The Final Blow to the Liberty Bell

All in all I’m inclined to believe E. J. Rauch’s 1911 recollection of helping to crack the Liberty Bell in 1835. The story he told the New York Times didn’t present him as more than one of a crowd, and it didn’t come with any tidy moral.

However, that wasn’t the occasion when the bell cracked; it was one of a series of occasions. Rauch recalled seeing a crack twelve to fifteen inches long. The current gap is over two feet long, and a hairline crack extends another few inches from its top.

The last time the city ordered the bell to be rung was eleven years after the date Rauch remembered it cracking. On 26 Feb 1846, USHistory.org states, the Philadelphia Public Ledger reported:

The old Independence Bell rang its last clear note on Monday last in honor of the birthday of Washington and now hangs in the great city steeple irreparably cracked and dumb. It had been cracked before but was set in order for that day by having the edges of the fracture filed so as not to vibrate against each other. . . . It gave out clear notes and loud, and appeared to be in excellent condition until noon, when it received a sort of compound fracture in a zig-zag direction through one of its sides which put it completely out of tune and left it a mere wreck of what it was.

By that year, according to what he told the Times, Rauch had enlisted in the army, so he may well have been far out of hearing range. Thus, he went through life thinking he’d helped break the bell.

“We found that there was a big crack”

Yesterday I started to quote a letter from E. J. Rauch published in the New York Times on 16 July 1911 about the crack in the Liberty Bell.

On George Washington’s birthday in 1835, when he was nine years old, little Emmanuel Joseph was returning from an errand for his mother when the custodian of the old Pennsylvania State House, a man named Downing, beckoned to him.

“Come here!” he called to me and several boys whom he spied in the square. After he had corralled six or eight of us—I don’t remember exactly how many—he told us that he wanted us to ring the Liberty Bell in honor of Washington’s Birthday. The idea pleased us very much—we boys were not in the habit of ringing the old bell—and we agreed to do it.

Then Downing climbed into the steeple of the State House and tied a rope to the clapper of the bell. Coming down again, he put the end of this rope into our hands and instructed us to pull with all our might, which we did.

We were working away, and the bell had struck, so far as I can recall, about ten or a dozen times, when we noticed a change in the tone. We kept on ringing, though, but, after a while, the steeplekeeper noticed the difference, too. Surmising that something might be wrong, he told us to stop pulling the rope. Then he climbed back into the steeple, we boys following behind.

On the side of the bell that hung toward Walnut Street we found that there was a big crack, a foot or fifteen inches long. Downing then told us to run along home. We obeyed.

What happened after that I forget—boy-like I didn’t do any worrying, and heard no more about the cracking of the bell until some years later. Then, however, and many times since, I have read of how the bell came to be cracked, but never have I seen the version which I have just given. I honestly believe it is the correct one.

A nineteenth-century tradition held that the bell cracked while being tolled on 8 July 1835 for Chief Justice John Marshall’s death. But perhaps that was the day when the public learned about the crack that had appeared a few months before. Perhaps Rauch misremembered the occasion when he had helped pull the rope. Or perhaps his story has no foundation in fact; normally people wouldn’t want credit for damaging a national icon, but the crack in the Liberty Bell is part of what makes it iconic.

The historical record shows, however, that Philadelphia continued to order the Liberty Bell to be rung after 1835.

TOMORROW: The final blow.

(The picture above illustrates a legend about the signing of the Declaration of Independence that Philadelphia author George Lippard came up with in 1847. It’s got nothing to do with Thomas Downing, E. J. Rauch, and the other boys. But I couldn’t resist using it.)

“How I Broke the Liberty Bell”

A century ago, the 16 July 1911 New York Times ran a story headlined “‘How I Broke the Liberty Bell’—By the Boy Who Broke It.” I read about this confession in Gary B. Nash’s book on the bell and went in search of the full article. Old enough to be in the public domain, the story is available in the newspaper’s public archive and more easily at Sunday Magazine.

Emmanuel Joseph Rauch contacted the Times to state that he had helped to put the famous crack in the famous bell. He told the paper that he had been born in Pennsylvania on 6 Nov 1825 and had reached the age of eighty-six. Actually, that meant he he was in eighty-sixth year, but he tended to give himself an extra.

Rauch had worked for both the army (a lieutenant in the Civil War) and the railroads, among other enterprises. In 1886 he moved to New York, joined the Manhattan Elevated Railway company, and became “road foreman of engines.” I find his name on a letter to the Locomotive Engineers’ Monthly Journal in 1892. Age and the arrival of electric engines spurred Rauch’s retirement. His granddaughter Julia Rhoads left a biographical article about him among a few other papers at Penn State.

E. J. Rauch’s letter as the Times began this way:

The Liberty Bell was cracked, as I remember, on Washington’s Birthday, 1835, and this is the way it was done:

I was then 10 [sic] years old. On that day I had been sent by my mother on an errand to a shop not far from our home. On my return from it, I was walking through State House Square when I noticed that the janitor or steeplekeeper of the old State House building was beckoning to me. His name was Downing—“Major Jack” we used to call him—and he was a well-known character in Philadelphia at that time.

