 I'm Sam Lemley, Curator of Special Collections at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. Welcome to this first episode of Coffee with the Curator, a video series that will feature distinctive artifacts from Carnegie Mellon's collection of rare books, manuscripts, and early technologies. Each video in the series, each episode, will be about 15 to 20 minutes long, or about the time it would take to meet over a cup of coffee. The current reality of remote work at home learning and quarantine offers an unusual opportunity. While I'd much prefer to share the things in Special Collections in person and all their embodied pageantry, the current circumstances invite and require a more experimental approach to teaching with collections. The upside of all this is that, at least I hope, this will allow a wider more diverse audience to engage with treasures in the collection that are otherwise inaccessible or only put on display infrequently. So I hope you'll follow along and view these videos as an occasion to learn something new and an opportunity to get a sort of behind-the-scenes look at what Special Collections at CMU has on its shelves. So today we will be looking at what I think is one of the most remarkable things in Special Collections, and that's this document here. I'll have it up on the screen. This is a video that I recorded earlier. So it's a rather undistinguished looking pamphlet, right? It's about 11 inches tall, eight inches across, and at some point in its past it was disbound, sort of torn from its original binding. And if you take a moment to kind of read the physical evidence that's in front of us, you'll see that there are some small remnants of the original leather binding on its left-hand edge. You can also see that there's a small stain in the upper right quadrant to the first page, and the outer leaves, the sort of first and last pages of the pamphlet that kind of serve as the pamphlets binding, makeshift binding, are they're slightly darker and stained by damp and dirt. So all that suggests that it's been in this disbound state for quite some time, right? It had time to accrue this discoloration and damage. So besides that, the document itself is only 12 pages long, and it would have required a mere three sheets of paper to print a single copy. On the first page, which I'll show here, about a third of the way down under several kind of ambling lines of legislative language, is the pamphlet's title, and that's articles in addition to an amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. Of course, this is a copy of the American Bill of Rights. It was printed in Philadelphia by Special Commission in January or February 1792, and this particular copy was purchased by Henry Posner in 1963 and was later deposited with the libraries, along with the rest of the Posner Memorial Collection by Henry Posner's son and family. As a brief aside, fortunately, the entire Posner Memorial Collection, at least those materials that are out of copyright, has been digitized. So since now, all those materials are now available online via CMU Libraries Digital Collections Platform, and I'll link to that resource here. But to return to the Posner Bill of Rights, while it really might not look the part, it's among the rarest documentary artifacts held in special collections at CMU. In fact, it might be the single rarest item we hold. Only five copies, including this one, are known to survive, and that's a staggering figure if you think about the importance, the historical importance, of this document. Apart from its rarity, though, what's interesting is that this addition of the Bill of Rights was not unprecedented. This was not the first time that the constitutional amendments that would become the Bill of Rights had been printed. In fact, they'd been put into circulation fairly widely in newspapers and broadsides as early as 1789, after they were first approved by Congress and sent to the states for debate and ratification. What does make this particular printing of the Bill of Rights significant, then, is the context of its printing. And remember that it was printed likely in January or February 1792. In other words, it was published immediately after Virginia became the 11th and final state to ratify on December 15, 1791. And it was Virginia's vote that met the requirement that three-fourths of states ratify any proposed amendment to the Constitution, remembering that at this point there were only 14 states. And the Constitution itself was less than five years old. So that gives a sense of the importance of this document. In other words, this document that I'm holding and very gingerly handling in this video is the first form of the Bill of Rights that could claim the force of law, and the first time that its 10 articles appeared in print as an integral part of the United States Constitution. For this reason, constitutional scholars refer to this document as the official Bill of Rights. And I think that's right. This is the official text. It inscribed and codified the version that Americans read and learn in high school civics courses, for example. What this phrasing hides, though, is that if you call it the official Bill of Rights, I think it hides the fact that there was a chaotic process of versioning, reprinting, revising, and pretty vociferous debate that preceded this official version. And because of this, I think referring to this edition