of these people is so vividly informed by the Bible,” Diethorn said. “It’s not the same as saying they were religious, but it was the common language of all members of that society. What I think is fascinating about this era is how the idea of reason, science, and objectivity, which inform the Enlightenment so completely, can coexist in their minds with the idea that there is a divine presence in the world.
“I think a lot of laypeople in America today feel that the Enlightenment was somehow antireligious,” she continued. “That people like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and others were deists and didn’t believe in God. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The language of religion is so ingrained in their culture in the form of the stories, the aphorisms, the proverbs, and the characters, and this religious language is readily adopted as the language of liberty, whether you’re talking about the Israelites, their captivity, and their freedom, or leaders like Moses, David, or Solomon. The eighteenth century is big on parallels. They’re searching for historical precedent for their own actions, and they’re finding it in religious rhetoric because everyone understood and could relate to that.”
“And it seems that specifically what they were looking for is authority,” I suggested. “An authority higher than the king. God gives you that authority.”
“The heart and the head need to be equally stimulated to make something worth doing,” Diethorn said. “The Enlightenment may give you intellectual credibility, but the Bible gives you emotional credibility.”
THE STAIRCASES IN the tower get wobblier the higher you climb. Above level five, you enter the new tower, installed during the building renovation in 1828. When the nation’s capital moved to Washington and the state capital to Harrisburg, the State House was slated to be torn down, but a wave of nostalgia accompanied the visit of Lafayette and the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Ceremonies inspired by the French hero’s arrival introduced the name Independence Hall into popular use.
The sixth flight of stairs is by far the most narrow, and the steps are placed at uneven intervals. About halfway up, they are interrupted by jutting steel girders that now buttress the structure. I had to lift my hands above my head and squeeze between the railing and the beam, like climbing through the pistons in a car engine. And then the stairs stop. The only way to reach the cupola is via a wooden ship’s ladder. This seventh level is dark and much smaller than those below it. The air is stale and dusty, more like descending into a dungeon than ascending to a summit. I grasped the rungs and began to climb.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the fractured, largely forgotten, nearly century-old State House bell suddenly experienced a remarkable renaissance resulting from a newfound fascination with the Mosaic phrase on its face. In 1839 a Boston abolitionist group called Friends of Freedom circulated a pamphlet that featured on its cover an idealized drawing of the bell, including the inscription PROCLAIM LIBERTY TO ALL THE INHABITANTS . The drawing was captioned “Liberty Bell,” and inside was a poem “inspired by the inscription on the Philadelphia Liberty Bell.” Six years later another abolitionist group adopted the same image in a poem by Bernard Barton.
Liberty’s Bell hath sounded its bold peal
Where Man holds Man in Slavery! At the sound—
Ye who are faithful ’mid the faithless found,
Answer its summons with unfaltering zeal.
The emphasis on the newly coined Liberty Bell was part of the abolitionists’ desire to deflect attention away from the Constitution that had enshrined slavery into law and to return attention to the Declaration and its ideal of liberty for all.
The notion soon took hold among Americans. Benson Lossing’s popular Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, published in 1850, featured a
“I think a lot of laypeople in America today feel that the Enlightenment was somehow antireligious,” she continued. “That people like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and others were deists and didn’t believe in God. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The language of religion is so ingrained in their culture in the form of the stories, the aphorisms, the proverbs, and the characters, and this religious language is readily adopted as the language of liberty, whether you’re talking about the Israelites, their captivity, and their freedom, or leaders like Moses, David, or Solomon. The eighteenth century is big on parallels. They’re searching for historical precedent for their own actions, and they’re finding it in religious rhetoric because everyone understood and could relate to that.”
“And it seems that specifically what they were looking for is authority,” I suggested. “An authority higher than the king. God gives you that authority.”
“The heart and the head need to be equally stimulated to make something worth doing,” Diethorn said. “The Enlightenment may give you intellectual credibility, but the Bible gives you emotional credibility.”
THE STAIRCASES IN the tower get wobblier the higher you climb. Above level five, you enter the new tower, installed during the building renovation in 1828. When the nation’s capital moved to Washington and the state capital to Harrisburg, the State House was slated to be torn down, but a wave of nostalgia accompanied the visit of Lafayette and the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Ceremonies inspired by the French hero’s arrival introduced the name Independence Hall into popular use.
The sixth flight of stairs is by far the most narrow, and the steps are placed at uneven intervals. About halfway up, they are interrupted by jutting steel girders that now buttress the structure. I had to lift my hands above my head and squeeze between the railing and the beam, like climbing through the pistons in a car engine. And then the stairs stop. The only way to reach the cupola is via a wooden ship’s ladder. This seventh level is dark and much smaller than those below it. The air is stale and dusty, more like descending into a dungeon than ascending to a summit. I grasped the rungs and began to climb.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the fractured, largely forgotten, nearly century-old State House bell suddenly experienced a remarkable renaissance resulting from a newfound fascination with the Mosaic phrase on its face. In 1839 a Boston abolitionist group called Friends of Freedom circulated a pamphlet that featured on its cover an idealized drawing of the bell, including the inscription PROCLAIM LIBERTY TO ALL THE INHABITANTS . The drawing was captioned “Liberty Bell,” and inside was a poem “inspired by the inscription on the Philadelphia Liberty Bell.” Six years later another abolitionist group adopted the same image in a poem by Bernard Barton.
Liberty’s Bell hath sounded its bold peal
Where Man holds Man in Slavery! At the sound—
Ye who are faithful ’mid the faithless found,
Answer its summons with unfaltering zeal.
The emphasis on the newly coined Liberty Bell was part of the abolitionists’ desire to deflect attention away from the Constitution that had enshrined slavery into law and to return attention to the Declaration and its ideal of liberty for all.
The notion soon took hold among Americans. Benson Lossing’s popular Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, published in 1850, featured a
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