History’s Footnotes: Untold Witnesses at the Turning Point

Thomas Jefferson, ever the scientist, recorded the temperature in Philadelphia on July fourth, 1776. Seventy-six degrees. In our last episode, we talked about history’s footnotes—the unsung eyes at the turning point. Today, we are inside the Pennsylvania State House, looking through them. The air inside this room is much, much hotter.

I call it the smell of argument. It’s sour wine, and sweat, and the damp wool of fifty-some men who have been shouting in a locked room all summer. My job is to be invisible. I bring the water pitcher. I mop the floor where a glass has spilled. I am a shadow that moves, and because shadows don't have opinions, they hear everything.

They call themselves a Congress. Upstairs, in this same building, another assembly is meeting—men who still want to reconcile with the King. But down here, the air is electric with treason. They are birthing a nation, they say. I see men with flushed faces, their wigs powdered but their collars stained with sweat.

They swat at the horseflies buzzing by the open windows. They talk of liberty. They talk of tyranny. They use these grand, beautiful words. And I listen. I listen as they read the words Mister Jefferson wrote. He’s the tall, quiet one from Virginia. He owns more than a hundred people who look just like me.

And he has written that all men are created equal. There was a part in his first draft that blamed the King for the slave trade. I heard them arguing about it. A man from South Carolina said it would not do. A man from Georgia agreed. So they took it out. They took us out. To get everyone to agree, they erased the part that even mentioned we were in chains.

So when the final vote is called, and the man from Massachusetts, Mister Adams, slams his hand on the table in victory... I feel nothing but the heat. I see men who own other men declaring themselves free. It’s the grandest pronouncement I’ve ever heard, and also the most hollow. They are celebrating a freedom they have written for themselves, on a parchment that cost more than I will ever be worth.

A few months ago, a woman named Dinah, right here in Philadelphia, went to the court and demanded her freedom. She didn't write a declaration. She simply took it. The bell outside begins to ring. The sound washes over the room, over the city. The men are cheering now, shaking hands, some even embracing.

They believe they have changed the world. I slip out of the room to fetch more cool water, leaving them to their triumph. They have written a new world on that paper. But they did not write me in it.