look closer

Jefferson stands in the red waistcoat and lays the draft on the table. Franklin is at his elbow. Congress cut about a quarter of the text over the next three days.

The painting shows the wrong day, and it does it on purpose. This is the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, on the twenty-eighth of June, 1776. The five men standing at the table are the committee, handing their draft of a declaration to the Congress. The Congress will spend the next six days arguing over it. The tall one in the red waistcoat laying the paper down is Thomas Jefferson, 33. He wrote most of it in about 17 days in a rented room a few streets away, on a small folding desk he designed himself. Beside him stand Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston. Seated behind the desk, waiting to take the paper, is John Hancock, the president of the Congress. Nobody in this room is signing anything. The signing came later, and mostly on the second of August. Congress was not gentle with the draft. Over three days they cut about a quarter of Jefferson’s text, including his long passage blaming the king for the slave trade, which the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia would not swallow. Jefferson sat through the edits in silence, wincing. Franklin, sitting next to him, told him a small story about a hatter’s signboard, cut down word by word until only a picture of a hat remained. It was meant as comfort. The vote for independence itself had passed on the second of July, which made John Adams write to his wife Abigail that the day would be remembered with fireworks and parades forever. He had the celebration right and the date off by two. John Trumbull painted the scene decades after the fact, and he chased accuracy like a man who had been there, which he nearly had. He had served as an aide to George Washington early in the war and had a soldier’s memory for faces. He got Jefferson to sketch the room for him, then painted the delegates one at a time. For years he traveled up and down the coast to catch the living ones face to face, and copied the dead from other portraits. Two signers he could find no likeness of at all, so he painted their sons and let them stand for their fathers. Jefferson’s sketch of the room, it turned out, was wrong in its details, so the doors and windows behind the founders are a memory of a memory. On the back wall Trumbull hung captured British flags and drums as war trophies. There were none in the real room. He wanted the war present in the picture of its beginning. Trumbull had one working eye. A fall down a staircase as a boy had blinded the other, and he spent his life painting fine detail with half the usual equipment. Congress ordered a copy the size of a wall, 12 feet by 18, and bought it in 1819 for the rotunda of the Capitol, where it still hangs. The picture became the most reproduced image in American history without most people ever knowing what it shows. It is on the back of the two-dollar bill, printed billions of times. It shows a draft being handed over on a summer afternoon, and nearly everyone has spent a whole life mistaking it for the moment of the signing.