The Liberty Bell's Crack and the Abolitionists Who Named It

The bell was cast in London in seventeen fifty-two and shipped to Philadelphia, where it cracked before it was officially hung. Local craftsmen recast it twice. The third version, the one that hangs behind glass on Market Street today, was produced in Philadelphia by John Pass and John Stow, whose names are still on it. It rang in the State House steeple for decades, summoning legislators and marking events. The founders called it the State House Bell.

The name Liberty Bell was given to it in eighteen thirty-seven by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, which reproduced its image on the cover of their publication Liberty, noting the inscription cast into the crown of the bell, a verse from Leviticus: Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. The abolitionists saw a cracked bell as exactly the right symbol for a country whose founding principles had a visible fissure running through them.

The bell had been damaged and repaired and damaged again because bells of that era could not sustain the vibration of their own resonance indefinitely. The crack in the Liberty Bell spread sometime between eighteen seventeen and eighteen forty-six, most likely while it was being rung in eighteen forty-six, and was eventually stabilized by filing a groove alongside it, which is the gap you can see today. The cracking was metallurgical, not metaphorical.

But the abolitionists made it metaphorical, and the metaphor proved more durable than the original meaning. The founders had rung it to announce legislative sessions. The Anti-Slavery Society rang it to announce an argument about who was included in the liberty the inscription proclaimed. That argument is the one the bell is remembered for.