The Passport in America: The History of a Document (11 page)

The determination of proof in disputes over the authorship of written documents had been an object of legal concern for several hundred years. Until the middle of the nineteenth century U.S. law tended to follow English legal tradition that had established a common-law rule against the “comparison of hands”; courts did not allow multiple examples of writing to test the status of the contested document. Instead, disputes over the genuineness of writing were resolved either by testimony from the writer, a witness who saw the person write the document, or by bringing in an acquaintance of the writer who could testify to the authenticity (or not) of the writing based on knowledge of the person. The circumstances of many cases meant it was an acquaintance of the purported writer who most frequently provided evidence. It was not even necessary for these witnesses to have observed the writing of the specific document under examination—they only needed to have seen the person’s writing at some point during their acquaintance.
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An American edition of an English treatise on evidence made it clear that such a witness was expected to provide “recollection of the general character” of the script, not “the formation of particular letters.”
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This seemed logical for a court in which it was assumed that “one man knows the face of another though he cannot describe the minute particulars, by which he knows it. So it is of hand-writing.”
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Thus, following English practice, some courts were more interested in a witness having a meaningful relationship with the purported writer and therefore only required a general impression of the prevailing character of the writing based on an assumed relationship between a person’s character and the uniqueness of their handwriting.
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By 1900 the concern over the status of handwriting evidence in disputed document cases had resulted in thirty-seven states permitting comparison of hands to assist in determining the authenticity of handwriting. This was in large part due to a group of self-proclaimed experts who responded to the problems created when changing social structures undermined the social basis that had underwritten the existing method for identifying handwriting. In short, personal knowledge of individuals began to be seen as a problematic basis for evaluating disputes as the small social circles in which documents, especially financial notes, had circulated disappeared by the middle of the century.
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Handwriting analysis as a field of expertise also emerged in a period in which it was increasingly accepted that, if properly understood, small variations in appearance and behavior could be seen as meaningful. This belief developed in the last half of the nineteenth century with the emergence of identification techniques such as fingerprinting, anthropometry, and social statistics, along with the popularity of detective novels such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” series.
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In line with this, handwriting experts argued the minute particulars of handwriting deemed irrelevant or even irretrievable prior to the first half of the nineteenth century were the only basis for reliable evidence in courts. As legal historian Jennifer Mnookin explains it, an understanding of “not just the shape of the letters, but also the extent of their shading, the existence and nature of various loops, the form of connection between letters, and the presence or absence of retouching” could enable an expert to authenticate handwriting by breaking it down into its component parts; in one instance a signature was broken down into thirty different marks.
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It was this act of “scientific” reading that courtroom handwriting experts took as the foundation of their work as they sought to identify the writer of a disputed document.

Outside of the courtroom the reading of identity from handwriting more often took the form of graphology. This also sought to attribute the assumed link between personal identity and handwriting to science and thus contributed to moving identification away from the opinion and subjectivity of personal knowledge to the method and objectivity of science. Loosely used, graphology could accredit the so-called handwriting experts who evaluated documents. However, it was more commonly applied to another set of self-anointed experts who sought to reveal a person’s true character from their handwriting and to those who sought to do the same using popular manuals.
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Even if one accepts that handwriting experts sought to identify a more empirically verifiable sense of the individual than the character or personality traits of the graphologist, as practices of identification they shared the claim that a person does not have to know an individual to identify him or her.
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Although handwriting identification may seem distant from the passport, its development required the assumption that identity can be verified without personal knowledge and through impersonal means, an assumption that is critical to the belief that identity can be accurately documented. This was particularly the case for a mass-produced document such as the passport, issued by an authority that more than likely did not have personal knowledge of the person identified in the document. The complicated ways
in which this changed the relationship between identity and identification is made apparent in both the use and representation of the signature of the secretary of state on the U.S. passport.

Below the text of the passport and immediately preceded by the valediction, which began with the phrase “Given under my hand,” was the signature of the secretary of state. The format of the passport as a letter from one official to another no doubt contributed to the perceived need for the secretary to sign the passport, along with an established assumption that an unsigned document implies that no one is prepared to take responsibility for it, thus reducing its value.
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That the secretary of state’s signature was the only signature on early U.S. passports illustrates the late eighteenth century passport was not yet a modern identification document. And the secretary did indeed sign these early passports by hand; the signature remained consistently handwritten until the Civil War. The format of the passport as a letter complete with a signature does give the text an implied autobiographical anchor. However, the signature as a sign of authentication represents the authority of an impersonal entity (the federal government) more than the name of an individual. The bearer’s signature was there to connect the person presenting the passport to the document; the secretary’s signature, along with the seal, was on the document to stand in for the absent authority that verified the individual identity in the passport.