Hold on! The name “Major Jack Downing” was a character that Seba Smith of Maine had created as a voice for humorous essays starting in 1830. Three years later a New York writer, Charles Augustus Davis, started using the same pseudonym. So was Rauch remembering a fictional character?

In fact, the 1829 Register of Pennsylvania records “Thomas Downing, watchman at the State House, praying for an advance in his salary.” He did so again in 1835. In 1839 Thomas Downing testified before the legislature about a political fight the previous autumn; he stated, “I live in the Terret of the State House.”

An 1884 history of Philadelphia identifies the old State House janitor as “Tommy Downing,” well known to the city’s firefighting societies because he rang the old State House’s alarm bell. Charles Franklin Warwick’s Keystone Commonwealth, published in 1912, states:

The last ringer of the [Liberty] bell was Thomas Downing. His term of office extended from 1827-35. He lived in the steeple and the pipe from his stove protruded through one of the openings. It was while he was the ringer that the Bell cracked in 1835.

Even though Downing had to stop ringing the old bell that year, his later legislative testimony shows he continued to live in the tower.

So a Mr. Downing was indeed “janitor or steeplekeeper of the old State House building” when Rauch was a boy. Folks probably took to calling him “Major Jack” after the fictional character.

TOMORROW: Back to Rauch’s story.

Liberty Bell Curiosities

Gary B. Nash’s The Liberty Bell, published by Yale University Press last year as part of a series on American icons, offers these intriguing facts:

• In 1828 the city of Philadelphia commissioned William Meredith to make a new bell for the old Pennsylvania State House. That building’s damaged pre-Revolutionary bell was stuck on the fourth floor of a tower, and the city told the bell-maker that for $400 he could have it for scrap. After looking at the situation, Meredith decided it wouldn’t be worth the trouble of hoisting the bell down and hauling it away. And that’s why we still have the bell that, seven years later, abolitionists in New York dubbed the Liberty Bell.
• In 1893, the Daughters of the American Revolution collected copper coins from the Roman Empire, the heads of pikes used by John Brown’s raiders, a silver spoon from John C. Calhoun, hinges from Abraham Lincoln’s house, links of George Washington’s surveying chain, a copper kettle from Thomas Jefferson, and Lucretia Mott’s silver fruit knife, and had them all melted down to make the Columbian Liberty Bell, a 13,000-pound tribute to the Liberty Bell at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. (Hey, cheer up! Most of those artifacts probably had horrible provenances.)
• The Liberty Bell has been on display in Boston only once, for two days in 1903 around the 128th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. (Boston had asked for the bell three years earlier, but Philadelphia decided to keep it—perhaps to be present at the 125th anniversaries of the creation of the Continental Army and the naming of Washington as commander-in-chief.) After the bell arrived in Boston by train, it was carried on “a float drawn by thirteen bay horses and escorted by the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company” to the Bunker Hill monument for its brief display.
• The bell rang to summon “eight thousand Philadelphians to the State House to hear the portentous news in April 1775—brought by Paul Revere after a five-day dash on his magnificent mare, Brown Betty, from Boston to the Quaker City—about the firefights at Lexington and Concord.”

Ooh! Ouch! Reading that last sentence is like watching a pig fall down a flight of stairs—getting both more awful and more risible with each bump. It mixes up Revere’s ride to Philadelphia with the Suffolk Resolves in the fall of 1774 with the series of express riders who carried news of shots at Lexington (but not yet Concord) in April 1775. The name of Revere’s horse was Brown Beauty, at least according to a 1930 genealogy. I don’t know about the eight thousand people, but Nash is an expert on the social history of Philadelphia, so on that detail I trust him.

“All this commotion about the Bell”

In his short book The Liberty Bell, Gary B. Nash quotes from a reminiscence by William Linn which he could credit only to “Unidentified source from Independence National Historical Park files.”

Google Books let me find Linn’s statement at greater length in The Liberty Bell: Its History, Associations and Home, a booklet compiled by E. R. Gudehus and published by the city of Philadelphia in 1915.

The full recollection was:

All this commotion about the Bell makes me think of my boyhood days, when we would go down to the old Bell and, with paving stones, try to knock off a piece of it.

If the Bell would break at all, it would have broken then, when these boys hammered it with pieces of iron and stones trying to get a piece off.

For nearly a hundred years no one had paid any particular attention to the Bell. Then came the Centennial, when the worship began, although it had hung in the Hall for years. That was done, no doubt, to save it, or the boys would have broken it all up.

There was an attorney named William Linn in Philadelphia active in Republican politics in the late 1800s. He died on 22 Nov 1922, according to the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. The 24 November Reading Eagle stated that he had been a Civil War officer and “more than 70 years of age.” In the following year, Linn’s widow sent the Public Ledger a manuscript of his reminiscences of old Philadelphia. So I’m thinking that man’s probably the source of this anecdote, and it refers to the period around 1850.

As Nash shows, the bell was just becoming famous then because Abolitionists adopted it as a symbol of freedom and author George Lippard had linked it fictionally to the Declaration of Independence. But people hadn’t yet accepted the value of preserving something old for everyone, as opposed to trying to take a souvenir of it for oneself. In 1852 the city moved the bell from a little-visited upper floor of Independence Hall to the ground floor—though I can’t tell whether that meant boys had less of a chance to pound on it, or more.