Few national capitals have also become frontline cities during war. When Virginia seceded from the Union on May 24, 1861, and when the people of Virginia ratified the decision to secede, and Colonel Robert E. Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia on June 1, Washington faced the enemy just across the Potomac River. At risk was not just the government of the United States, but every government document and artifact since the Revolution.
Washington was in a terrible defensive position. Not only could it be reached unobstructed from the north across Maryland’s Piedmont Plateau, but the Potomac could be forded from the Virginia side both upriver and across the three bridges that spanned the river from Arlington. The only permanent defensive post near the national capital was Fort Washington, built in 1809 high above the Potomac across from Mount Vernon, roughly twenty miles south of the White House. Nor were there any troops in Washington in any numbers at the outbreak of the war; perhaps fifteen hundred could be called on to defend the White House, the still-unfinished Capitol, and other important public buildings.
Within weeks, soldiers from northern states began flooding into Washington, creating havoc in a city unprepared to house or feed them. Makeshift barracks and tents sprung up, soldiers camped in public buildings, including the Capitol. Subject to waiting for action, they drank and brawled, further unsettling the city. A regiment of Rhode Islanders was bivouacked in the old Patent Office Building (now the National Portrait Gallery). While there they trashed hundreds of cabinets and stole hundreds of patent models.
This may have been regretted as an unfortunate casualty of wartime, but the Patent Office held an irreplaceable treasure: the original parchment Declaration of Independence. Secretary of State Daniel Webster had sent the Declaration to the Patent Office in 1841, where it was placed in the massive second floor gallery known as the National Museum. There, among the thousands of artifacts, it quickly became one of the capital’s most popular exhibits.
Now, however, the Declaration—the country’s most priceless artifact—was at risk in a city at war. The damage from turning the Patent Office into a barracks for Union troops was just the beginning. Washington was a Southern city, and among its 70,000 inhabitants were thousands of Confederate sympathizers and agents. Confederate spies had been arrested at least twice around the Patent Office, which was all but unguarded. Anyone could sneak into the building and get up to the second-floor gallery where the Declaration was simply hung on the wall in a large frame.
The threat from inside the city was paralleled by that from without. Despite a crash program to build defenses ringing the capital—ultimately comprising 68 forts and 93 batteries, along with 20 miles of infantry trenches and 32 miles of military roads––newspapers reported that Confederate forces would soon invade Washington. Older Washingtonians could remember when the British had invaded in August 1814, burning the Capitol and White House; on that occasion, the Declaration had barely survived, being spirited out of the city just before the Redcoats arrived. Now, the specter of a large Confederate army attacking the city led to near-panic that the whole city could be put to the torch, along with nearly a century of government records. So acute was the fear of invasion that rumors briefly flew that the Declaration, Constitution, and other irreplaceable documents had already been secretly carried off to Philadelphia, for safekeeping.
Yet every history of the Declaration states definitively that the parchment Declaration hung on the wall of the Patent Office from 1841 through 1876, when it was taken up to Philadelphia for the Centennial Exposition. No one has even asked the question of whether President Abraham Lincoln, who revered the Declaration above all other American documents, would have left it hanging unguarded on the wall of a building that was in turns a barracks and then a military hospital, filled with hundreds of patients, doctors and nurses, and visitors, easily accessible to spies or saboteurs. Had the Confederates captured the Declaration and brought it to their capital in Richmond, it would have been a massive blow to Northern morale. Worse, saboteurs might simply have decided to destroy America’s founding charter. After the Union debacle at Bull Run in July 1861, Southern invasion seemed all but inevitable. Once more the Declaration’s survival was threatened by an enemy army, as in 1776 and 1814.
What happened to the Declaration of Independence remains the last great mystery of the Civil War. It only made sense for Lincoln and his Secretary of State William Seward to order the Declaration moved to the one place that seemed the safest, but to do so secretly, leaving no official record. How and when this happened is revealed for the first time in National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, available now from Simon & Schuster’s Avid Reader Press.
Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, from which this essay is adapted.
