Saving the Declaration of Independence

   Thirty years after the end of the American Revolution, the United States was entangled in another war with the British.  In the late summer and early fall of 1814, Washington, DC was under siege.  James Monroe, the Secretary of State, ordered that a clerk, Stephen Pleasonton, take three monumentally significant documents out of the State Department and usher them to safety.  The plan was originally to store the documents at a mill on the Potomac River near Georgetown, but Mr Pleasonton transported the documents to instead to Rokeby, a home located in Leesburg, Virginia, which was 35 miles away from the danger lurking in the burning city of Washington.  It is in the vault at Rokeby where the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Articles of Confederation were kept safe during the attack on Washington.  From my research, it appears this was the only time those documents were ever stored in a private residence.  My project will examine the journey the documents took, and the actors, including, but not limited to: Stephen Pleasonton, James Monroe, Reverend John Littlejohn, Charles Binns III, Catesby Cocke, Charles Binns II, The Binns Family, Rokeby House, and many others.  I will examine why Pleasonton decided not to use the mill in Georgetown, and who helped him broker the deal to store the documents at Rokeby.  There was a clear sense of the importance of the documents which were “saved,” and I will examine the idea that perhaps these documents indeed conveyed some talismanic importance: to this day, some people in and around the Town of Leesburg claim that while the documents were in Leesburg the town would have been considered as the nation’s capital.

   So far, I have encountered a variety of sources while researching this event – articles, deeds, wills, and some really cool old books.  What follows are some titles I have consulted while attempting to document this story:  The Virginia Historical Chronicle, Virginia Historical Magazine, Guide to the Buildings of Surry and The American Revolution, William & Mary Quarterly, Robert Morgan Moxham, Belmont Plantation on the Occoquan, (1975), James C. Southhall, The Cocke Family of Virginia, (1897), Deeds and Wills 1738 – 1754 and 1754 – 1768 Surry County Courthouse (copy on loan to Loudoun Co. Rust Library), Frederick Gutheim, The Potomac, (1949), The Constitution of the United States, Together With An Account of its Travels Since September 1787, compiled by David C. Mearns and Vernon W. Clapp.  (The Library of Congress, Washington: 1952 LCI.2 C76 (4) 952), Robert James Belford, A History of the United States in Chronological Order From A.D. 432 To The Present Time, (1886), A Sketch of the Events Which Preceded the Capture of Washington by the British on the Twenty-Fourth of August 1814, E.D. Ingraham, 1849.  NARA E 355.6 15 19 JE 366, J-122.