Personal Declarations

I would love to hear about Revolutionary exhibitions, programs and events sheduled for your area in this 250th anniversary year: 1776 is certainly alive and well in the Boston area! Since I’m on sabbatical, I’ve been able to attend quite a few happenings, and my favorite collaborative initiative is the Declarations Trail, on which four institutions, the Boston Athenaeum, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Public Library and Harvard University’s Houghton Library, have put more than a dozen copies of the Declaration of Independence on view, “originally created in different printings for different audiences” along with lots of other contextual objects. I’ve been to the first two exhibitions at the Athenaeum and MHS, and am looking forward to the opening of the last two later this spring.

Looking at, and thinking about, these paper Declarations has got me thinking about their popular and personal reception. I am very mindful of the words of historian J.L. Bell on his great blog Boston 1775: for the first generations of Americans it was a set of words, not an object they ever saw but at the same time, I know that one of the primary functions of print is to make things more permanent, and with tangible permanance comes possession as well as remembrance. Following that trail in my mind brought me to textile Declarations in general and Declaration handkerchiefs in particular–because there seems to have been a market for these words that you could literally put in your pocket. That market did not really develop until the first era of remembrance for the American Revolution—the 1820s, approaching its 50th anniversary with participants dying—but then it really took off. A great book (Threads of History. Americana Recorded on Cloth 1775 to the Present by Smithsonian curator Herbert R. Collins), an archived exhibition at the Museum of the American Revolution, and numerous auction archives introduced me to the copperplate-printed handkerchiefs produced by William Gillespie & Sons in Scotland for the American market beginning in 1821. Produced in blue, black and red colorways, there’s a blue one coming up at auction next week at Eldred’s Auctions, and this spectacular red textile was the banner lot at an important Sotheby’s auction in 2023. A black (more sepia) handkerchief was sold by Swann Auction Galleries in 2023, and the Yale University Art Gallery has a similar one, as well as a centennial quilt from fifty years later sewn around the same: what a perfect object linking two eras of patriotic remembrance.

Textiles seem less ephemeral than paper, so I assume that the Declaration handkerchiefs of the 1820s were in demand as commemorative items, but it’s important to remember that this was also an era that the Declaration was being issued as separate broadside for the first time too–it was evolving from words into an object which could take several forms. The motifs that were featured on these textiles, including the “chain” of states, big Revolutionary moments, and the founding fathers, will reappear again and again. Fifty years later, the Centennial will inspire another wave of patriotic production, but those objects will be more familiar than introductory.