America's Prophet Read online

Karie Diethorn dismissed the novel theories, saying that no mention of the bell appears in Franklin’s voluminous correspondence and misspellings were common in the eighteenth century when universal rules for spelling had yet to be adopted. “My sense is that Norris, as a Quaker, thought about the applicability of biblical verse to everyday life. And the significance of the jubilee year would not have been lost on him. Having spent so much time on the architecture of the building, he probably wanted to follow that to the nth detail and make the statement that the Charter of Privileges was a meaningful experience.”

  I asked if the quotation suggested Norris and his colleagues viewed themselves as a continuation of the Israelites.

  “I doubt they considered themselves chosen like the Israelites,” she said. “I think they looked on themselves as Englishmen, first and foremost, and that they were entitled to the rights of Englishmen. Winthrop, Bradford, and others in the seventeenth century viewed themselves more as exceptional. By the eighteenth century, people were more practical. The idea that the Bible portrays oppression, and everybody knows the text, made it easy for them to quote the Bible.”

  AS SOON AS we stepped through the door and into the bell tower I began to sweat. The first two floors are air-conditioned, the others are not. A worn wooden staircase leads to the third floor, an unfinished space that reminded me of the attic in my childhood home. In the building’s early years, Diethorn explained, the State House employed a doorkeeper, who cleaned the fireplaces, lugged wood, and replaced the candles. This floor was his living quarters. “In the late eighteenth century, the doorkeeper’s wife had a baby in this room,” she said. The next level up, the fourth, is where the bell ringer would have stood—Philadelphia’s Quasimodo. This floor is where Isaac Norris’s ill-fated bell spent much of its life, inactive and trapped.

  Norris’s request for a bell arrived in London in the spring of 1752 and was quickly relayed to Whitechapel Bell Foundry. The foundry cast the bell using the customary method of an inner mold, called the core, and an outer mold, called the cope, into which the founders poured molten bell metal, an alloy of 77 percent copper and 23 percent tin, mixed with traces of arsenic and gold. “Basically, it’s like a fruitcake,” Diethorn said. A bell has five parts: the lip; the sound bow, where the clapper strikes; the waist, the concave part in the middle; the shoulder, which is where the Leviticus quote is located; and the crown, which connects the bell to the wooden yoke. The note Norris’s bell sounded was an E-flat.

  The bell arrived in Pennsylvania that September, and eager workers made a critical misstep: They hurriedly unpacked the bell, mounted it on a temporary rigging, and bolted in the clapper. They pulled back the metal clapper, dropped it toward the lip, and listened intently as a deadly thud reverberated through history. The bell cracked. A horrified Norris blamed Whitechapel for using metal that was “too high and brittle.” Whitechapel, in turn, blamed “amateur bell-ringers.” Wars have been launched over less. Norris tried to send the bell back, but the ship’s captain refused to transport it, so Norris dispatched the bell to “two Ingenious Work-Men” in Pennsylvania, Charles Stow and John Pass, who melted it down and recast it. Tinkering with the alloy, they added an ounce and a half of copper for each pound of bell, yet another miscalculation. The following April they lugged the recast bell to the top of the tower for a ceremonial chime. Instead of a sonorous peal, the bell issued an atonal bonk, which one witness described as the sound of two coal scuttles being banged together. Far from proclaiming liberty throughout the land, the bell couldn’t be heard on the ground floor.

  Stow and Pass were so humiliated by the “witticisms” hurled at them that they hurriedly prepared for a second recasting. “If this should fail,” Norris wrote, “we will…send the unfortunate Bell” back to Whitechapel for remolding. A frantic six weeks later, the recast bell was ready to be toted to the belfry. This version at least rang, but its sound pleased few. “I Own I do not like it,” Norris wrote, and ordered a replacement from Whitechapel. He planned to return the original bell for credit, but the assembly ultimately kept both. The “Old Bell” hung in the tower, while the “Sister Bell” hung in a secondary cupola on the fourth-floor roof where it tolled the hours. The Old Bell was still hanging in the State House steeple in July 1776, though the tower was so rotted it was dangerous to enter.

