written in a large, clear hand (or “engrossed,” as ordered by Congress) by Timothy Matlack, an officer in the Continental Army. In his competent clerk’s script, Matlack transcribed the text adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, rendering it in the form and materials then used for significant legal documents. It was ready to receive the fateful fifty-six signatures on August 2.

Visitors peer through thick glass into the helium-filled case to see the Declaration illuminated by soft green light. We can recognize the familiar configuration on the parchment, but the text is not completely legible and the signatures are barely there. The classical architecture of Pope’s sanctuary, the subdued lighting, and the hushed atmosphere make the space into a giant reliquary. The direct witnessing of an object of such historical consequence is not less affecting for being imperfectly discernible.

We know what it once looked like thanks to an engraving commissioned in 1820 by John Quincy Adams when he was secretary of state. Adams was concerned about the already evident deterioration of the parchment and wanted to publish an authoritative replica of the document he revered. He hired a young Washington engraver, William J. Stone, to make a facsimile. In a decade of technical and artistic innovation in the graphic arts, including Goya’s late lithographic portfolio, The Bulls of Bordeaux (1825), Blake’s engraved Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826), and the young Delacroix’s lithographs for Faust (1828), Stone produced one of the most remarkable prints. Like those harbingers of Romanticism, who introduced expressive techniques and novel interpretations of biblical and literary texts (Goethe felt Delacroix’s images had exceeded his own imagination), his work looked forward—in his case to a new standard of clarity that would be codified with the introduction of photography in 1839.

Stone did more than execute the calligraphic text in the smooth curves inherent to engraving, as earlier engravers would have done. After all, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when penmanship was learned from engraved copybooks, it was natural to bring the writing back to its printed origins. Instead he took fidelity into fresh territory by scrupulously rendering the effect of iron gall applied to parchment with a goose quill, capturing the slight drag that happens when the pen crosses over still-wet ink. Splatters, stray marks, and blobs are reproduced with consummate virtuosity. The rough edges on the large strokes of John Hancock’s signature suggest that ink had already chipped off by the time Stone made his copy. His facsimile is utterly convincing, even though we can no longer compare it with the original. It is the iconic image of the Declaration, endlessly multiplied in history books, classroom posters, and online.

It must be remembered that Stone accomplished his Olympian feat of verisimilitude by incising lines in reverse, using this slowest of methods to replicate signatures that probably took less than a minute to write. But how did he transfer the image so perfectly onto the copper? The plate itself gives a few hints.¹ Some inadvertently unfinished items of punctuation that are outlined but not shaded show that Stone scratched the contours of each letter into the surface before reinforcing the shapes with deep grooves made by the engraving tool. A process of dampening the actual document and running it through the press to make a reverse transfer onto the plate has been suggested, but I find this highly unlikely. The ink had been oxidizing for fifty years and was deemed somewhat abraded.

That was a poor prospect for the perfect image Stone required and a risky proposition in any case. I believe he made a precise tracing in graphite on translucent paper that was transferred in reverse onto a copperplate coated with a waxy substance. The text would have been retraced with a fine point that firmly pushed the contours through the paper into this receptive surface, Stone then following those outlines with a sharp steel stylus, all the while checking his accuracy against the original. A very particular John Quincy Adams verified Stone’s work as it proceeded. The final resolution—firming edges and creating the effect of solid black ink using closely spaced crosshatched lines—happened letter by letter with ever more attention to exactitude. It took three years.

Adams ordered two hundred vellum prints of the Declaration to be distributed to the three living signers, the Marquis de Lafayette, branches of the federal government, state governors and legislatures, and universities.² The State Department retained the plate, but Stone was allowed to periodically issue impressions on paper. In 1833 a large edition of facsimiles was ordered for Peter Force’s American Archives (1837–1853), a monumental history of the nation as told through documents from Columbus through the Constitution. The initial order was for four thousand copies, but by the time the volume on the Continental Congress was published, in 1848, interest and funding had foundered, suggesting a smaller run of 1,500. This is still well beyond the thousand or so fine impressions one can expect from a copperplate. The matrix, now in the National Archives, is indeed very worn, but it yielded good copies the last time a few were made, for the bicentennial. Stone’s engraving is uniquely authoritative, but it was not the first and far from alone in the field of printed versions of the Declaration of Independence. Published by the State Department in limited editions and aimed at government and academic audiences, it was overshadowed by competing prints that were widely distributed throughout the nineteenth century.

John Bidwell, curator emeritus at the Morgan Library and Museum, has tracked the many versions of the document and its signatures that circulated from the early years of the republic to 1900. His first research on the subject was presented in a lecture published in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society in 1988, which became the standard reference in a field that includes major trophies for Americana collectors. The Declaration in Script and Print: A Visual History of America’s Founding Document rounds out that work started thirty-six years ago. Using the methodologies of a bibliographer, Bidwell amassed information for 110 separate entries, covering more than 200 items. He modestly acknowledges that his checklist can never be truly complete, but the accumulation of facts about the prints opens up a trove of stories surrounding them, their makers, and the ever-changing political landscape of the United States in the nineteenth century.

