The Record
Real History · Movie History
What the films claim, what the documentary record actually says, and where the line between the two falls. We grade gently. The films are allowed their inventions.
Side by Side
What the Films Claim
Charles Carroll's death and last words
EmbellishedThe Film’s Claim
On his deathbed in 1832, Charles Carroll — the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence and a Freemason — summons a stable boy named Thomas Gates and whispers 'The secret lies with Charlotte.'
The Historical Record
Carroll did die on November 14, 1832, at age 95, on Lombard Street in Baltimore, and he was the last surviving signer (Jefferson and Adams having both died on July 4, 1826). He was Catholic, not Mason — in fact the only Catholic signatory of the Declaration, raised under Maryland statutes that barred Catholics from politics, law, and the vote. There is no evidence Carroll left a deathbed cipher. There is no Thomas Gates in the historical record.
Note · The bedside scene is a film invention, but the date, the city, the age, and the identity of the dying man are accurate. Making Carroll a Mason is the larger embroidery; the family-cipher mythology layered over a Catholic signer is one of the franchise's bigger creative liberties.
The back of the Declaration of Independence
InventedThe Film’s Claim
The reverse of the Declaration of Independence holds an Ottendorf cipher in lemon-juice invisible ink, plus a partial pictographic map pointing toward the Templar treasure beneath Trinity Church.
The Historical Record
The reverse of the Declaration carries one piece of writing: 'Original Declaration of Independence dated 4th July 1776,' written by an unidentified clerk for filing convenience. There is no invisible-ink message. There is no map. The National Archives' conservators have examined the document with multispectral imaging.
Note · The label on the back is real and visible to visitors. The treasure map is movie magic. We respect the magic.
Independence Hall as filming location
CompressedThe Film’s Claim
Independence Hall in Philadelphia is the site of the bell-tower clue and the basement compartment that holds Benjamin Franklin's spectacles.
The Historical Record
The exterior shots of Independence Hall are the real Philadelphia building. The interior basement scenes were filmed on a sound stage; the National Park Service does not permit filming inside the historic structure. The film was the first major Hollywood production to receive permission to shoot exterior scenes at Independence Hall in many years.
Note · The bell-tower-shadow geometry doesn't quite work in real-world astronomy, either, but the film's visual logic is internally consistent.
The Silence Dogood letters
MixedThe Film’s Claim
Benjamin Franklin's Silence Dogood letters — fourteen in total, published in the New-England Courant in 1722 — exist as a published key text usable for an Ottendorf cipher. Original 1722 printings are held at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
The Historical Record
The Silence Dogood letters are entirely real. Franklin wrote them as a sixteen-year-old apprentice in his brother James's print shop, signing them with the persona of a middle-aged widow. The Courant ran fourteen between April and October of 1722. Surviving copies are held at the Massachusetts Historical Society and several other archives. The Franklin Institute does have a Franklin collection but does not, in fact, hold the original Silence Dogood papers as the film depicts.
Note · Letters real; collection location embellished for plot purposes.
The Ottendorf cipher
AccurateThe Film’s Claim
The Ottendorf cipher is a book cipher in which three integers per word point to page, line, and word in a key text. Franklin and his fellow Founders used it in correspondence.
The Historical Record
The Ottendorf cipher is real and named (loosely) for Maj. Nicholas Dietrich, Baron de Ottendorf, who used a similar form during the American Revolution as a contact of Maj. Benjamin Tallmadge's Culper Spy Ring. Book ciphers of the page-line-word form predate Ottendorf by centuries. The Founders did use book ciphers in correspondence, including Aaron Burr.
The Charlotte (the Arctic ship)
InventedThe Film’s Claim
A late-eighteenth-century colonial merchant freighter named the Charlotte was preserved in Arctic ice and recovered in the early 2000s with a meerschaum-pipe-stem cipher in its hold.
The Historical Record
There is no historical record of a colonial freighter named Charlotte lost in the high Arctic. Several ships of the period bore the name (the Charlotte of London, the Charlotte of Pennsylvania), and the British whaler Charlotte sailed into Hudson Bay in 1751, but none match the film's profile.
The Templar treasure crossing to America
InventedThe Film’s Claim
The Knights Templar smuggled the treasure of Solomon's Temple out of Europe and across the Atlantic, eventually hiding it under the streets of Manhattan beneath what would become Trinity Church.
