The words of the Declaration of Independence are now 250 years and one day old, but the document itself wasn’t completed and signed until August 2, 1776. In the Review’s November 21, 2024, issue, Andrew Raftery wrote about the history of the parchment—and the many efforts over the years to preserve it as well as market it with florid redesigns and a variety of “official” reproductions and prints.
Rescuing the People’s Parchment
Andrew Raftery
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.
Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.
