Reprinting the Constitution by Hand

Since I’ve been looking at the effort of starting a new newspaper in pre-Revolutionary Boston, it seems appropriate to share the video on this page from The History List.

Lee Wright recorded Gary Gregory of the Edes & Gill Print Shop in today’s North End talking about how he researched, recreated, and now prints Benjamin Edes’s edition of the new proposed U.S. Constitution. Edes put that out ahead of the Massachusetts ratifying convention in 1788. The only surviving original appears to be at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The photo at right shows Gary holding a previous—and mercifully shorter—document that he’s also recreated: John Gill’s printing of the Declaration of Independence soon after that text arrived from Philadelphia in 1776.