D. G. Hart’s work on Independence Hall featured in the Wall Street Journal.
Where else in the U.S. can you go and stand inside a room where George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Ben Franklin, John Hancock and others worked, talked, argued, shook hands, exchanged seats and probably snoozed—for months on end, even years? Sure, during celebrations of America’s 250th, many have visited Jefferson’s Monticello or Adams’s Peacefield to see where some of these men dined, conversed, argued, smoked and drank Madeira. But Philadelphia’s Independence Hall is the only building that boasted the presence of all the Founders, not simply for cocktails or conversation, but to launch a new nation.
Yet Independence Hall struggles to make the top shelf of the U.S.’s favorite historical sites. Take the reputation of its phony stepchild, the Liberty Bell. The current version of the Philadelphia relic isn’t the original casting but the third iteration of a bell that cracked immediately on its test run. What is also deceptive is the bell’s timing. It was commissioned in 1751 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of William Penn’s Charter of Privileges, which served as Pennsylvania’s original constitution. It had nothing to do with the Fourth of July, unless on nearby South Street someone found a fortune teller who predicted American independence 25 years before the war.
Despite those origins, the Liberty Bell became the symbol Americans associated with the Declaration of Independence. Nineteenth-century abolitionists were among the first to link the bell to the Fourth of July because of its biblical inscription. Soon after, Philadelphia novelist George Lippard popularized the belief that the Continental Congress rang the bell to announce and celebrate the declaration. Over time, it became the Founding’s most ubiquitous relic.
