The Man Who Saved the Declaration of Independence

W hen tourists journey to Washington, D.C., this year to help celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary, many of them will surely pay a visit to the National Archives to see the original Declaration of Independence. But without the courage of a State Department clerk back in 1814, they would be staring at an empty shrine, the priceless scroll having been incinerated with much of Washington so long ago. More than two centuries after his heroics, it’s time to formally recognize Stephen Pleasonton for saving America’s national treasure.

Born in 1778, during the Revolutionary War, Pleasonton became one of three clerks in the State Department sometime in the early 1800s. Among the irreplaceable documents in his care was the parchment Declaration signed by John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, and members of the Continental Congress in 1776.

By 1812, tensions with Britain had again reached a boiling point, particularly over the Royal Navy practice of “impressing” American sailors on the high seas — in essence, kidnapping them to serve on British ships. A deeply divided U.S. Congress declared war on the former mother country in June 1812, a conflict that Americans were woefully underprepared to fight.

In the summer of 1814, the British decided on a knockout blow to the Americans: Capture the upstart country’s capital city, and put its government to flight. By mid-August, an invasion force of more than 4,000 redcoats reached the Chesapeake Bay and began the march on Washington. They were shadowed by Secretary of State James Monroe, who shot off a warning to the State Department, adding “You had better remove the records.”

Responsibility for saving the Declaration fell on Stephen Pleasonton. On August 23, amidst the panic in the capital, he somehow found linen to turn into bags and carts to carry the Declaration, Constitution, journals of the Continental Congress, Washington’s wartime correspondence, and “all the laws, treaties, and correspondence of the Department of State since the adoption of the Constitution.”

Ignoring the incompetent Secretary of War, John Armstrong, who told him to stay put, Pleasonton loaded his bags into the carts less than 24 hours before British troops reached the city. As Washingtonians fled the capital in panic, he rode up through Georgetown, crossed the Potomac, and then as the British prepared to face American troops at Bladensburg, Md., continued up into the Virginia countryside.

Despite being outnumbered, the battle-tested British easily routed the ill-prepared Americans on August 24 and soon entered Washington. That evening, they torched the still-unfinished Capitol building and the Library of Congress, and then moved up Pennsylvania Avenue to the president’s House. First Lady Dolley Madison had just barely fled, taking with her Gilbert Stuart’s irreplaceable portrait of George Washington. The British didn’t even take time to loot, immediately burning both the executive mansion and the State Department, located next door.

Tens of thousands of vital government records and documents fed the flames that day. Yet the Declaration was not one of them, thanks to Pleasonton.

Stopping only to exchange his carts for more durable wagons, Pleasonton reached the outskirts of Leesburg, Va., on August 24. There, he arrived at the deserted Rokeby Mansion, where he deposited the Declaration, Constitution, and other papers into a 10’-by-6’ brick vault in the cellar, leaving them unguarded so as not to draw attention to the hiding place. Exhausted by his endeavors, Pleasonton did not join the residents of Leesburg who gathered that evening to view the fire-reddened sky from the burning capital.

Until the Americans could be sure that the British had left the area for good, it was thought too dangerous to bring the state papers back to Washington. Today, when the Declaration is protected by sophisticated security systems and handled with utmost care in atmosphere-controlled rooms by trained professionals in advanced protective gear, it is difficult to imagine the parchment lying unguarded for weeks in a coarse linen sack on the floor of a humid cellar, keeping company with rats and bugs. Not until a month later did Pleasonton return to Leesburg to pick up the scroll and bring it back to the capital.

With the defeat of the British later that year, a wave of patriotism swept the country. Carried along was the original Declaration, suddenly famous for having miraculously escaped the flames. Within a few years, artistic reproductions of the founding document began to appear, and John Trumbull painted his famous scene of the presentation of the draft to Congress in 1776, which was hung in the Rotunda of the rebuilt Capitol building.

In 1841, Secretary of State Daniel Webster put the original Declaration on display in the Old Patent Office (now the National Portrait Gallery). Since then, whether in the State Department, Library of Congress, or (since 1952) in the National Archives, America’s founding charter has been on nearly continuous exhibition. Well over 100 million Americans and tourists have viewed the document, making it perhaps the most recognized artifact in American history. Now seen as the guiding spirit of the American experiment, it inspired abolitionists, suffragists, immigrants, civil rights marchers, and all Americans as they worked to create a more perfect Union.

It is thanks to Stephen Pleasonton that Americans have for more than 200 years been able to gaze with awe and hope at the very words that changed the world, helping ensure ever-greater equality and liberty for all. America’s 250th anniversary is the perfect time to award a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom or Congressional Gold Medal to the man who saved the Declaration for posterity.

Parts of this essay are adapted from the author’s book National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America (Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster).