The Man Who Kept the Record

The room is close with candle smoke, and the men who will be remembered are all still talking. At the foot of the long table a lean man in plain clothes bends over a bound book and writes. He does not rise to speak. He is not a delegate, and he will cast no vote. His whole task is to set down what the others decide, and he has set it down, every word of it, for as long as this Congress has met.

It is 1776.

He does not just take the minutes. He keeps the official record of the Continental Congress from its first day, and he holds the post for fifteen unbroken years while delegates arrive and leave and are forgotten, sitting through every session, keeping the regular minutes and the secret ones both, until he becomes the one steady memory of the Revolution.

He does not just serve quietly at the table. A decade earlier he is one of Philadelphia’s fiercest organizers, working with John Dickinson through the Stamp Act crisis to keep English goods out of the city and writing hot handbills against the East India Company’s tea, a protest man well enough known that his enemies watch him.

He does not just record the founding. In July of 1776 his hand attests the first printed copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Dunlap broadsides that carry the news to the country, his name and John Hancock’s the only two upon them. He gives the Great Seal of the United States its final approved form, adopted in July of 1782. And in the spring of 1789 he rides the long approach to Mount Vernon to tell George Washington, to his face, that he has been chosen the first president.

He does not just guard the nation’s memory. By a story long told and never proven, late in his life he writes a candid history of how the founders truly conducted themselves, and then he burns it, judging that the truth would disgrace some of them, so that the one man who saw all of it chooses, in the end, to erase his own witness.

His Spark of Liberty was a faithful record of how a free country was really made.

He gave the young nation its first archive, the minutes and files that became its earliest national memory, and he also decided, alone, how much of the honest story that nation would never be allowed to read. The keeper of the record was also its editor, and both the keeping and the withholding were his.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

Born on November 29, 1729, in County Londonderry in the north of Ireland, he lost his mother as a boy and then his father, who died at sea on the 1740 crossing to America, leaving the sons to land alone at New Castle in Delaware. He was schooled at Francis Alison’s academy, became the first Latin tutor at the academy that grew into the University of Pennsylvania, joined Benjamin Franklin’s Junto, and moved from teaching into trade and protest in the Philadelphia of the 1760s. In September of 1774 he was chosen Secretary of the Continental Congress, and he held that office through the whole life of the Continental and Confederation Congresses until the new federal government took over in 1789. He attested the first broadside printings of the Declaration in 1776, helped settle the design of the Great Seal in 1782, and carried to Mount Vernon in 1789 the official word of Washington’s election. He retired to Harriton House in Pennsylvania, spent his last years on a careful translation of the Greek Old and New Testaments, and died there on August 16, 1824, at the age of ninety-four.

His name was Charles Thomson.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

A new Sparks of Liberty short read is here. What the Candle Witnessed tells the story of the enslaved boy who taught himself to read and, by candlelight in the summer of 1776, read the anti-slavery passage that Congress struck from the Declaration of Independence. Read it now on Amazon.
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