The Historical Record
The Templars were a real military order, founded in 1119 and suppressed by King Philip IV of France in 1307 after a famous Friday-the-13th October arrest. Their wealth was partially seized and partially redistributed. There is no archaeological or documentary evidence of a Templar treasure crossing the Atlantic. The Oak Island legend in Nova Scotia and certain Sinclair-Rosslyn theories propose a North-American Templar trail; mainstream historians remain skeptical.
Note · Templars real, suppression real, legend longstanding. The American crossing is romance.
Freemason involvement among the Founders
EmbellishedThe Film’s Claim
Many of the Founding Fathers were Freemasons and used Masonic ciphers and symbols deliberately throughout the founding documents and the Great Seal.
The Historical Record
Several Founders were demonstrably Freemasons — George Washington (Alexandria Lodge No. 22), Benjamin Franklin (St. John's Lodge, Philadelphia), Paul Revere, John Hancock, and others. Of the 56 Declaration signers, however, current scholarship identifies only 9 as confirmed Masons, with a handful more disputed. The Great Seal's eye-and-pyramid is influenced by Masonic symbolism but was not designed exclusively by Masons.
Note · Real influence, larger in the films than in the documentary record.
Booth's missing diary pages
AccurateThe Film’s Claim
John Wilkes Booth's diary, taken from his body after his death in April 1865 and held in the National Archives, is missing eighteen pages. The film fills the gap with a single suppressed page held by Mitch Wilkinson's family for generations.
The Historical Record
The diary is real and is held at Ford's Theatre / the National Archives. It surfaced in 1867 in a War Department file, with pages cut out. Most sources cite eighteen missing pages; the FBI lab, in a later examination, suggested as many as 43 separate sheets (86 pages) might be missing. Whether the pages were cut by Booth himself, by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, or by a clerk after the fact is contested. The pages have never been recovered.
Note · The missing pages are real and historically contested. The film's particular reconstruction is invented, but the gap is a real historical mystery.
The Resolute desk
MixedThe Film’s Claim
The Resolute desk in the Oval Office was built from the timbers of HMS Resolute and given by Queen Victoria to President Hayes in 1880. A second, twin Resolute desk exists in Buckingham Palace, also built from Resolute timbers.
The Historical Record
The Oval Office Resolute desk is real, was built from HMS Resolute timbers in 1880, and was given by Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes that same year. It has been used by every president since Hayes except Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. There is no historical record of a twin desk at Buckingham Palace built from Resolute timbers. The film invents the twin.
Note · Oval Office desk real and accurate to the year and provenance. The London twin is the invention. The kneehole panel modification — designed by White House architect Lorenzo Winslow in 1945 at FDR's request and installed during Truman's first months in office — is real, but the film's secret compartment is invented.
Mount Rushmore and the chamber beneath
InventedThe Film’s Claim
Mount Rushmore, sculpted by Gutzon Borglum between 1927 and 1941, conceals the Olmec city of Cibola in a chamber accessible by a triangular keystone behind a presidential face.
The Historical Record
Mount Rushmore is real and was sculpted by Borglum between 1927 and 1941 (the bulk of the work; Borglum died in March 1941, his son Lincoln finished what could be completed by October). Borglum did plan a Hall of Records inside the mountain — a chamber behind Lincoln's head — but funds ran out and the chamber was begun and never finished. In 1998 a small repository of documents was placed in the partially-completed chamber and sealed. There is no Olmec city behind Mount Rushmore.
Note · The Hall of Records is real. The Cibola chamber underneath is movie. Borglum's Mason status is sometimes disputed; he was at minimum closely associated with Masonic civic culture in early-20th-century America.
The Library of Congress Reading Room
MixedThe Film’s Claim
The President's Book of Secrets is housed in a hidden alcove of the Library of Congress, accessed by a catalog code passed only to incoming presidents.
The Historical Record
The Library of Congress and its great Main Reading Room are real and are largely depicted accurately in Book of Secrets, including the architecture, the catalog system, and the dome. There is no President's Book of Secrets. Sitting presidents do not have a unique catalog code. (They do have certain classified-document privileges, but those are not Library of Congress holdings.)
Note · The setting is faithfully depicted; the book is invented.
The Mount Vernon tunnel
InventedThe Film’s Claim
Beneath George Washington's Mount Vernon estate is a service tunnel containing a colonial-era bottle and a residue painting that resolves with water.
The Historical Record
Mount Vernon does have basements and root cellars, all preserved and accessible to historians. There is no documented service tunnel beneath the estate matching the film's depiction. The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, which has preserved the estate continuously since 1858, reports no such tunnel.
