The National Archives. Those columns — seventy-two of them, each fifty-three feet high, weighing ninety-five tons apiece. On the base of one of the statues out front, a quote from Shakespeare — "What is past is prologue."
Inside this building, right now, are the three documents Americans consider sacred — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. And if you want to understand how America treats sacred things, this is a good place to start.
The Declaration was written with iron gall ink — made from crushed oak tree galls mixed with iron sulfate. It fades. It was never meant to last forever. And then we made sure it didn't.
In eighteen eighteen, the government wanted copies. An engraver named William Stone pressed a damp cloth against the original parchment and transferred the actual ink onto a copper plate. He may have done this to the signatures more than once. They literally squeezed the Declaration like a sponge.
Then a government official hung it on
a wall opposite a window — where it baked in direct sunlight for thirty-five years. During the War of eighteen twelve, a clerk named Stephen Pleasonton stuffed it into a linen sack. Carted it thirty-five miles by wagon to keep the British from burning it. During World War Two, it rode a Pullman sleeper car to Fort Knox. Spent three years sharing a vault with the nation's gold supply.
The result —