The importance of the signature as the source of legal authority for the passport was made explicit in 1920 when the confirmation of a new secretary of state went beyond the thirty-day limitation provided for in statutes; this left the United States without a secretary of state. As a result, the State Department considered it necessary to halt the issuance of passports as there was no individual, and thus no signature, “to render a passport effective.”
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While a seal can be understood as an impersonal signature, the secretary’s handwritten signature was distinct from the other techniques that represented the state such as the ornamentation that adorned passports. The signed names of secretaries of state personalized what became during the nineteenth century an increasingly large bureaucratic structure. This more personal authority derived from the culturally produced assumption of a link between a person and his or her handwriting and specifically his or her signature. The verification of the state’s authority in the form of a handwritten
signature resonated with a claim to authority based on an understanding of authenticity, reinforced by the phrase “Given under my hand.” The handwritten signature implied the presence of the secretary of state at the creation of the passport and thus its authenticity.

That handwriting could be read to personalize the impersonal authority of official documents granted it the possibility of a very specific role in the development of documentary authority. As part of the contested emergence of print culture, handwritten documents acquired a particular cultural role in contrast to print, which was equated with self-negation.
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In eighteenth-century Europe print culture gave handwriting a primary role in situations that involved the presentation of the self. Handwriting on calling cards, trade cards, and mercantile letters was deemed more acceptable than the so-called dead letter of print.
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In the United States in the nineteenth century, the cultural assumptions that considered handwriting personal and unique also played a role in documents issued by institutions in large numbers. As noted, the pre–Civil War banknotes, as documents that circulated beyond the reputation of the banks that issued them, formed part of a new impersonal public discourse that developed separately from personal authority. The authenticity of the banknotes could not be verified through personal interaction and local knowledge, therefore, the authority of these banknotes required confidence in an impersonal medium—the documents through which that claim was expressed. But confidence in the authority of these mass-produced identical documents initially came to depend on the signature of the bank owner that was intended to present the banknotes as a personal agreement. It was anticipated that the signature as a graphic form considered personally distinct would give the notes an aura of uniqueness.
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The secretary of state’s signature as a sign of uniqueness, something authentic on a passport printed from a standardized template, emphasizes the significance of a personal mark on an impersonal document. In the case of Secretary of State William Seward, whose right hand had been permanently injured, his stenographer believed

the capitals in his signature were distinguishable, but it was little more than an impatient wave lie, a heavy trailing of the hand, that joined the S and the d. We have wondered whether the foreign officials who scrutinized the travelers’ passports could read the signature at the bottom. It reminded one of the shambling gait of Homer’s crook-horned oxen.
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Of course those hotel clerks, police officers, and border officials to whom the passport was presented more than likely sought to read the signature as an authentication of the document, not to decipher a name; with thirty-two secretaries of state between 1830 and 1900, knowledge of the name of the secretary of state at any given moment would have been quite an achievement on the part of a foreign official looking at a U.S. passport. In this context the pointlessness of a passport having the actual signature of the secretary of state was not lost on some department officials. Seward’s stenographer believed “the seal of the Department authenticated by an assistant secretary would be sufficient” for a passport.
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Without this option, the stenographer believed, the requirement to sign passports turned one of the country’s most powerful officials into a “writing machine.”
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The tension between replication and authenticity that characterized the emergence of mass-produced documents is evident in the concern that the person who signed a passport, who gave the document the semblance of personal authority, was turned into a machine by the excessive need to repeat his signature.
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A solution adopted by many of the secretaries who succeeded Seward may have allowed them to avoid the mechanical labor of signing passports, but it made this tension even more visible; in the second half of the nineteenth century many secretaries issued passports with their signature stamped on the document.
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The signature was still preceded by the phrase “Given under my hand,” presumably to reassure people that this was the secretary’s signature. The introduction of a stamp was probably the result of the dramatic increase in the number of passport issued. From 1801 to 1850 the State Department issued almost 22,000 passports; from 1850 to 1898 it issued a little under 263,000, with another 108,000 being issued between 1898 and 1905.
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There is no record of why some secretaries reverted to handwritten signatures. However, a turn-of-the-century problem with the stamped signature raises one possibility. In so doing it illustrates the often gradual assumption of documentary claims to authenticity and authority that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, and it reinforces the importance of standardization to the emerging authority of documents such as the passport.