Cibola, the Seven Cities of Gold
InventedThe Film’s Claim
Cibola is a real Olmec city of gold hidden inside Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills, accessible through a chamber sealed by Borglum's sculpture.
The Historical Record
The Seven Cities of Cibola were a 16th-century Spanish-colonial myth, originating with shipwrecked survivors of the 1527 Narváez expedition (including the Moorish slave Estevanico). Coronado's 1540 expedition, drawn by Fray Marcos de Niza's reports, found the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh in present-day New Mexico and not gold. The legend is composite; Cibola, El Dorado, and Quivira often overlap in colonial Spanish texts. The Olmec civilization is real (c. 1500-400 BCE in Gulf Coast Mexico) but is not historically associated with the American Black Hills.
Note · Cibola legend real, Olmec civilization real, the splice of the two onto a hidden Black Hills city is the film's composite invention.
The Olmec carved plank
InventedThe Film’s Claim
A small Olmec wooden plank with carved glyphs reading 'noble bird, hand, sacred temple,' originally split between the two Resolute desks, points to Mount Rushmore.
The Historical Record
The Olmec were a real Mesoamerican civilization that produced colossal heads, jadeware, and detailed glyphs. There is no documented Olmec wooden plank linking to Mount Rushmore or to the Resolute desks. The artifact is film fiction.
The Liberty Bell / Centennial Bell at Independence Hall
AccurateThe Film’s Claim
The 'house of Pass and Stow' references the Liberty Bell and the shadow of the bell tower at 2:22 marks a clue location.
The Historical Record
John Pass and John Stow were the real Philadelphia founders who recast the Liberty Bell after its first crack in 1752; their names appear on the Bell's inscription. The Bell currently hangs at the Liberty Bell Center, having been moved from Independence Hall in 1976. The bell now hanging in the Independence Hall steeple is the Centennial Bell, hung in 1876 to mark the nation's hundredth birthday. The 2:22 timing is referenced by the time printed on Independence Hall's clock as it appears on the back of a U.S. one hundred dollar bill.
Note · All real. The clue's geometry is film logic, but the bell history and the hundred-dollar-bill detail are correct.
Iron-gall ink and the Declaration
AccurateThe Film’s Claim
The Declaration of Independence was engrossed by Timothy Matlack in iron-gall ink in late July and early August 1776.
The Historical Record
Accurate. Matlack was hired by the Continental Congress on July 19, 1776 and worked through August 2, when delegates began signing. He used iron-gall ink — tannic acid from oak galls, iron filings, gum arabic — on parchment, in Copperplate script. His title hand ('The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America') is one of American history's most recognizable pieces of calligraphy.
The Playfair cipher
MixedThe Film’s Claim
The Playfair cipher — used in Booth's diary in Book of Secrets — is a 5x5-grid digraph cipher decoded with the keyword DEATH.
The Historical Record
Playfair is real, invented by Charles Wheatstone in 1854 and championed by Lord Playfair (hence the name). Confederate intelligence used Playfair extensively during the Civil War, which is the reason a Booth-era figure would plausibly know it. The keyword DEATH and the specific Booth-diary application in the film are inventions.
Note · Cipher real and period-appropriate; specific Booth use is film fiction.
The Île aux Cygnes Statue of Liberty replica
MixedThe Film’s Claim
A small Statue of Liberty replica on the Île aux Cygnes in Paris bears an inscription left by Édouard de Laboulaye in 1876 pointing to the 'Resolute' twin desks.
The Historical Record
The Île aux Cygnes Liberty replica is real — a quarter-scale 1889 statue gifted by the French to Paris on the centennial of the French Revolution. Édouard de Laboulaye is real: the French jurist whose 1865 dinner-party suggestion grew into the larger New York Statue of Liberty project. The 1876 inscription depicted in the film is invented; no such Laboulaye-signed inscription appears on the Paris replica's torch.
The President's Book of Secrets
InventedThe Film’s Claim
Each outgoing President hands an unbroken record of national secrets to each incoming President; the book has been in continuous succession since George Washington.
The Historical Record
There is no President's Book of Secrets in any documented historical archive. Sitting presidents do receive certain classified briefings on inauguration; the Presidential Records Act governs official records. The film's leather-bound mythical book is fiction.
Note · Beautiful invention. The book is the franchise's MacGuffin and is acknowledged as such by everyone involved.
