Occa­sion­al­ly and with dimin­ish­ing fre­quen­cy, we still lament the lost art of let­ter-writ­ing, most­ly because of the degra­da­tion of the prose style we use to com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er. But writ­ing let­ters, in its long hey­day, involved much more than putting words on paper: there were choic­es to be made about the pen, the ink, the stamp, the enve­lope, and before the enve­lope, the let­ter­lock­ing tech­nique. Though recent­ly coined, the term let­ter­lock­ing describes an old and var­ied prac­tice, that of using one or sev­er­al of a suite of phys­i­cal meth­ods to ensure that nobody reads your let­ter but its intend­ed recip­i­ent — and if some­one else does read it, to show that they have.

“To seal a mod­ern-day enve­lope (on the off chance you’re seal­ing an enve­lope at all), it takes a lick or two, at most,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Abi­gail Cain. Not so for the likes of Mary Queen of Scots or Machi­avel­li: “In those days, let­ters were fold­ed in such a way that they served as their own enve­lope. Depend­ing on your desired lev­el of secu­ri­ty, you might opt for the sim­ple, tri­an­gu­lar fold and tuck; if you were par­tic­u­lar­ly ambi­tious, you might attempt the dag­ger-trap, a heav­i­ly boo­by-trapped tech­nique dis­guised as anoth­er, less secure, type of lock.”

Begin­ning with “the spread of flex­i­ble, fold­able paper in the 13th cen­tu­ry” and end­ing around “the inven­tion of the mass-pro­duced enve­lope in the 19th cen­tu­ry,” let­ter­lock­ing “fits into a 10,000-year his­to­ry of doc­u­ment secu­ri­ty — one that begins with clay tablets in Mesopotamia and extends all the way to today’s pass­words and two-step authen­ti­ca­tion.”

We know about let­ter­lock­ing today thanks in large part to the efforts of Jana Dambro­gio, Thomas F. Peter­son Con­ser­va­tor at MIT Libraries. Accord­ing to MIT News’ Heather Den­ny, Dambro­gio first got into let­ter­lock­ing (and far enough into it to come up with that term her­self) “as a fel­low at the Vat­i­can Secret Archives,” pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. “In the Vatican’s col­lec­tion she dis­cov­ered paper let­ters from the 15th and 16th cen­turies with unusu­al slits and sliced-off cor­ners. Curi­ous if the marks were part of the orig­i­nal let­ter, she dis­cov­ered that they were indi­ca­tions the let­ters had orig­i­nal­ly been locked with a slice of paper stabbed through a slit, and closed with a wax seal.”

She and her col­lab­o­ra­tor Daniel Starza Smith have spent years try­ing to recon­struct the many vari­a­tions on that basic method used by let­ter-writ­ers of old, and you can see one of them, which Mary Queen of Scots used to lock her final let­ter before her exe­cu­tion, in the video at the top of the post.

Though we in the age of round-the-world, round-the-clock instant mes­sag­ing — an age when even e‑mail feels increas­ing­ly quaint — may find this impres­sive­ly elab­o­rate, we won’t have even begun to grasp the sheer vari­ety of let­ter­lock­ing expe­ri­ence until we explore the let­ter­lock­ing Youtube chan­nel. Its videos include demon­stra­tions of tech­niques his­tor­i­cal­ly used in Eng­land, Italy, Amer­i­ca, East Asia, and else­where, some of them prac­ticed by nota­bles both real and imag­ined. Tempt­ing though it is to imag­ine a direct dig­i­tal-secu­ri­ty equiv­a­lent of all this today, human­i­ty seems to have changed since the era of let­ter­lock­ing: as the apho­rist Aaron Haspel put it, “We can have pri­va­cy or we can have con­ve­nience, and we choose con­ve­nience, every time.”

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lewis Carroll’s 8 Still-Rel­e­vant Rules For Let­ter-Writ­ing

6,000 Let­ters by Mar­cel Proust to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Jane Austen Writes a Let­ter to Her Sis­ter While Hung Over: “I Believe I Drank Too Much Wine Last Night”

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

How the Mys­ter­ies of the Vat­i­can Secret Archives Are Being Revealed by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In the ear­ly Unit­ed States, devout Chris­tians who would impose their beliefs on oth­ers were in the minor­i­ty among the country’s founders. Thomas Jefferson’s views on the sub­ject are well-known. Much more con­ser­v­a­tive than Jef­fer­son, fel­low Vir­gin­ian George Wash­ing­ton made fre­quent state­ments on reli­gion as part of the essen­tial tex­ture of pub­lic life. But while Wash­ing­ton dis­cussed reli­gion as a com­mu­nal affair with impor­tant social and polit­i­cal dimen­sions, like Jef­fer­son he endorsed reli­gious lib­er­ty and free­dom of con­science and belief.

Wash­ing­ton went fur­ther in defense of reli­gious minori­ties than the huge­ly influ­en­tial the­o­rist of reli­gious tol­er­a­tion, John Locke. The prin­ci­ple of tol­er­a­tion was unique in Europe and Eng­land, where “state-spon­sored reli­gion was the norm,” as New­port, Rhode Island’s his­toric Touro Syn­a­gogue explains.