Historians recognize a new appreciation of the Declaration of Independence starting around 1817, when its rhetorical power and symbolism were highlighted after a period of relative neglect. In March 1816 the Philadelphia newspaperman John Binns presented a prospectus for an engraved version, promoting the document’s symbolic value, augmented with images and executed in the most prestigious medium: the Declaration as a work of art. The new calligraphic rendering of the text would be surrounded by state seals and portraits, emblematic botanical ornaments, and facsimile signatures copied from the vellum. Binns was a publisher, not an artist, so his composite work employed a team of designers and specialist engravers. The many elaborations required a plate so large as to entail building a new press. Binns was skilled at self-promotion, and his advertisements ran in numerous newspapers. As he solicited subscriptions for his expensive and time-consuming project, canny rivals capitalized on the potential market and started issuing cheaper decorated editions of the Declaration before his deluxe engraving was ready.

Binns’s sales were severely impacted by the version of the Declaration published by the writing master Benjamin Owen Tyler in 1818, a year before the Binns engraving was completed. Tyler’s prospectus mimicked the phrasing used by Binns, but his final product was entirely different. A skilled calligrapher, Tyler wrote the text in an elegant round hand, punctuated by ornamented capitals and flourishes; the facsimile signatures are in their original configuration below. The engraver Peter Maverick (at the time likely William Stone’s instructor) rendered Tyler’s writing and the signatures with exquisite crispness. The resulting print has the chaste, understated quality we associate with the Federal period in America, a marked contrast to the crowding of Binns’s confection, which crams the signatures into leftover space at the bottom of the frame.

Despite their stylistic differences, Binns and Tyler shared a love of pugnacious public discourse. Binns wrote newspaper articles and a pamphlet defending his primacy; not to be outdone, Tyler dug up a government clerk, William P. Gardner, who had proposed a design for a Declaration aggrandized with allegorical figures by John James Barralet as early as 1810. The drawing is lost, but the concept was clearly different. Gardner had a letter of endorsement from Thomas Jefferson that Tyler subsequently published. Competing accusations of plagiarism and letters of support from the highly placed were tossed back and forth in what must have been an amusing newspaper brawl. (Less entertaining were attacks on Binns’s artists, most of whom were born overseas. His rivals objected to them, Bidwell says, “on the grounds that immigrants should not be allowed to meddle with an instrument of national identity.”)

Adams found the entire affair distasteful. He had reluctantly certified the accuracy of the highly stylized facsimile signatures on the Binns engraving but disliked Binns and deplored his use of the Declaration for political advancement, which culminated in his bid to sell a large part of the edition to Congress. One wonders whether Adams commissioned Stone’s rigorously objective engraving in reaction to the artistic excesses and hucksterism of Binns and Tyler. The sole addition to it, “Engraved by W.I. Stone, for the Dept. of State, by order of J.Q. Adams Sect. of State, July 4th, 1823,” was a perfect riposte to their florid claims of authenticity.

The next entrant in the field of Declaration prints was based not on the document but on a history painting by John Trumbull. Son of the governor of Connecticut, a classical scholar at Harvard, an aide-de-camp to General Washington, and a pupil of the American painter Benjamin West in London, Trumbull was ideally placed to create the official image of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He and Jefferson had spent time together in Paris in 1786, where the two sketched out the first idea for the picture now installed in the Capitol Rotunda.

Trumbull insisted all portraits be done from life or from documented sources, often painting his sitters directly into the small-scale version now at the Yale University Art Gallery. In 1817 he brought this prototype to Washington and proposed himself for the commission to make four history paintings for the Capitol. When Jefferson was questioned about Trumbull’s abilities, he ranked him higher than West and second only to Jacques-Louis David—high praise that got him the job. The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 was the first Rotunda painting to be finished, in 1818; before it was delivered to Washington, Trumbull put it on tour, with stops in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

Along with the receipts from the exhibition, Trumbull looked for extra profits by collecting subscriptions for a large engraving; the handbook he printed for the show had a key to the portraits and information for subscribers. Within the general acclaim for the painting were grumbles about its lack of historical veracity. Of the fifty-six signers, only forty-eight were portrayed. Several people shown were signers who had not been present on July 4; several others in the picture were nonsigners. Most importantly, Jefferson’s memory had conflated several events—the scene depicted is actually a meeting on June 28, when the Committee of Five presented their draft of the Declaration to the Continental Congress. Trumbull continued to insist on the accuracy of his commemoration, but his viewers did not appreciate the narrative latitude that marked it, and that marked West’s The Death of General Wolfe (1770) or the Coronation of Napoleon as painted by Jacques-Louis David and completed in 1807.

