Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (51 page)

She began this grueling chore, unofficially, after receiving letters
from grief-stricken wives, mothers, and fiancées desperate to hear if Barton had possibly seen or cared for their loved ones. Similar appeals were flooding into the White House, and in March 1865, President Abraham Lincoln personally asked Barton to head up a government bureau that would locate these men and notify relatives of their fate. Lincoln’s murder threw Washington into chaos, and neither Congress nor the War Department gave Barton the funding necessary to run the agency effectively. Undaunted, she paid for it all herself, spending more than $15,000 to hire a staff of twelve and set up an office in Annapolis, Maryland. (She was later partly reimbursed.) Over the next four years, Barton corresponded with thousands of anxious family members and traveled the country collecting and sharing information. One Union private, a former prisoner of war named Dorence Atwater, provided her with a register of thirteen thousand fatalities from the notorious Confederate POW camp in Andersonville, Georgia. A teenager when he was imprisoned there, Atwater had hidden the list inside his coat lining and smuggled it out when he was released. That list is why there are now thirteen thousand distinctly marked graves at Andersonville, a sight “mighty in [its] silence,” Barton wrote after the last reburial was completed, “teaching the world a lesson of human cruelty it had never learned.”

While New York City could never replicate on Hart Island what has been done at Andersonville, Melinda’s database of names represents a unique and expanding memorial in itself, built with as much care and labor as any physical monument, and as moving as any public tribute to the dead.

Melinda was right about today’s experience being an intense one, and it’s discouraging to consider overall how many historical records and treasures have been destroyed or stolen by vandals, thieves, fires, and decay. For all that is taken from us, however, much is recovered—thanks to the Melinda Hunts and Clara Bartons of the world, who do the heavy lifting and hard work to salvage and restore the past. They give us reason to be hopeful. Not only about history, but about ourselves.

BEFORE THE PLACE
was closed down in 1969 and wrecking crews later reduced it to rubble, Leary’s Book Store stood at 9 South Ninth Street, between Chestnut and Market, in downtown Philadelphia.
Sentimental bibliophiles (such as myself) might consider Leary’s alone worth recognizing because it was the nation’s oldest continuously operating bookstore, but what has drawn me to its former location isn’t Leary’s history per se; rather, it was the discovery inside the building of a rare, nearly two-hundred-year-old parchment found by staff members packing up leftover inventory. Two centuries ago the one-page document apparently wasn’t considered important enough to safeguard with due diligence, and it has since come to represent countless historic items that, although once abandoned or neglected, have been rediscovered and are now deemed irreplaceable.

I’m well aware that we cannot, as a society, preserve everything. Our cities would be overcrowded with storage warehouses if we tried to save and catalog every official record, piece of correspondence, manuscript, and artifact from our past. But the national heirlooms and relics that earlier generations have tossed out, misplaced, or sold off is mind-boggling. Plymouth Rock suffered three centuries of abuse from hammer-happy souvenir hunters before it was finally enshrined in its current memorial at Plymouth Harbor; cartloads of letters written by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and John Hancock were hauled out of government buildings in Washington, D.C., and dumped into the Potomac River to make room for Union Army munitions during the Civil War; and more recently, NASA administrators sheepishly announced in 2006 that they had lost the original video footage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 landing, images shot with a special camera on the moon that were much crisper and more detailed than anything broadcast live on television. A NASA spokesman later conceded that they might have accidentally taped over it.

Not even original copies of the Declaration of Independence have been spared mistreatment. After Second Continental Congress delegates approved the final wording on July 4, 1776, the handwritten manuscript was rushed to John Dunlap’s print shop on Second and Market Streets here in Philadelphia. Dunlap, a twenty-nine-year-old Irish immigrant, labored into the wee hours of July 5 to roll out an
estimated two hundred copies, which were then carried by messengers throughout the colonies to be reprinted in local newspapers, distributed to state assemblies, and read aloud in taverns, churches, and town squares. Only about two dozen of these first, official versions of the Declaration—known as “the Dunlap broadsides”—have been recovered in the States, and three of them are mere fragments. Two copies intercepted by British officers during the Revolution are currently housed in England’s Public Record Office, and the rest are mostly in various historical societies, universities, museums, and libraries throughout the United States.

In 2000 television producer Norman Lear and Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Hayden bought one Dunlap broadside at a Sotheby’s auction for $8.14 million and, quite generously, toured it around the country at their own expense. Purportedly, the document was found behind an oil painting acquired for $4 at an antiques market in Adamstown, Pennsylvania. The buyer claimed that when he returned home and dismantled the frame, which appealed to him more than the artist’s ho-hum pastoral scene, out dropped the Dunlap broadside from between the canvas and the wood backing.

