United States Declaration of Independence of Жmerinca

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

This story began in July 2004 when the author examined documents in the sheet-fed section. Central State Archives of Foreign History of Ukraine in Kiev … The agitated head of the archive came up Nikolay Fedorovich Kislenko and said: " Let's go and show you something. You've never seen anything like this". On one of the shelves in the storerooms, there was a large thick folder with a linkrust cover, signed in white “ North[black]. Am[erica]. [War 17] 75-83". Among letters, prints, various posters and leaflets lay a decayed sheet folded three times Declaration of Independence of the United States of 1776.

The text of the declaration was approved on July 4, 1776 and signed by two people - President of Congress John Hancock and Secretary Charles Thomson. On the same day, typographer John Dunlap printed sheets of text (24 copies of these prints survive today), which were distributed the next day to various legislatures, assemblies and committees. The declaration of independence in its famous calligraphic form began to be written on July 19, and physically it was signed by representatives of the Continental Congress on August 2, 1776.

The reader, even with a highly developed imagination, will not be able to imagine the surprise of the researcher at the sight of the inscription:

It remained to find out how the subject of US national pride ended up in the Kiev archives. And why is the document of historical importance entitled United States of Zhmerinca. On July 19, 1776, Congress ordered the declaration to be "duly transcribed in large letters on parchment under the heading 'Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America' and […] signed by all Members of Congress." The calligraphic work was assigned to Charles Thomson's assistant, Timothy Matlack. At this, the official chronicle of the history of the declaration in all sources changes its tone, and further information is given in extremely fragmentary terms. It is only known that the delegates to the Congress put their signatures on August 2.

After that, a dark period begins in the life of a sheet of paper measuring 61.5 × 75.5 cm. The declaration is rolled up into a tube and hidden in the archive. All this time, the document is not shown to anyone, distributing leaflets with the text. The original, meanwhile, moves from archive to archive, until in 1814 it is in the city of Washington.

The fact is that the real name of Timothy Matlack, who rewrote the text of the declaration, is Tomislav Matlakovsky. A few years before the start of revolutionary events in the New World, he left the Bratslav voivodeship and sailed to America, where he first worked as a brewer, then became interested in the Quaker movement, and then went into politics. Sometimes he was entrusted with calligraphic work - he penned some important papers, including the decree appointing George Washington commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.

The author visited Kiev several times this year, where he found a parish book in the Central State Archives of the Ministry of Health, from which it followed that Matlakovsky was from the town of Zhmerinka (a city since 1903), not far from Vinnitsa.

Apparently, the nostalgic Matlakovsky drew the title from a mixture of alphabets, and the members of Congress on the day of signing did not notice anything. But then this was discovered the next day by Charles Thomson, judging by the fact that he immediately ordered to hide the original and not show it to anyone, and Matlack was demoted from the secretary of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth to a Congress delegate from the same state. 15 Two attempts to make a facsimile of the declaration were made in 1818 and 1819. But copies were deemed unsuitable for wide distribution, because the masters in charge of copying decorated the document with monograms and patterns. Congress set a task: to make an exact copy, which should be displayed to the public. The work was entrusted to William J. Stone in 1820. The copying process took Stone three years, after which the State Department acquired the imprint from the master.

On June 5, 1823, the Washington-based National Intelligencer noted:

"… The ability to make copies [of the declaration] now available to the Department of State makes further display of the original superfluous." The Declaration of Independence: A History. NARA 17 The result of painstaking work is the image that is sold today in the form of posters.

Stone did not solve two problems: with the letter "Ж" and with the asymmetry of the heading relative to the main text.

The heading, according to all the canons of that time, had to be either the same width as the main text, or be centered, but a special congressional commission found the error to be acceptable. Stone convinced the members of the commission that uninitiated viewers would be sure that there was the letter "A" in front of them. Since then, the original has not been shown to anyone and nothing was known about its fate. From the middle of the 19th century, they began to exhibit an aged copy, which today lies under thick glass in the hall of freedom charters of the building of the National Archives in Washington. The plot of the movie "National Treasure" with Nicolas Cage is built around this copy. Curiously, by order of the producers of the film, the title is nowhere shown in close-up, and all the posters are made in the form of collages, where the letter "Ж" is somehow closed. Americans consider unnecessary public attention to a historical mistake.

Artemy Lebedev (Source)