I’m a big fan of the Declaration of Independence. Not the text, specifically, but the document itself. Have you ever seen a copy? It’s written by hand, in tiny crabbed cursive, with misspelled words and a bunch of underlinings and corrections – a sheet of paper that gives the impression of a lot of angry men in one small room, shouting about ‘death, desolation and tyranny, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages’.
When I was little, I thought we had the real Declaration of Independence hanging by our back door. My family’s been American for a while, and we have a lot of old junk lying around, so I guess it was pretty natural to assume that the Declaration we had was the real one. I never looked at it closely (had I bothered, I would have read FACSIMILE OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE printed across the top; but what eight-year-old knows what ‘facsimile’ means?) because it always seemed a little shameful that such a noteworthy document had been glued crookedly onto a piece of cardboard and left unmounted in a large square frame that was much too big, and then hung by a back door, providing shelter to generations of barn spiders. I mean, what would the founding fathers think? Or poor crazy George III?
A couple months ago, I took it down and leaned it against the wall so I could move some furniture around; whereupon Cleo, always looking for stuff to stomp on, gave the glass a good kick with her steel-toed toddler shoes, and it cracked into three pieces. Luckily, the glass stayed intact enough to protect the Declaration, but when I went to take the backing off so the glass could be disposed of properly, I ran into a problem. Someone had used twelve one-inch brads to hold the picture in, and they were the kind of brads that looked like they might have been waiting for years to give someone tetanus. So I took it to the frame shop.
Here is where the surprising part happens: when they took the frame apart, they found that the Declaration (glued to cardboard, you recall) was covering a giant (12×14) photograph that had been professionally tipped onto a white matboard. Once the Declaration was out of the way, it was easy to see that the frame had been made for the photograph.
The picture itself is unspectacular: about a hundred dour-looking people, dressed in frock coats and top hats or hoopskirts and bonnets, gathered outside a giant building that must have been white, because it barely shows against the sky. There are bare, glum trees clustered around – there must have been a wind when the exposure was taken, because a few branches are blurry – and the assembly looks cold and melancholy. It’s an awful composition, too, with the people jammed against the left side and an expanse of empty bleachers to the right. Underneath, there is a caption:
DELEGATES TO THE BAPTIST CONVENTION, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, MAY 1867
This is a very mysterious and exciting thing to find, because not only is my family not Baptist, we aren’t really even very religious. Maybe once in a generation, someone will turn up who likes to go to church, but we’re remarkably free of the kind of fervor that would inspire someone to buy and frame a photograph of Baptist delegates. Or so I, innocent child, thought.
My father, never at a loss for family gossip, immediately told me a story about his grandfather, who was devoutly religious, yet married a saloon-keeper’s daughter. Apparently he had some disagreements with his in-laws, which culminated in their donation of a silver Communion set to his church, upon which he turned his back upon the church and lived out his days as a Freethinker. “You notice,” my father pointed out, “that he covered up the Baptists with a centennial print of the Declaration of Independence.” At which I began to laugh, because, you know, ‘death, desolation and tyranny’ is pretty funny in that context.
As for the Declaration, it’s getting a proper frame, with conservation glass and a hanger that won’t let barn spiders in. It’s going to be hung in the dining room, opposite a Vermeer print. Thomas Jefferson would be pleased, but I don’t know what the Freethinking ex-Baptist great-grandfather would think.