American Scripture

Maier’s story begins on February 14, 1995, with a detailed description of the National Archives’s conservation efforts to preserve “the nation’s vital documents,” or what they call the “Charters of Freedom.” These include the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Conservators and scientists used the latest, most sophisticated technology to assess the documents’ physical condition and to gather data that could reveal previously unknown causes of deterioration. The evaluation’s data gave researchers more questions than answers, particularly concerning physical changes to the Bill of Rights and the role of the glass in the document’s display case. Overall, the results of the evaluation were inconclusive.

Maier then goes back in time to show that the documents—especially the Declaration of Independence—haven’t always been handled with reverence. The Declaration was copied on low-quality parchment in 1776, then traveled several times in harmful conditions between different cities until 1823. Its decay became apparent to viewers that year, so after the Declaration underwent the damaging process printers used to create a facsimile, it was displayed on a wall in the national Patent Office. Through the next century, the State Department moved the Declaration to different locations in an effort to slow its decay. Finally, in 1921, it settled in the Library of Congress, where it went on display in its first “shrine,” as the Librarian of Congress called it, and where awkward conservation efforts led to further damage (xi-xii).

In the early 1950s, the Declaration and the other “vital documents” moved to a new “shrine” at the National Archives. The original Declaration of Independence acquired a sacred status in the United States, which made its preservation an urgent issue for the nation; Maier compares Americans’ attachment to the document with the Soviet Union’s display of Lenin’s embalmed body, “a tangible remnant of the revolution to which its children can still cling” (xiii). The United States, however, is intent on preserving a document “that was written to perform a constitutional function” (xiii), rather than a leader’s body. Maier says it’s ironic how the valiant conservation efforts to protect the document that declared the country’s Independence from Great Britain actually illustrate the strong influence “English constitutional tradition [has] on American political culture” (xiii).

Maier returns the narrative to 1995 to describe the experience that inspired her to write American Scripture. On July 24, 1995, Maier was in Washington DC for a conference; during a break, she went to see the “vital documents” in their “shrine” at the National Archives. While she waited in line to enter the exhibit, she overheard a family behind her discussing a mural depicting the Second Continental Congress, with the drafters of the Declaration grouped conspicuously to indicate their significance. The family members were looking for George Washington in the picture, unaware that Washington was never in that Congress. One of them said the mural seemed to bring history to life; Maier wonders whether she should have “killed the fun by correcting their error” (xiv).

Maier, herself, thought the “vital documents” seemed “dead,” displayed as they were in the “shrine,” a funereal procession shuffling past it with guards standing at either side of the exhibit. Maier recalls the National Archives’s display and relates certain historical connections she pondered as she observed it and the people around her. She noticed that the two security guards on duty were both Black, and she thought of their presence as symbolic: “By their presence and attitude of reverence the guards witness the triumph of Abraham Lincoln’s view that the guarantee of freedom in the Declaration of Independence extended literally to ‘all men’” (xiv). The physical documents occupied a platform that reminded Maier of altars she saw during her “Catholic girlhood.” A version of the Magna Carta was on display near the shrine, but its significance as the English ancestor to the American documents didn’t interest the tourists.

Maier reached the Bill of Rights, which she had never seen in its original form. She recounts what she knew about the Bill of Rights, then reveals what she saw in the display: “Congress’s official copy of the twelve amendments it proposed, not the ten that were ratified” (xv). She looked at the shrine overall and thought the documents in their vault represented American values and concerns of the 1940s and 1950s, while the influence of the 1960s and 1970s showed itself in the “changing identity” of the guards on duty. She asked one of the guards whether the documents were absent from the exhibit during the recent evaluations; the guard declared that no human hand had touched the documents in decades.

Maier admits that she hadn’t intended to write a history of the Declaration of Independence: There was a surfeit of books on the subject, and she thought the document’s significance was overblown already. She realized, however, that she wouldn’t assign any of those other books to her classes—she’d have to write a short textbook that fit her requirements; but as she wrote, her textbook became a history about issues she’d never considered. She explains what the book doesn’t do, which is to identify and analyze the influences of European philosophy and political ideology in the Declaration, a project already accomplished by many other scholars since 1922, when historian Carl Becker’s “delightful” and “dated” book The Declaration of Independence was published (xvi). Maier’s interest in the Declaration stems from its “purposely unexceptional” nature: The principles in the document weren’t original thoughts from its drafter; they were adaptations of ideas that Americans of different political bents discussed and wrote about before the summer of 1776 (xvii).

Having once famously claimed that Thomas Jefferson is overrated, Maier feels the need to tell readers that she doesn’t dislike Jefferson; she simply objects to the “mythology of Jefferson” that now exists in American culture (xvii). She intends to show that Jefferson wasn’t the only person responsible for writing the Declaration, and his draft isn’t more worthy of academic study than the final draft. More importantly, however, Maier wants to tell a story about the events, people, and documents that caused general consensus on Independence in the colonies; about the drafting and editing of the Declaration in Congress; and about the remaking of the Declaration’s reputation, from an unremarkable political document that Americans forgot, to a “sacred text” that expresses ideals Americans must strive to realize (xviii-xix).

Maier will end the story with Abraham Lincoln’s reinterpretations of the Declaration before and during the Civil War, but she won’t assign all credit to Lincoln for remaking the document. She intends to finish her story by demonstrating the overarching theme:

[T]he remaking of the Declaration of Independence no less than its original creation was not an individual but a collective act that drew on the words and thoughts of many people, dead and alive, who struggled with the same or closely related problems (xx).

She’ll discuss in the Epilogue the story of the Declaration’s remaking beyond the American Civil War, and there will be a moral.

Maier says that after a period of indecision, she chose to begin her story with the convening of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775. The chaotic Second Continental Congress became the fledgling nation’s first government, the government that would adopt Independence and produce the Declaration of Independence. She sets the scene for the first chapter: Massachusetts delegates Samuel Adams and John Hancock leaving their colony, which the British were attacking, to join Congress in April 1776.