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Ideas may be timeless, but how they get around sure has changed.
Back when Samuel Adams was talking about “setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men” and the Constitutional Congress was in session — i.e., more than a century before the Wright brothers first took flight, two centuries before popularized consumer email, and two-and-a-half centuries before Lin-Manuel Miranda dropped a reanimated Alexander Hamilton’s first mixtape — it took four or five hard, body-wracking days for a messenger carrying news and drafts of our founding documents on horseback to cover the roughly 300 miles between Boston and Philadelphia.
This summer, a carefully curated selection of those same documents will arrive in Miami on the comparatively plush journey aboard the Freedom Plane, a flight chartered by the National Archives ostensibly to commemorate America’s 250th birthday — but considering (*waves a sad hand vaguely from sea to shining sea*) it feels as much like an intervention as a celebration.
As yet another signifier of the outsized role Miami now occupies in the national psyche — both culturally and politically — HistoryMiami Museum will be one of only eight museums in the nation to host the documents this coming June 20 through July 5, 2026. (Freedom isn’t free, but this exhibit will be!)
The Freedom Plane Tour will offer an exceedingly rare opportunity to view, among other pieces, an 1823 original engraving of the Declaration of Independence, the 1774 Articles of Association, the 1783 Treaty of Paris, a secret draft print of the Constitution and a tally sheet approving it (both 1787), and the 1778 Oaths of Allegiance from George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr (no beatboxing unless you’re actually Lin-Manuel Miranda, please). The documents, acting archivist James Byron told the New York Times, are “all original, no facsimiles, no copies — all irreplaceable and all instructive.”
The documents last hit the road for the bicentennial celebrations in 1976 aboard the 15-month American Freedom Train railway exhibition. If you’re still on the fence or worried about the lack of corporate involvement, set those fears at ease: This airborne iteration will be underwritten by the Comcast Corporation, Microsoft, P&G, and Boeing, which “will provide the aircraft and associated operational support to transport the records between the venues” — just as the founders surely intended.
Other stops on the tour will include Kansas City, Dearborn, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston, Seattle, and Denver.
Freedom Plane National Tour. Saturday, June 20, at HistoryMiami Museum, 101 W. Flagler St., Miami; 305-375-1492; historymiami.org. Admission is free.