Trumbull defended himself and started altering the prototype, adding portraits and moving figures, although never changing the concept. This painting was handed to the young engraver Asher Brown Durand as the model for the landmark print that launched his long and distinguished later career as a Hudson River school painter. Along with the reproduction of the painting distributed to subscribers in 1823, Trumbull added a new key engraved by Durand on a separate plate. This long, narrow print, intended to be hung below the primary image, had outline engravings of the heads, most labeled with a facsimile signature derived from the Tyler Declaration.³ Vexingly, the key has several inaccuracies in the identifications of the portraits, a product of Trumbull’s constant fussing with the prototype. Although the print made only a small profit for him, it too became famous—the canonical representation of July 4, 1776—and was widely copied and often used as an illustration on versions of the Declaration.

Bidwell identifies the Binns, Tyler, and Trumbull prints as progenitors of most subsequent versions of the Declaration. He describes them as “families” identifiable by design characteristics—allegorical framing from Binns, decorative calligraphy from Tyler, and the historical image and outline portraits from Trumbull. Deep connoisseurship is evidenced in Bidwell’s tracing of the sources of the facsimile signatures that became essential to Declaration prints. The stylistic variants in the signatures promulgated by Binns and Tyler reveal themselves in copies of copies of copies, to say nothing of the occasional misspelling of the signers’ names.

New technologies such as lithography helped enable such freaks of penmanship as Bidwell’s item number 69 (see illustration at top of article), in which R. Morris Swander fashioned Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington out of carefully managed thick and thin steel-pen strokes that coalesce into the Declaration text, surrounded by signatures from Tyler (some repeated to fill the space), with portraits from Trumbull’s key at the top.

Recombination also served political needs. Bidwell’s number 75 is a lithograph published by William R. Knapp during Reconstruction, circa 1868. It has the familiar reproduction of Trumbull’s painting and facsimile signatures derived from Tyler (with two names misspelled). The text is not that of the Declaration but rather Thomas Jefferson’s “Rough Draft,” in which he denounced the slave trade as “execrable commerce”—“the most famous,” as Bidwell says, of the subsequent “editorial interventions” and an early reflection on what the Declaration and this country might otherwise have become. This is countered by number 74, the broadside Read and Compare!, which runs the text of the Declaration alongside a parallel attack on Reconstruction—The New Declaration of Independence, adopted July 4, 1868, by an assembly of “white men, all late of the Republican Party,” who were attending a Democratic Party event in Illinois.

The 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia was the final efflorescence of ornamental Declaration prints, available to consumers at all price points. The familiar motifs from Binns, Tyler, and Trumbull were combined in every possible manner, with new images of the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and any number of other patriotic symbols. Advertising reigned supreme. Bidwell’s most extreme example was published by James D. McBride starting about 1874, positioned for maximum market saturation well in advance of the commemorative year. Centennial Memorial, 1776–1876 exists in multiple variants, including some with advertising for hosiery, fertilizer, curtains, medicines, liquor, and fire insurance from businesses all across the eastern United States. The design aesthetic of these prints reflected the eclectic, industrially produced wares that entranced visitors in the exhibition halls. There was no such thing as too much ornament in the endless recombinations of historical references and styles. The faded parchment original, on loan to Philadelphia from the State Department, must have seemed a sober reminder of another era.

By 1883 we see the first published photographic reproduction of the document in a collotype from a photographic negative taken by Albert G. Gedney. (Elaborate retouching actually introduced some small mistakes.) Tellingly, the signatures are reproduced from Stone’s facsimile, no doubt because they were no longer clear on the vellum. Allegorical versions of the Declaration became less frequent by the end of the nineteenth century, and reproductions of Stone’s print became the standard. John Quincy Adams’s vision of what a print of the Declaration of Independence should be—a straightforward transcription “untainted,” as Bidwell says, “by demeaning publicity and arbitrary artistic interventions”—was the impetus for William Stone’s masterpiece and eventually prevailed.

In February 1841 the seventy-three-year-old Adams appeared before the Supreme Court to argue for the freedom of the more than thirty surviving Africans who had seized the Spanish slave ship Amistad, as well as several captive children. For nine hours the former president spoke in the presence of the print he had commissioned:

I know of no law, but one which I am not at liberty to argue before this Court…except that law [gesturing to a copy of the Declaration hanging from a pillar]…. I know of no other law that reaches the case of my clients, but the law of Nature and of Nature’s God on which our fathers placed our own national existence.

The case was decided in favor of the defendants. Surely Adams would understand the hold the vellum original and his facsimile continue to have over viewers today.