of the Bill of Rights as quote-unquote official obscures precisely what's most interesting about it. A closer look reveals that Virginia's deciding vote was, in fact, the occasion for printing this particular edition of the Bill of Rights, instead of merely listing the ratified amendments, for example, it records the deliberation and compromise that led to ratification. So in a sense, kind of embedded in this document is the story of the contentious origin of the Bill of Rights, and frankly, the entire debate about individual liberty and how those fit into the American system of government at its origin. So the best and most basic evidence for this is the fact that it lists 12 amendments rather than the more familiar 10. What many don't know is that of the 12 amendments originally proposed in 1789, only amendments 3 through 12 were ratified to become part of the Constitution. So our first amendment, for example, which protects the freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and the press was in fact originally the third. So you might be asking, well, why print all 12 if only 10 were ratified? And I think that's because ratification was not unanimous. Some states did vote in favor of ratification of amendments 1 and 2. It's just that only amendments 3 through 12 reach the required threshold of states to be fully ratified. So in other words, the Posner Bill of Rights almost intentionally recorded the dissent that necessarily went along with consensus. So besides that, underneath the printed amendments, beginning on page three, appears a kind of roll call of states. And this records how each state voted on the question of ratification. I find this fascinating because it turns out that the bulk of the Posner Bill of Rights isn't actually the Bill of Rights at all. The amendments take up one leaf or two pages of paper, while most the document is sort of given over to an enumerative record of legislative bureaucracy. And I'll show Pennsylvania's vote on screen here, which appears on page nine. So Pennsylvania was one of the last states to submit its vote on ratification. And you can see that it's dated September 21, 1791, about three months before Virginia's deciding vote. So why is this, right? Why would the printers of the Posner Bill of Rights clutter the text of the bill with all this peripheral information, the record of how each state voted? I think the answer to this question has a lot to do with the political origins of officially printed versions of laws, right, in the early American Republic. And I promise you, this is a more exciting story than you think, but one that I can only kind of summarize today. So after Virginia's vote to ratify was submitted to the federal government, Thomas Jefferson, who was then the Secretary of State, commissioned the printing of this edition. 135 copies were made and distributed to the 14 state legislatures and to congressional representatives, sort of in an effort to ensure that they had the official final and approved language of the amendments on file. Now this simple act of commissioning the printing of the text of the ratified Bill of Rights was not without a deliberative origin of its own. Today, the Secretary of State is mostly an ambassador, right, a representative of the US government on the international stage, in addition to being the administrator of a sprawling State Department. But during Jefferson's tenure, the Office of the Secretary of State was also responsible for all the sort of secretarial minutiae of running a newly formed government. And I think this explains in part the title of the position, right, Secretary of State. So one of these responsibilities was appointing an authorized printer to publish the vast documentary record produced by the three branches of the United States government. And Jefferson, who is well known for his obsessive interest in documentation and record keeping, took this responsibility seriously, you know, famously Jefferson would wake up every morning and record what the weather was doing that day at Monticello, where he lived. So he was incredibly invested in record keeping, and he sort of carried that mentality into his role as Secretary of State. So, yeah, he viewed his work as secretarial and almost archival, right, and that he wanted to ensure that approved versions of laws were preserved in some sort of reliable medium, and more often than not that that reliable medium was often print, right. So at the same time, Jefferson's letters from his time as Secretary of State also reveal that he viewed the press as a necessary instrument for ensuring the kind of semi-democratic participation that the Constitution called for, and to a great extent relied on. One example of this is an obscure report that Jefferson submitted to Congress in February 1791. So really smack dab in the middle of the debate around the Bill of Rights and about a year before it was finally sort of approved and printed. In this report, Jefferson observed that printings of the laws of the United States were often simply disposed of, and in consequence, these printings were rare and inaccessible, or even worse, non-existent, right. People would sort of receive them, consult them, and then throw them away. So to remedy this, and I'll put this quote up on screen here, Jefferson wrote in this report, it is desirable that copies of the laws should be so multiplied throughout the States, and in such