Who’s Who
Historical Figures
Every Founder, signer, engraver, conspirator, sculptor, monarch, diplomat, and explorer the films invoke. Grouped by role.
Founding Fathers
1706–1790 · Referenced
Benjamin Franklin
Printer, inventor, diplomat, and the most quoted of the Founding Fathers. Franklin invented bifocal spectacles late in life, contributed to the wording of the Declaration as a member of the Committee of Five, served as ambassador to France during the Revolution, and as a teenager in Boston wrote the satirical 'Silence Dogood' letters under a pseudonym for his brother's newspaper.
Why in the franchise
Two of the franchise's clue mechanisms — the Silence Dogood letters as Ottendorf key, and the bifocal-spectacle 'vision' device hidden in Independence Hall — depend on Franklin specifically. He is the cipher's author and its punchline.
Signers
1737–1832 · Depicted
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
The only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence and, eventually, the longest-lived. Carroll was Maryland-born, Jesuit-educated in France for seventeen years, fluent in five languages, and one of the wealthiest men in colonial America. He signed in August 1776, served as Maryland's first U.S. Senator, and died at ninety-five in 1832 — by which point he was the last surviving signer.
Why in the franchise
The franchise's whole engine. In the cold open of NT1, Carroll on his deathbed in 1832 summons a young stable boy named Thomas Gates and whispers a single sentence: 'The secret lies with Charlotte.' That sentence is Disney's invention. The man saying it was real.
Engravers
1736–1829 · Referenced
Timothy Matlack
Quaker brewer, Pennsylvania politician, and assistant to the Secretary of the Continental Congress. In July 1776, after the colonies approved the Declaration, Congress ordered the document 'fairly engrossed on parchment,' and Matlack — chosen for his copperplate hand — was almost certainly the penman. He engrossed the Declaration in iron-gall ink in roughly two weeks. Signing began on August 2, 1776.
Why in the franchise
The Charlotte's pipe-stem cipher poem names him by name: 'fifty-five in iron pen, Mr. Matlack can't offend.' The franchise leans on Matlack's reality to ground its fiction — there really was a man with this exact job.
Presidents
1809–1865 · Depicted
Abraham Lincoln
Sixteenth President of the United States. Won the 1860 election on the Republican ticket, presided over the Civil War, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, gave the Gettysburg Address that November, and was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth six days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox.
Why in the franchise
Lincoln's assassination is Book of Secrets' inciting event. The film treats Booth's plot as a cover for an attempt to suppress the Cibola map — the missing diary page being the cipher Thomas Gates was given to decode.
1767–1845 · Referenced
Andrew Jackson
Seventh President of the United States and namesake of the Jackson era. War of 1812 hero at the Battle of New Orleans. Sat for two terms, 1829–1837. Survived the first known assassination attempt on a sitting U.S. president in 1835 (the assailant's pistols misfired).
Why in the franchise
Referenced in Book of Secrets' presidential timeline — Jackson's tenure is part of the chain by which the President's Book of Secrets is passed administration to administration.
1822–1893 · Referenced
Rutherford B. Hayes
Nineteenth President of the United States, 1877–1881. Civil War general, governor of Ohio, victor of the contested 1876 election. In 1880 received the Resolute desk from Queen Victoria; the desk has remained in service to many U.S. presidents since.
Why in the franchise
The recipient of the real Resolute desk. The film's twin-desk plot frames Hayes and Victoria as the Resolute's twin custodians.
Monarchs
1819–1901 · Referenced
Queen Victoria
Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India. Reigned sixty-three years (1837–1901). In 1880 she presented President Rutherford B. Hayes with the Resolute desk, made of timbers from the abandoned Arctic exploration ship HMS Resolute, as a gesture of Anglo-American friendship.
Why in the franchise
The Resolute desk is one of two desks in Book of Secrets' clue chain. The film proposes that Victoria kept a twin desk for herself in Buckingham Palace from the same Resolute timbers — a fictional twin, but a useful one.
Diplomats
1811–1883 · Referenced
Édouard de Laboulaye
French jurist, abolitionist, professor of comparative law at the Collège de France, and lifelong admirer of the U.S. Constitution. In 1865 — moved by the centennial of the Declaration approaching and by the abolition of slavery — Laboulaye proposed a French gift to the United States: a colossal statue. His friend the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi turned the idea into the Statue of Liberty, dedicated in New York Harbor in 1886.