Purportedly
is the key word because manuscript experts are skeptical. It’s not the document’s authenticity that they doubt, just the story of how it turned up. The more likely scenario, they contend, is that someone swiped the broadside from a small historical society or library whose staff members were unaware that they’d even had it in their possession. (This isn’t uncommon; manuscripts that were misfiled centuries ago or bundled up with other, unrelated materials are serendipitously discovered every so often by researchers going through an archive, usually while looking for something else.) The individual who supposedly bought the cheap painting has never been publicly identified, and no antiques dealer in Adamstown has stepped forward to verify the story.

As further evidence of the poor handling Dunlap broadsides have suffered since 1776, the copy now owned by the University of Virginia was uncovered inside an attic in Albany, New York, being used
as wrapping paper. And about thirteen years later, a Dunlap broadside was found stuffed in an old wooden crate by employees of a soon-to-be-demolished Philadelphia bookstore. That would be Leary’s.

Texas businessman Ira G. Corn Jr. and attorney Joseph Driscoll purchased the Leary’s copy in May 1969 for $404,000 and later donated it, with financial assistance from fellow community and corporate leaders, to the city of Dallas. Now exhibited inside the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library, this is the only Dunlap broadside—and therefore one of the oldest existing copies of the Declaration anywhere in the world—freely displayed to the public on a permanent, year-round basis.

Contrary to popular perception, the elegantly handwritten Declaration of Independence showcased inside the National Archives rotunda is not the Declaration finalized on July 4. Called “the engrossed copy,” this version was commissioned by Congress in mid-July 1776 and signed by most of the representatives on August 2. The actual document that Congress promptly handed to John Dunlap on July 4 has disappeared and was most likely cut up and destroyed in the printing process.

Several early, incomplete drafts of the Declaration have also been preserved, and they exemplify why original manuscripts are so valuable, especially those composed in an era when Delete buttons didn’t exist; through every handwritten strike-through and careted addition, one can follow a document’s evolution and the thought process of its author.

In what Jefferson himself labeled “Independence-Declaration original Rough Draught,” he initially wrote:

Right on this document we can see how, at the behest of Jefferson’s fellow delegates, “sacred and undeniable” were crossed out and “self-evident” was scribbled above. There’s also a line through “& independent”
and “preservation of,” the phrasing about “equal creation” was reworked, and a reference to God was inserted. In the end, the Declaration’s most vital pronouncement is made bolder and more memorable: “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 & the pursuit of happiness.”

(It’s a minor point, but Jefferson consistently used the word
inalienable
, not
unalienable
, and there’s speculation that Dunlap inadvertently changed the word.)

Congress made about eighty edits—or, in Jefferson’s words, “mutilations” and “acrimonious criticisms”—to the Rough Draft, as the copy is now referred to. Among the most vociferously debated passages was Jefferson’s denunciation of the slave trade. “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself,” Jefferson wrote accusingly of King George III,

How Jefferson, who owned hundreds of slaves himself, could have composed such a diatribe is a whole separate topic for discussion, but suffice it to say that certain southern representatives refused to sign the Declaration if this language remained. The section was excised, representing the largest single cut from Jefferson’s Rough Draft.

Since Dunlap’s broadsides represented the final product of Congress’s edits and were printed on a movable-type press, they contain no handwritten marks or alterations. But because more than two dozen
have been salvaged, it’s still possible to compare them and find discrepancies. Many, including the Leary’s copy, are slightly crooked, and at least eleven have faint overlapping text, indicating that the paper had been folded in preparation for distribution before the ink was completely dry. These and other imperfections accentuate the urgency of the moment.

No laws regulate what private collectors can or can’t do with Dunlap broadsides as long as they’re obtained legally. Fortunately, most buyers—such as Norman Lear, David Hayden, Ira Corn, and Joseph Driscoll—have put theirs on public display or donated them to reputable institutions. But there’s nothing stopping a crazed millionaire from purchasing a copy and burning it to make a political statement or turning it into a papier-mâché hat for kicks.

Concerted efforts to safeguard documents of national importance didn’t begin in earnest until 1933, when Congress established the National Archives. That same year, Robert D. W. Connor, the first archivist of the United States, delivered this mortifying assessment of our federal government’s “system” to retain and catalog historic manuscripts:

Although the cornerstone of the National Archives was laid in 1933, construction lagged due to the Depression and World War II, and the engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence didn’t settle into its permanent home until 1952.

That it hadn’t been lost or ruined in the meantime, as had the great majority of Dunlap broadsides, is a miracle in itself. After the signing ceremony on August 2, 1776, the engrossed copy was repeatedly rolled up and unrolled as it accompanied Continental Congress members dashing from city to city, trying to keep one step ahead of British soldiers who would have loved to get their hands on the treasonous parchment.

In 1801, President John Adams ordered that key government manuscripts be moved from Philadelphia to the nation’s new capital in Washington. The Declaration and its priceless companions were loaded onto a ship that sailed down the Delaware River, out to sea, through the Chesapeake Bay, and finally up the Potomac.