In a contest for a single symbol in an American place, that animates our history, our best selves, one obvious symbol is the Liberty Bell. Located in our nation’s first capital, Philadelphia; the bell is in proximity to Independence Hall. And this hall is where the second Continental Congress discussed the prospect of independence from the world’s superpower, and under conditions of personal and financial risk. All thirteen colonies were present on July 2, 1776 when the Lee Resolution was adopted, declaring the their independent from Britain. Wearing wigs and heavy wool suits (plus no air conditioning) things were warm and the deliberations were heating up. It was 68 degrees at 7am on July 4 (according to records kept by Philadelphian Phineas Pemerton), and 76 degrees at 1pm. The wind was shifing from the north to the southwest, and in the afternoon, clouds were increasing. Then it happened – the declaration was adopted. And the Liberty Bell rang.
Except it didn’t.
Every school child knows that the Liberty Bell rang when the Declaration of Independence was read aloud to the people of Philadelphia. The bell did ring, but it was not known to anyone as the Liberty Bell then, it was the State House Bell, ironically a gift from the British.
It was not called the Liberty Bell until 1828, when it was adopted as a symbol of the abolitionist movement because the inscription on the bell declared the most basic principle of democracy (“Proclaim liberty throughout the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof”) while the crack in the bell was a compelling image of the rift created by slavery in the land of the free.
Philadelphia had an early and important role in the abolitionist movement—but there were Quaker slave-owners, and Philadelphia did allow slave ships into its port. Philadelphians like to recall that their city was one of the first to conduct open debates about slavery and abolition. But the deep contradiction between the revolution that declared that all men are created equal, and an economic and political system that enslaved some men, was as real in Philadelphia as anywhere in the country. Perhaps it was more intense in Philadelphia because Philadelphia saw itself as the cradle of liberty.
It was a stroke of brilliance when the abolitionist movement took the cracked bell of liberty as its symbol. The promise of democracy, the great ideal of liberty for all, had a big crack down the middle. It is hard to imagine a story that goes more immediately and directly to one of the most troubling and fascinating issues in America, and especially in Philadelphia, the place where the contradictions and paradoxes of slavery in the midst of freedom may have been most poignant.
They used a replica of the Liberty Bell, with no crack, and with an additional inscription that read Establish Justice. PA suffragette Katherine Wentworth Ruschenberger commissioned the bell’s casting for a 5,000 mile whistle stop tour of PA in support of a 1915 ballot measure granting women the vote. The bell was mounted on the bed of a modified pick-up truck (and the truck whistled?). Seventy thousand women supported the tour through 67 PA counties where the towns and the women were decorated in yellow sashes, a symbol of women’s suffrage. There were marching band parades through large crowds all along the tour. But the ballot measure was defeated, winning in the rural area but not the cities. Women had to wait five more years for the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution to get the franchise. A month after passage, at a big event on Independence Square the Justice Bell found its voice.
Around 2000, began a plan to move the Liberty Bell into a new setting in the park, they did not choose to interpret the issue of slavery as part of the story. In fact early on they took the position that slavery and the Liberty Bell were two very different stories, and each should be interpreted in its own right without connecting them. But the connection to slavery and the abolitionist movement is what gave the Liberty Bell its name.
The controversy that followed was predictable, though even the historians who were prominent in protesting the NPS plans did not make much of how the Liberty Bell got its name. The argument instead centered on the fact that the new site for displaying the bell overlapped the site of the house where George and Martha Washington lived, with their slaves, during part of his presidency. The house had been built by one of the city’s largest slaveholders, and when the Washington’s moved in new space was added to accommodate their household staff of 32 people, a mixture of slaves and indentured servants.
Gary B. Nash, who led a loose-knit coalition of historians, suggested to the NPS some ways to more fully depict slavery in the park, reported the Los Angeles Times. ”What we are talking about is historical memory,” said Mr. Nash. ”You either cure historical amnesia, or you perpetuate it” … ”This does not address the braided historical relationship between freedom and slavery,” he continued, ”how interdependent they were, and how the freedom of some was built upon the unfreedom of others.”
The NPS reconsidered and a base planning document from 2017 explains, “The site of the President’s House, where George Washington and John Adams and their households lived and worked during their terms as the first and second presidents of the United States, prior to Adams’ move to the White House in 1800, is interpreted by the park, especially in the paradox of the Washingtons bringing their enslaved people to work and live there.”
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