WASHINGTON — “Subjects.” That’s what Thomas Jefferson wrote in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence to describe the people of the 13 colonies.
But in a moment when history took a sharp turn, Jefferson sought to expunge the word, to wipe it out and write over it. Many words were crossed out and replaced in the draft, but only one was obliterated.
Over the smudge, Jefferson wrote the word “citizens.” No longer subjects to the crown, Jefferson made the colonists into a people whose allegiance was to one another, not to a faraway monarch.
Scholars of the revolution have long speculated about the “citizens” smear — wondering whether the erased word was “patriots” or “residents” — but now the Library of Congress has determined that the change was far more dramatic.
Using a modified version of the kind of spectral imaging technology developed for the military, research scientists teased apart the mystery and reconstructed the word that Jefferson banished in 1776.
The task was made more difficult by the way Jefferson sought to match the lines and curves of the underlying smudged letters with the new letters he wrote on top of them. It took research scientist Fenella France weeks to pull out each letter.
“It’s almost like we can see him write ‘subjects’ and then quickly decide that’s not what he wanted to say at all, that he didn’t even want a record of it,” said Library of Congress preservation director Dianne van der Reyden. “Really, it sends chills down the spine.”
