The Mentor: The Cradle of Liberty, Vol. 6, Num. 10, Serial No. 158, July 1, 1918

FIVE

The Philadelphians, having outgrown the primitive “Towne House” that had served the community’s needs since 1709, undertook in 1729 to erect an Assembly building commensurate with the growing importance of the province. A dozen years later the new State House was completed, including the dignified chamber now famous as the Hall in which the Declaration of Independence was discussed and received its first signatures. Another decade passed before sufficient funds were available for the rearing of a frame steeple on the south side of the building, “with a suitable place thereon for hanging a bell.” To grace this steeple and call together the Provincial Fathers, whose meeting-place was in one of the rooms below, it was decided after prolonged discussion that a bell be ordered from England. A letter dated November 1, 1751, was forthwith dispatched from the Superintendents of the State House to the Colonial agent in London, asking that he purchase “a good bell, of about two thousand pounds weight, the cost of which we may presume may amount to about one hundred pounds sterling, or, perhaps, with the charges, something more.… Let the bell be cast by the best workmen, and examined carefully before it is shipped, with the following words well shaped in large letters around it, viz:

And underneath,

Within a year a ship bearing the new bell was reported at the water-front, and eager citizens thronged the pier hoping to see it. The arrival of the State House bell, destined none knew to what great mission, was the chief interest of that August day in Quaker Philadelphia. To the chagrin of the Superintendents they were compelled to announce a few days later that the long-looked-for bell had “cracked by a stroke of the clapper without any other violence, as it was hung up to try the sound.” Two “ingenious workmen” essayed to recast the metal, to which a larger proportion of copper had been added, and in April, 1753, artisans raised the “American bell” to its place in the steeple. Later on it was cast again, because the metal composition was now thought to contain too much copper. The result, we are told, was but tolerably successful. However, this “new great bell” continued in service for over sixty years. It announced the convening of the Assembly and the courts, and for a time was used to summon church-goers on Sunday.

The voice of the bell joined in joyful celebration with that of the people when the odious Stamp Act was repealed; late in the year 1773 it witnessed the agitated remonstrances of the inhabitants against the proposed importations of taxed tea. On September 5, 1774, the First Continental Congress convened in Carpenter’s Hall, Philadelphia. It convened again the following May in the State House, and paved the way to the Declaration of Independence. When the Battle of Lexington was reported on an April day, the State House bell summoned to the historic enclosure called the “Yard” a company of eight thousand people, determined to defend “with arms their lives, liberty and property, against all attempts to deprive them of them.”

Matters were hurrying to the breaking-point when in June, 1776, the State Assembly received the resolutions of the General Convention of Virginia, which forecast in sentiment and wording the final Declaration. Two days later the National Assembly, also in session at the State House, took the first step toward the Colonies’ Magna Charta when the resolution was read and seconded “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” A committee on the Declaration of Independence was chosen; July second the “Resolution respecting Independency” was confirmed by representatives of all the colonies except New York. For two days it was debated, on the evening of the fourth day of July it was passed, and the next day it was officially promulgated. On July eighth the Declaration of Independence was read from a balcony in the State House square, and the bell, which for a quarter of a century had awaited this moment to fulfill the prophecy of its Biblical quotation, proclaimed free and independent the Colonies of America.

The bell’s period of service was finally closed exactly forty-nine years after that day of rejoicing, when in tolling for the death of Chief Justice John Marshall its sides again cracked. It was then removed from the steeple, and now remains a monument in Independence Hall to the days when American Liberty was young.

PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 6, No. 10, SERIAL No. 158
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.