Earlier this week I attended a watershed event at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts (co-hosted by the Salem Athenaeum), where I live. The event celebrated the restoration and first public display in generations of the “Endecott Charter.” This magnificent, 3-foot square, four-page, meticulously quill pen-inscribed document from 1629 is, in a sense, the birth certificate of the United States of America.

Under the authority of King Charles I, the Charter was brought from England to John Endecott in Salem, Massachusetts, to establish his legal authority as the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Governor John Winthrop, who arrived in 1630 with his own copy of the Charter, has received more “press” over the years, but the Endecott Charter was here first. It established an American form of self-government that continues to this day.

The keynote speaker for the event, retiring Supreme Court Justice Margaret H. Marshall (the first woman to hold this position!), gave a brilliant summation of Constitutional history in her remarks, showing the line of ascent from the Endecott Charter, to the aftermath of the Salem Witch Trials which resulted in the creation of today’s Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, to John Adams’ drafting of the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780, to subsequent court cases upholding the rights of all people under that Constitution thus ending slavery, to the U.S. Constitution which was based on the Massachusetts version, to today’s Supreme Court and its charge to apply the law equally to all people. » Read more: “Show Up” for History – And Your Business!