Thomas Jefferson's Writing Desk
Benjamin Randolph, cabinetmaker, to Jefferson's design (About 1721 to 1791) · 1776
A small mahogany box with a hinged writing surface and a drawer sits in a case in the democracy gallery. It is a portable lap desk, made in Philadelphia in 1776 by the cabinetmaker Benjamin Randolph to a design by Thomas Jefferson, and it is the desk on which Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in his rented rooms in that city in June 1776. Few objects in the museum connect so directly to a founding moment. The wood is plain and the design is practical: a slanted lid that lifts to hold papers, a drawer for pens and ink, and a folding stand that lets the surface be raised or lowered.
Jefferson had the desk built because he wanted something he could carry when he travelled between Virginia and Philadelphia. Look at the compact proportions and the brass hinges: it could rest on the knees or on a table, and the lid could be adjusted to a comfortable angle. Jefferson used it for the rest of his life, for letters, drafts and legal notes. In 1825, a year before he died, he gave it to his granddaughter's husband, Joseph Coolidge, with a note pasted inside the lid in which he wondered whether the desk might one day be carried in procession like the relics of the saints.
The Coolidge family gave the desk to the United States in 1880, and it came to the Smithsonian from the State Department in 1921. It was shown for decades in the old Museum of History and Technology and is now central to the exhibition on American democracy, which follows the argument about who gets to govern from 1776 to the present. Look for the note in Jefferson's hand: he was right about the relic, and probably knew he would be.
Did You Know? Jefferson pasted a note inside the lid predicting that the desk might one day be carried in procession like a holy relic.
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