Why in the franchise
Laboulaye's name is the cipher key in Book of Secrets — Riley reads the inscription on the smaller Liberty replica on the Île aux Cygnes in Paris. The film treats Laboulaye as one of the cipher's nineteenth-century stewards.
Carvers & Sculptors
1867–1941 · Referenced
Gutzon Borglum
Idaho-born American sculptor, Paris-trained at the Académie Julian, where he met Rodin. Borglum directed the carving of Mount Rushmore from 1927 to his death in 1941, supervising four hundred workers and carving the sixty-foot heads of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. He was also an active Freemason — raised in Howard Lodge No. 35, New York City, in 1904.
Why in the franchise
Book of Secrets implicates Borglum's Masonic connection in the Cibola cover-up: the carving on the mountain is a seal hiding the chamber beneath. The Hall of Records corridor is real (begun, never finished); Cibola is the film's invention.
Conspirators
1838–1865 · Depicted
John Wilkes Booth
Stage actor, Confederate sympathizer, and Lincoln's assassin. Booth shot the President at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, leaped to the stage shouting in Latin, and fled south. He was cornered and killed in a Virginia barn twelve days later. Booth's diary survived him; pages were missing from it when authorities recovered the book.
Why in the franchise
Book of Secrets opens with Booth and his co-conspirators recruiting Thomas Gates as a cipher-breaker. The missing diary page is the McGuffin. The film's central historical liberty is to entangle Thomas Gates in the assassination plot.
1823–1865 · Referenced
Mary Surratt
Boarding-house keeper in Washington, D.C. Booth used her tavern in Surrattsville and her Washington house as meeting points. Surratt was tried by a military commission for the assassination conspiracy, found guilty, and hanged on July 7, 1865 — the first woman executed by the United States federal government.
Why in the franchise
The Booth co-conspirators are the film's framing device for the missing diary page. Surratt is a name in Thomas Gates' cipher chain.
1844–1865 · Referenced
Lewis Powell
Tall former Confederate soldier assigned by Booth to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward on the night of April 14, 1865. Powell wounded Seward severely but did not kill him. He was captured at Mary Surratt's house, tried by military commission, and hanged on July 7, 1865.
Why in the franchise
One of the four Booth co-conspirators executed in 1865 — referenced in the film's frame as part of the wider plot Thomas Gates is implicated in.
1835–1865 · Referenced
George Atzerodt
German-immigrant carriage maker who had acted as a boatman for Confederate operatives crossing the Potomac. Booth assigned him to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson on April 14, 1865; Atzerodt lost his nerve, drank instead, and fled. He was tried, convicted, and hanged on July 7, 1865.
Why in the franchise
Booth's vice-presidential assassin who failed to act. Named in Book of Secrets as part of the co-conspirator frame.
1842–1865 · Referenced
David Herold
Pharmacist's apprentice from Washington, D.C. Herold guided Booth south after the assassination, hiding with him in pine thickets and barns across Maryland and Virginia. He surrendered at the Garrett farm where Booth was killed; tried by military commission and hanged on July 7, 1865.
Why in the franchise
The fourth executed co-conspirator. Referenced in the wider Booth plot.
Explorers
1510–1554 · Referenced
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado
Spanish conquistador. In 1540, accompanied by some 300 Spanish soldiers, several hundred allied Mexican-Indian troops, 1,500 stock animals, and the friar Marcos de Niza, Coronado led an expedition north from Compostela in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola. He arrived at Hawikuh in present-day New Mexico — a Zuni pueblo, not a city of gold — and spent two more years searching the southwest in vain.
Why in the franchise
Cibola is the film's lost city. Coronado is the historical figure who looked in the wrong place. Book of Secrets proposes that Cibola was real and Olmec, hidden under what would become the Black Hills of South Dakota.
c. 1500–1539 · Referenced
Estevanico
North African (Moorish) man, enslaved by Spanish colonists, one of four survivors of the disastrous 1527 Narváez expedition that wandered Texas and northern Mexico for nearly a decade. In 1539, sent ahead of Marcos de Niza's reconnaissance expedition into the Zuni country, Estevanico became the first non-indigenous explorer to reach the pueblo of Hawikuh — the first 'Cibola' the Spanish saw. He was killed there, possibly for misreading or misrepresenting his role.
Why in the franchise
Estevanico's reports were the seed of the Cibola legend. Book of Secrets's Cibola is downstream of his testimony.