  The drama of that summer was marked by four key dates: July 2, when the Congress voted for independence; July 4, when it adopted Jefferson’s document; July 8, when the Declaration was read aloud for the first time; and August 2, when most members signed. The only date for which evidence exists of bells being rung in the city is July 8. “There were bonfires, ringing bells, with other great demonstrations of joy,” wrote a witness. But no one specified that the State House Bell was among those sounded, and there’s reason to at least be skeptical, considering the poor state of the belfry. Five years later the tower was considered so rickety it was removed entirely and the bell retired to the fourth floor, where it remained mute for the next forty years and was rung only on ceremonial occasions. Twice officials actually sold the bell, but both times they balked before handing it over. For all practical purposes, Pennsylvania’s E-flat bell was impounded, a forgotten slave to its own misfortune, unable to peal even for its own release. (The Sister Bell was also removed, in 1828, when the new bell tower was finished. It was given to a Catholic church, which was burned in 1844 in a wave of anti-Catholic riots. The bell crashed to the floor and broke into smithereens. Workers collected all the pieces they could find and recast them into a 150-pound bell, down from the original 2,080 pounds. The recast version now hangs at Villanova University.)

  During one of the original bell’s ringings, likely in the 1820s or 1830s, it cracked again. Some witnesses claimed the cracking occurred on the visit of Marquis de Lafayette in 1824; others said it followed the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act in Britain in 1829; still others suggested it was at the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall in 1835. The truth, Diethorn explained, is that the bell was probably cracking all along, just not visibly. On Washington’s Birthday 1843, the crack had become so substantial that it rendered the bell unusable. Officials performed a repair technique called stop drilling, in which they actually removed chunks of metal to prevent the jagged edges from scraping, thereby creating the inch-wide gap that became the bell’s most distinctive feature. The rounded edges from this procedure are still visible. At the time, officials actually took the metal fragments and made them into trinkets, which they sold. “It was like buying a piece of Noah’s ark jewelry,” Diethorn said.

  So why such misfortune?

  “In effect, the bell was doomed from the start,” she stressed. “They were taking the same metal, subjecting it to heat, breaking it down, and reconstituting it. Plus, their casting techniques were highly flawed. Today, they use sterile environments and humans don’t get anywhere near the bells when they’re being cast.”

  I asked her why the bell came to have such meaning.

  “It’s hard to get your heart around a building,” she said. “But the bell is timeless, in its shape, its function. It’s easier to understand on an emotional level.”

  And so much of that emotion, she added, comes from the inscription. “You have to remember, the cultural identity of these people is so vividly informed by the Bible,” Diethorn said. “It’s not the same as saying they were religious, but it was the common language of all members of that society. What I think is fascinating about this era is how the idea of reason, science, and objectivity, which inform the Enlightenment so completely, can coexist in their minds with the idea that there is a divine presence in the world.

  “I think a lot of laypeople in America today feel that the Enlightenment was somehow antireligious,” she continued. “That people like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and others were deists and didn’t believe in God. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The language of religion is so ingrained in their culture in the form of the stories, the aphorisms,
the proverbs, and the characters, and this religious language is readily adopted as the language of liberty, whether you’re talking about the Israelites, their captivity, and their freedom, or leaders like Moses, David, or Solomon. The eighteenth century is big on parallels. They’re searching for historical precedent for their own actions, and they’re finding it in religious rhetoric because everyone understood and could relate to that.”

  “And it seems that specifically what they were looking for is authority,” I suggested. “An authority higher than the king. God gives you that authority.”

  “The heart and the head need to be equally stimulated to make something worth doing,” Diethorn said. “The Enlightenment may give you intellectual credibility, but the Bible gives you emotional credibility.”

