Philadelphia and the Founding Documents

On the morning of July fourth, seventeen seventy-six, a printer named John Dunlap worked through the night to produce the first broadside copies of the Declaration of Independence. The document had been adopted the day before by the Second Continental Congress, gathered in Philadelphia's State House on Chestnut Street, the building the world would later call Independence Hall. By dawn, Dunlap had printed somewhere between one hundred fifty and two hundred copies.

Riders carried them outward across the new nation. Pennsylvania's role in American founding was not incidental. It was structural.

The Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in seventeen seventy-four and again in seventeen seventy-five. The Declaration was written and signed here. When the new nation's first attempt at a governing document, the Articles of Confederation, proved unworkable, the Constitutional Convention of seventeen eighty-seven also met here, in the same building, that long hot summer.

What emerged in September of that year was the Constitution of the United States. The geography had something to do with it. Philadelphia in the seventeen seventies was the largest and most cosmopolitan city in British North America, roughly equidistant between the northern and southern colonies, a natural meeting ground.

But Penn's political inheritance mattered too. Pennsylvania had been governing itself through a representative assembly for nearly a century. The colony had a tradition of written constitutions, beginning with Penn's own Frame of Government.

The Liberty Bell, cast in London in seventeen fifty-two and famously recast by Philadelphia craftsmen after it cracked on first ringing, hung in the State House steeple and rang to summon citizens to public meetings. The crack it carries today appeared sometime in the early nineteenth century. The bell's inscription, drawn from Leviticus, Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof, was chosen by Pennsylvania's Provincial Assembly in seventeen fifty-one, before independence was even imaginable.

Pennsylvania was the place where the documents were drafted. But it was also, in a deeper sense, the place where the ideas behind them had been tested for nearly a century first.