Following the Civil War, Americans experienced a renewed interest in the revolutionary period. The nation’s founding was at the center of a broad shift in historical memory. Librarians, collectors, historians, and teachers began to point to documents like the Declaration in order to promote a sense of national identity and pride.
It was in this context that Mellen Chamberlain (1821-1900) worked to collect the autographs of the Declaration’s signers. Chamberlain gathered the majority of these signatures between 1837 and 1860, which he later added to this reproduction of the Declaration. While it lacks just one original signature, that of Thomas Lynch, Jr., this unique document includes the rarest and most sought-after signature of all, that of Georgia representative Button Gwinnett, who died in 1777.
Chamberlain was the head of the Boston Public Library between 1878 and 1890. In 1893, he donated his vast collection of manuscripts to the library. This document, along with others like it, hung on the wall of the Children’s Room for decades, where it offered a visual lesson in civic history for young visitors.