  THE STAIRCASES IN the tower get wobblier the higher you climb. Above level five, you enter the new tower, installed during the building renovation in 1828. When the nation’s capital moved to Washington and the state capital to Harrisburg, the State House was slated to be torn down, but a wave of nostalgia accompanied the visit of Lafayette and the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Ceremonies inspired by the French hero’s arrival introduced the name Independence Hall into popular use.

  The sixth flight of stairs is by far the most narrow, and the steps are placed at uneven intervals. About halfway up, they are interrupted by jutting steel girders that now buttress the structure. I had to lift my hands above my head and squeeze between the railing and the beam, like climbing through the pistons in a car engine. And then the stairs stop. The only way to reach the cupola is via a wooden ship’s ladder. This seventh level is dark and much smaller than those below it. The air is stale and dusty, more like descending into a dungeon than ascending to a summit. I grasped the rungs and began to climb.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, the fractured, largely forgotten, nearly century-old State House bell suddenly experienced a remarkable renaissance resulting from a newfound fascination with the Mosaic phrase on its face. In 1839 a Boston abolitionist group called Friends of Freedom circulated a pamphlet that featured on its cover an idealized drawing of the bell, including the inscription PROCLAIM LIBERTY TO ALL THE INHABITANTS. The drawing was captioned “Liberty Bell,” and inside was a poem “inspired by the inscription on the Philadelphia Liberty Bell.” Six years later another abolitionist group adopted the same image in a poem by Bernard Barton.

  Liberty’s Bell hath sounded its bold peal

  Where Man holds Man in Slavery! At the sound—

  Ye who are faithful ’mid the faithless found,

  Answer its summons with unfaltering zeal.

  The emphasis on the newly coined Liberty Bell was part of the abolitionists’ desire to deflect attention away from the Constitution that had enshrined slavery into law and to return attention to the Declaration and its ideal of liberty for all.

  The notion soon took hold among Americans. Benson Lossing’s popular Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, published in 1850, featured a brief history of the Liberty Bell. The account included the fictitious story of a blue-eyed boy who waited outside the Assembly Room on July 4, 1776, heard the passage of the Declaration of Independence, and scurried up the bell tower to the “gray-bearded” guard crying, “Ring! Ring!” The story had been circulating for a decade and quickly became accepted fact. To capitalize on the new popularity, officials in 1852 carted down the bell from the rafters and placed it on display along with a portion of George Washington’s pew from Christ Church, a Bible from 1776, and Ben Franklin’s desk. As Mayor Robert Conrad said at the dedication, “We acknowledge even a profounder feeling of exultation over the contacts and deeds that have made this the holiest spot—save one—of all the earth; the Sinai of the world, upon which the Ark of Liberty rested.”

  Completing its resurrection, the Liberty Bell began traveling around the United States. It made seven journeys by rail between 1885 and 1915, for a total of 376 stops in thirty states, including world’s fairs in Chicago, New Orleans, and Atlanta. Three of the four first trips were in the South, where Northerners tried to use the bell as an instructional tool to enlighten former Confederates. Stereopticons showed former slaves bowing down to the bell. John Philip Sousa wrote “The Liberty Bell” march. Along with renewed interest in the Stars and Stripes through Flag Day and the Pledge of Allegiance, the Liberty Bell became part of a wave of American exceptionalism, which held that God had chosen America to lead the world into a new Promised Land. As another Philadelphia mayor, Charles Warwick, put it in 1895, “No religious ceremony in the bearing of relics could have produced more reverence than this old bell.”

  “The Bellman informed of the passage of the Declaration of Independence,” depicting the mythical story of the ringing of the Liberty Bell. From the cover of Graham’s Magazine, June 1854. (Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia)

  Transferring the Liberty Bell from truck to train at St. Louis after the Exposition, 1905. (Courtesy of The Library of Congress)

  And by rallying so intently around the words of Leviticus 25, Americans were reaffirming their commitment to the country’s moral foundations and its roots in the Hebrew Bible. During the years when the Liberty Bell was assuming its stature, Americans had near-universal biblical literacy, which means that most people would have recognized the context of the inscription. They would have seen it as part of God’s larger call to free the enslaved, salve the sick, uplift the poor. That recognition didn’t mean Americans went rushing to change their public policy, but it did mean they wanted their greatest symbols to be associated with their highest aspirations.

