State Library of Pennsylvania: General Assembly Collection

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Visit our Tour Destination: Pennsylvania page to see the entire tour of the state’s Save America’s Treasures sites.

After treatment:  The Statutes at Large, a law book from the Pennsylvania
General Assembly Collection at the State Library of Pennsylvania.
.Photo courtesy of the State Library of Pennsylvania.

State Library of Pennsylvania:  General Assembly Collection

Forum Building

607 South Drive

Harrisburg, PA

Website:  Bureau of State Library

The Treasure:  The Pennsylvania General Assembly Collection was the Independence Hall law library readily available to the Founding Fathers when they were writing both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Accessibility:  The State Library of Pennsylvania is open Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 9:30 to 5 and the second Saturday of each month from 9:30 to 4:30. For information on the rare collections of the State Library of Pennsylvania, including the General Assembly Collection, check the contact information on the Rare Collections Library page.

Background:  You’d think it would be the most famous library in America. If embellished by a few quasi-historical anecdotes, the Pennsylvania General Assembly Collection might have had the potential to be the library equivalent of Betsy Ross’s flag, the Liberty Bell, or Boston’s Old North Church.

Instead, the Pennsylvania General Assembly Collection—the law library at Independence Hall at the time when the Declaration of Independence AND the U.S. Constitution were drafted and signed—became an inexplicable casualty of historic memory. Somehow, it quietly slipped out of recorded history after its move from Philadelphia to Harrisburg in the early years of the 19th century.

Yes, the resource library available to the Founding Fathers as they debated and wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the U.S. Constitution in 1787 was simply forgotten.

Before treatment:  The Statutes at Large
(same book as shown above).
Photo courtesy of the
State Library of Pennsylvania.

In the mid-1740s, Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Norris, II, spearheaded the drive to establish the Pennsylvania General Assembly’s library and make it one of the finest in the colonies. In his role as Clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin purchased the core books of the Assembly library from William Strahan, a London bookseller. He selected these books to serve as a practical law library for statesmen, covering the breadth of English and international law.  Franklin and Norris then chose to round out the collection with additional volumes on philosophy, art, architecture, and the natural sciences. Today, these 420 books offer remarkable insight into the worldview of a Colonial statesman.

English law and philosophy forged the men who served in the Pennsylvania General Assembly, the Second Continental Congress, and the Constitutional Convention. The volumes of the General Assembly Collection—the works of John Locke, the Statutes at Large, and the works of Coke, Puffendorf, De Vatell, Grotius, and many of the other great European legal authorities—represent the legal universe that gave shape and legal credibility to the revolutionary documents of that time.

In summer 1776, the General Assembly Collection was maintained in the Library and Committee Room of the State Assembly Building, now commonly known as Independence Hall. Access to the Library and Committee Room was through the back door of the main Assembly Chamber. The books were readily available for reference.  Appropriately, the library prominently contained not just law, but the works of John Locke, whose influence permeates the Declaration, inspiring the immortal phrase, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Conservation Center for Art and Historic
Artifacts book conservator Jim Hinz lays
down Japanese paper mends on the interior
of a front board.  Photo courtesy of the
State Library of Pennsylvania.

Eleven years later, the Constitutional Convention met in secret at the State Assembly Building to draft a new set of laws to govern the young nation. Once again, the General Assembly Collection served as a readily available resource library to the assembled statesmen. Edmund Randolph wrote the first draft of the Constitution, which was then rewritten by James Wilson of Pennsylvania, and polished by a committee of Alexander Hamilton of New York, William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, Rufus King of Massachusetts, James Madison of Virginia, and Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania.

For most of the past 200 years, the General Assembly Collection has been sadly neglected, even narrowly escaping destruction by fire in 1897. The volumes eventually became scattered among various historic sites and among the general collection of the State Library of Pennsylvania. In the 1950s and 1960s, leadership at both Independence National Historical Park and the State Library of Pennsylvania realized the importance of the collection and began the task of re-establishing it as an intact colonial library. Between 1986 and 1991, Rare Books Librarian Barbara Deibler painstakingly gathered the General Assembly Collection into one place again.

Today, the General Assembly Collection is the centerpiece of a beautiful state-of-the-art Rare Book Room at the State Library building. Funding from Save America’s Treasures contributed to the conservation treatment of the volumes, as conservators from the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts addressed issues of rotted leather bindings, detached boards, broken hinges, loss of covering materials, and overzealous oiling.

The Rare Collections Library Reading Room
at the State Library of Pennsylvania.
Photo courtesy of the State Library of Pennsylvania.

The Forum Building, home of the State Library of Pennsylvania.
Photo courtesy of the State Library of Pennsylvania.

Notes from the Editor:  The above background information is adapted (with permission!) from a newsletter article that I wrote in 2007 for my workplace, the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts. For this particular project, I assisted with the writing of the original grant request. After funding was released, our team of book conservators was honored to work on this truly important project.

I still think the General Assembly Collection is one of the least appreciated of America’s great treasures. Here’s my original conclusion to the newsletter article:

The General Assembly Collection has the potential to offer unparalleled insight into the legal and philosophical thought that sparked the American experiment.  As the Collection becomes better known to both scholars and historians, it may yield new understanding about the currents that shaped the founding of a nation.

Note to scholars and historians: Get to work!

A conservator at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts
repairs the shoulder of the textblock of one of the volumes in the
Pennsylvania General Assembly Collection.
Photo courtesy of the State Library of Pennsylvania.

Other Recommended Sites:  The State Museum of Pennsylvania is located just three blocks from the Forum Building. The collections include over 4 million objects and its museum exhibitions cover all aspects of the state’s history, including its pivotal role in the nation’s political history and its industrial contributions, as well as outstanding Civil War exhibits.

Volumes of the Pennsylvania General Assembly Collection in
vault storage at the State Library of Pennsylvania.
Photo courtesy of the State Library of Pennsylvania.

© 2013 Lee Price