cheap forms as that every citizen of the United States may be able to procure them, that it is important also that such publications be rendered authentic by a collation of the proof sheets with the original roles by sworn clerks when they are printed at the seat of government or in its neighborhood, and by a collation of the whole work when printed at a distance, and a certified correction of its typographical errors annexed to each volume. So there's quite a bit there which we'll kind of get into, but I think this answers the question of, you know, why print 12 amendments and all the procedural minutiae of ratification rather than simply an enumeration of the Bill of Rights, right, the 10 that were ultimately ratified. Jefferson was eager to record as full a record as possible, and then to encourage the reprinting of that record in as many forms and venues as possible to ensure that sort of every citizen, right, as he said, could acquire a copy cheaply. And to a large extent this is exactly what happened, right, after ratification, newspapers throughout the United States territories and states reproduced the text of the Bill, and it was widely read. But there's also plenty of technical printers jargon here that should be unpacked. Jefferson is not only interested in the wide availability of copies of laws, but also takes pains to ensure that those copies have been checked against the originals, right. The printers responsible for producing this record should, for example, ideally be located near the seat of government. And these printers were then tasked with carefully collating or comparing the proof sheets, which were usually the first copies of a particular work to leave the press against the original rolls, right, the sort of handwritten copies made available by sworn clerks. And then even after this rigorous process, right, if errors were introduced during printing, the printers were there, then required to issue a list of errors that could be corrected by the reader, right. So I think this explains why Jefferson contracted the firm of Childs and Swain to print the Bill of Rights. They ran out of premises in Philadelphia, which was then the seat of the US government. And they had a reputation for accuracy in their printed work, right. But so the point being, right, the positive Bill of Rights is an extension of Jefferson's ambition to have official versions of laws printed and widely distributed so that they would be available cheaply. So that's a very brief documentary history of the Bill of Rights that really only brings us up to about 1793. But sort of coming back to the present, I want to end with the observation that assembling together to look at the positive Bill of Rights offers a number of lessons that are not only relevant, but I think insistent in 2020. After all this year marks the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which expanded suffrage to women. And this month, September 2020, marks the 233rd anniversary of the Constitution, which was signed by the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787. There's a famous quote from Thomas Jefferson that bears repeating as part of this conversation about the Bill of Rights. So to briefly set the scene, during the Constitutional debate, during the ratification debate, Jefferson was in regular contact with James Madison, who was in many ways the architect of the Constitution and subsequently the Bill of Rights. And so when the Constitution was finally ratified by the states in 1788, but before it included a Bill of Rights, Jefferson wrote to Madison and referred to the Constitution as a good canvas on which some strokes only want retouching. So this is an image and metaphor that likens the Constitution to a painting that's just all right, but that doesn't quite capture the likeness or the vibrancy of its subject. And of course, Jefferson knew at this point that he had to couch his criticism of the Constitution in subtle ways because Madison had labored so long on it, trying to force it, get it through Congress, with Congress's approval. But this makes Jefferson's criticism, I think, all the more striking. He thought that without the Bill of Rights, the Constitution was inherently flawed. So I think revisiting the Posner Bill of Rights with the burden and benefit of hindsight reminds us that Jefferson's metaphor of an unfinished painting still holds, but certainly in ways that he likely never anticipated. The American experiment is maybe always a good canvas in need of some retouching. After all, this copy of the Bill of Rights, as rare and as important as it is, lacks the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, and for that matter, the 19th. It's a tragic fact that of the 12 articles proposed in 1789 to amend the Constitution, none of them expanded the franchise or did anything to challenge the system of chattel slavery that was then practiced in the United States. And while further corrective amendments followed, particularly in the era of Reconstruction after the American Civil War, this document or this artifact still reminds us that the American canvas is still in the process of becoming. So with that, I want to thank you for viewing. I look forward to sharing more from the collection with you in the near future. So stay tuned for future videos and do feel free to contact me with questions or suggestions. Meanwhile, stay safe and be sure to vote. Thank you.