  And sure enough, successive waves of ostracized Americans attempted to commandeer the Liberty Bell to support their own liberations. Suffragettes molded a replica of the Liberty Bell, dubbed “the Justice Bell,” to promote women’s rights, chaining the clapper until women could vote. Civil rights leaders made pilgrimages to the bell, and in 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked its symbolism in his jubilant phrase “Let freedom ring” at the March on Washington. During the Cold War, Jewish groups laid a wreath at what they deemed the “Bell for Captive Nations” to promote the plight of Soviet Jewry. And as early as 1965; gay-rights groups marched at the bell calling themselves “our last oppressed minority.” The process was like a form of Liberty Bell midrash, with each minority group proclaiming liberty unto itself. More than any other emblem of 1776, the Liberty Bell had become the embodiment of America.

  AT THE TOP of the ship’s ladder is a small trapdoor. I pushed it open, hoisted myself through the narrow opening, and suddenly found my head in the mouth of a giant bell. The cupola is an octagon, with narrow arches open to the air. Some wasps had built a nest inside the bell. The Centennial Bell, dating from 1876, is considerably larger than its ancestor, weighing thirteen thousand pounds in honor of the thirteen colonies. Its metal is a mixture of American and British cannonballs from Saratoga and Union and Confederate cannonballs from Gettysburg. Around its lip is the inscription PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF.

  After the oven of the tower, the open air of the cupola felt freeing. The ground floor of this building may have given birth to the prose of America, but this was a place of song. I could see all the way down the expanse of Independence Mall, a beautification begun in the 1950s, and up the Delaware River, where, thirty-nine miles upstream, Washington crossed on Christmas night in 1776. For the first time on my climb, I felt proud. I rested my hand on the lip of the bell, which felt cool and vibrated with the slightest touch. I was so accustomed to thinking of the Liberty Bell in its climate-controlled museum across the street, I was jolted to remember that the bell had lived for decades on top of this building.

  Karie Diethorn joined me in the cupola. For a second her academic mien melted away. She smiled ruefully. I asked her if she had ever experienced a personal moment with the bell.

  “I’m always awestruck with how people react to it,” she said. “Once we di
d a military swear-in. The navy brought sailors and they took their oaths in front of the Liberty Bell. It was extremely moving. They committed themselves to serving their country in front of one of its greatest icons. To them, the Liberty Bell embodied all the sacrifices that came before them. I didn’t expect to be as overwhelmed as I was.”

  “So why do you think people need that object?”

  “I think it symbolizes hope. In the 1950s a lot of people looked at the Liberty Bell and thought about America as the greatest country in the world. Now, we still see the patriotic story, but we also see the incredible tragic events of our history. The irony of slavery and liberty coexisting in our nation. The Liberty Bell embodies all of those ideas. It’s a very flexible symbol. I think that’s why people relate to it.

  “Also, the message is very poignant,” she continued. “That inherent in our history is tragedy and victory simultaneously. From slavery comes freedom. But freedom is easily lost and can become slavery again. To me, it’s like looking down a long hallway, and the Leviticus verse resounds throughout that hallway for whatever period you’re in.”

  “I love how it comes back to sound.”

  “Hearing is our most fundamental sense,” Diethorn said. “Even a deaf person can feel vibration. And it’s the same with this place. The bell is the most important part of this otherwise public building. It’s the universal part. It sings the Declaration of Independence. The smallest part of the building turns out to have the biggest voice.”

  IF THE CUPOLA atop Independence Hall is one of Philadelphia’s most glamorous spots, the basement of the Christ Church parish house is surely one of its dingiest. It’s cramped, poorly lit, and overflowing with books, the kind of room where some Dickensian waif would be locked away during his childhood. The rector of the church took me into that morass and showed me one of the least known artifacts of July 4, 1776, and one of the most stirring relics I’d ever held.