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On May 14, 1776, after eight days traveling across Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, lodging at simple boardinghouses and dining with locals, Thomas Jefferson boarded a ferry across the Schuylkill River and arrived in clamorous, thriving Philadelphia, where delegates to the Continental Congress were arriving.
Jefferson considered himself a quiet farmer and thinker, and he despised urban quarters, with their teeming masses and rancid air. Yet here he was, readying to remain for months in the tightly packed city of nearly 40,000 people, the most populous metropolis in British America. Shipyards spread across the banks of the Delaware River, supplying goods to the city’s markets. Red-brick townhouses lined cobbled streets, which led slightly uphill toward the State House that would later be known as Independence Hall. A few blocks farther, along dirt roads, lay a gentler landscape of fields and farms and a handful of estates.
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Jefferson strolled through a scene strikingly different from the isolation and slavery at his plantations and mountaintop villa. Here was an astonishingly diverse city, with Quakers and Jews joining those of other faiths attracted by Pennsylvania’s policy of religious tolerance. There were free and enslaved Black people, poor and wealthy White people, merchants and bankers and industrialists. Here, too, was the Athens of America, as some called it, with scientists and historians and tinkerers and legislators, exemplified by Benjamin Franklin and his American Philosophical Society.
People visit the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Jefferson initially stayed as a guest of cabinetmaker Benjamin Randolph on Chestnut Street, in the same block as Franklin’s home across from Carpenters’ Hall, an elegant structure topped by a cupola and a weather vane, where the first Continental Congress met two years earlier. Nearby was a printer’s shop that recently had published a book Jefferson greatly admired: a 47-page volume by Thomas Paine, a poor immigrant from Britain, called “Common Sense.” Arguing against reconciliation with the monarchy, Paine wrote that “the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests.” The book sold more than 500,000 copies during the Revolutionary War and was cited by Jefferson and others as a key influence on the Declaration.
Jefferson ran errands, bought a glass of punch, received $300 in delegate pay and purchased $9 worth of paper, on which he would write the rationale for liberty. After nine days living in the center of the hot, muggy city, and tired of the smell from a nearby stable and tannery, Jefferson searched for lodging in what he called “the skirts of the town where I may have the benefit of a freely circulating air.” He found a place just a few blocks away at what was then the edge of Philadelphia.
He took one memento from his former lodging: a mahogany “writing box” built by Randolph, the cabinetmaker, on which he would compose the Declaration. The box had an easel-like hinge-and-peg system on which a writing surface could be adjusted, allowing it to be placed on a desk or a lap.
Revolutionary Revelations As the nation prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, The Post examines Thomas Jefferson’s role, its world-changing impact, the paradox of enslavement, and the story behind the doctoring of words in the Jefferson Memorial.
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