But the idea was usu­al­ly tak­en to mean that “non-Chris­tians were to be ‘tol­er­at­ed’ for their beliefs” in a pater­nal­ist sense, “with the hope that ‘Jews, Turks, and Infi­dels” would become Chris­t­ian.” Wash­ing­ton, how­ev­er, declared:

It is now no more that tol­er­a­tion is spo­ken of, as if it was by the indul­gence of one class of peo­ple, that anoth­er enjoyed the exer­cise of their inher­ent nat­ur­al rights. For hap­pi­ly the Gov­ern­ment of the Unit­ed States, which gives to big­otry no sanc­tion, to per­se­cu­tion no assis­tance requires only that they who live under its pro­tec­tion should demean them­selves good cit­i­zens, in giv­ing it on all occa­sions their effec­tu­al sup­port.

These words come from Washington’s short 1790 let­ter to the “the Hebrew Con­gre­ga­tion in New­port, Rhode Island,” the first in a series of let­ters writ­ten to cit­i­zens of New­port after he and then-sec­re­tary of state Jef­fer­son made a vis­it. The address responds direct­ly to a let­ter of wel­come read to him on his arrival in the city by Moses Seixas, an offi­cial of the first Jew­ish con­gre­ga­tion in New­port, which states:

Deprived as we hereto­fore have been of the invalu­able rights of free Cit­i­zens, we now (with a deep sense of grat­i­tude to the Almighty dis­pos­er of all events) behold a Gov­ern­ment, erect­ed by the Majesty of the People—a Gov­ern­ment, which to big­otry gives no sanc­tion, to per­se­cu­tion no assistance—but gen­er­ous­ly afford­ing to All lib­er­ty of con­science, and immu­ni­ties of Cit­i­zen­ship: deem­ing every one, of what­ev­er Nation, tongue, or lan­guage, equal parts of the great gov­ern­men­tal Machine….

As did many such procla­ma­tions, the doc­u­ment gloss­es the bru­tal con­tra­dic­tion of slav­ery, indige­nous slaugh­ter, and actu­al dis­crim­i­na­tion reli­gious minori­ties faced. Nonethe­less, the demo­c­ra­t­ic prin­ci­ples Seixas out­lined so accord­ed with Washington’s ideals that the first pres­i­dent repeat­ed key phras­es ver­ba­tim. This is no mere pan­der­ing. When Wash­ing­ton arrived in New­port in 1790, state leg­is­la­tures were in the process of rat­i­fy­ing what was then the Third Amend­ment to the Con­sti­tu­tion, which we know as the First, pro­hibit­ing the estab­lish­ment of state reli­gion and grant­i­ng free­dom of the press.

Argu­ments over reli­gious lib­er­ty were fierce, and tol­er­a­tion had strict lim­its. In some states “the rights of minor­i­ty groups such as Bap­tists, Pres­by­te­ri­ans, Catholics and Quak­ers were restrict­ed,” notes Touro. “In most states, non-Chris­tians were denied the rights of full cit­i­zen­ship, such as hold­ing pub­lic office. Even in reli­gious­ly lib­er­al Rhode Island, Jews were not allowed to vote.” While the First Amend­ment “did lit­tle to erase these injus­tices,” Washington’s let­ter set out ide­al con­di­tions in which the country’s “enlarged and lib­er­al pol­i­cy” grant­ed “lib­er­ty of con­science and immu­ni­ties of cit­i­zen­ship” to all.

That Wash­ing­ton would make such claims in Rhode Island bears par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance giv­en that the state is “most not­ed as the place where reli­gious free­dom was actu­al­ly born,” writes for­mer Ambas­sador and UN Del­e­gate John Loeb. The colony’s 1663 char­ter “set forth the first polit­i­cal enti­ty in the world to sep­a­rate the church from the state.” Washington’s state­ment one hun­dred and twen­ty-sev­en years lat­er “applied—and con­tin­ues to apply—to every Amer­i­can,” Loeb argues, despite its spe­cif­ic address “to a small group of Jew­ish cit­i­zens.” But that spe­cif­ic address mat­ters. It promised inclu­sion and pro­tec­tion to a com­mu­ni­ty that had faced cen­turies of ter­ror.

As his­to­ri­an Melvin Urof­sky writes, the let­ter “to the Hebrew Con­gre­ga­tion,” like many oth­er such state­ments made by the founders, “is a trea­sure to the entire nation”—a nation that “rec­og­nized,” at least in words, “diver­si­ty for what it was, one of the country’s great­est assets, and took as its mot­to E Pluribus Unum—Out of Many, One. The sep­a­ra­tion of church and state, and with it the free­dom of reli­gion enshrined in the First Amend­ment to the Con­sti­tu­tion, has made the Unit­ed States a bea­con of hope to oppressed peo­ples every­where.”

Read Wash­ing­ton’s con­cise “Let­ter to the Hebrew Con­gre­ga­tion in New­port, Rhode Island” here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read George Washington’s “110 Rules of Civil­i­ty”: The Code of Decen­cy That Guid­ed America’s First Pres­i­dent

Dis­cov­er Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Ver­sion of the Bible, and Read the Curi­ous Edi­tion Online

Har­vard Launch­es a Free Online Course to Pro­mote Reli­gious Tol­er­ance & Under­stand­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness