SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Our series, America In Pursuit, explores culture, history and objects in American life. Two-hundred-fifty years ago, the founders of the U.S. signed the Declaration of Independence. Today, NPR's Clare Lombardo tells us how Thomas Jefferson drafted it.
CLARE LOMBARDO, BYLINE: Thomas Jefferson wasn't just designing a new nation 250 years ago. He was also designing himself a portable desk.
ANTHEA HARTIG: Which almost looks like a laptop to us because it has a hinge case on a box, beautiful sliding out drawers for your pens and your ink and your blotters.
LOMBARDO: Anthea Hartig, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
HARTIG: The hinge also has a small rail on the front so you can prop up a book and read it. Or you can open it.
LOMBARDO: To create a perfect writing surface. Jefferson had it made out of mahogany in Philadelphia.
HARTIG: So, we think this is probably made very late 1775 or early 1776.
LOMBARDO: And in the steamy summer months of 1776, he used this desk to draft the Declaration of Independence.
HARTIG: And, of course, it went through many drafts and each word was debated. What kind of - are these sacred rights? Are these inalienable rights? They land, of course, on that beautiful kind of two paragraphs of some of the most soaring prose in U.S. history and then a long series of grievances.
LOMBARDO: Years later, in 1825, his granddaughter is getting married, and he designs a brand new desk, ships it, and it's lost at sea. So he ships the couple his desk, the one he'd designed himself and had been using for the past 50 years. And he leaves two notes.
HARTIG: He wrote, quote, "politics, as well as religion, has its superstitions. These gaining strength with time may one day give imaginary value to this relic for its great association with the birth of the great charter of our independence."
LOMBARDO: That was under the writing board. And there was another for his granddaughter's new husband.
HARTIG: Mr. Coolidge must do me the favor of accepting this gift. Its imaginary value will increase with years.
LOMBARDO: And if he lives to my age or another half century, Jefferson wrote, he may see it carried in the procession of our nation's birthday, as the relics of the saints are in those of the church. Jefferson wasn't far off. The desk is on display this summer in a special exhibit called American Aspirations at the Smithsonian Castle in Washington, D.C.
Clare Lombardo, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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