Past is Present

150 years ago this week…

…a young man named Henry L. Joslin, from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, was writing home to his mother on September 24th.

Henry, born in 1843, was serving in the Civil War and was working picket duty in Poolsville. In his letter he describes his camp, what guard duty was like, and gives updates about his health, and other young men at his camp. Below are some highlights from his letter. You can see the entire transcription here.

We have to go on guard once in about four days. It is pleasanter doing guard duty here than in camp as we do not have to walk our beats and we have a fire to keep warm by. We have to turn out half an hour before day break and remain under arms till sunrise and to keep warm we drill most of the time. It is quite cold here nights and we get a few chestnuts but not many yet. Some of us go hunting most every day and get two or three grey squirrels. Cousin George got some young ones alive which he carried up to camp.

Col. Griswold is here and is well. Bill is up to camp tending to cooking. I have not heard from Henry Greene since I let Camp Scott. I wish you would speak to him about it and wake him up a little. My health has been good except a cold that I caught on guard which is all night now.

So what was Henry missing while he was away? What was his mother experiencing while she anxiously awaited news from her son? Click here to see what news was happening in Lowell, one town over, on September 24th.

Sadley, Henry never returned home to his mother. He died from disease while serving as Corporal of his Company in Virginia in 1863. He did, however, write home frequently, and I’ll be featuring more of his letters on the anniversary of their composition, so look out for more letters from Henry soon.

The Acquisitions Table: Appeal to the Democracy

Appeal to the Democracy (Augusta, ME). Oct. 10, 1840.

Over the past few years AAS has acquired a number of campaign newspapers. These are always desirable due to their short existence, rarity, and political content. The Whig Battering-Ram was a revival of a campaign paper with a similar title from the 1840 election. It supported Henry Clay and was published by the Ohio State Journal, edited by Rufus B. Sage. Only one file is known of this title. Appeal to the Democracy was a Democratic Republican paper supporting Martin Van Buren for President. This paper was issued during elections in 1838, 1840, and 1844, but only two issues were known from the 1840 election until this one turned up.

A Lesson to Procrastinators…

One way we add to our manuscript collection is through what staff and readers find within other collections at AAS. Often we will find letters, notes, or other ephemera interfiled in books, periodicals and newspapers, and often it is deemed best to move this material into the manuscript collection. These items are fun because, while their provenance is not always clear, knowing where they came from within our collection adds a bit of mystery to the item. Seeing handwritten notes within the pages of books connects us to the past owner of the book. It makes us think of what that person might have been doing while reading the book. Were they bored and needed a distraction, and therefore decided to jot down a poem? Were they about to deliver a letter but decided to use it as a bookmark and forgot about it? Or maybe there’s a scrap piece of paper with important information on it that has been frustratingly lost within a book for 100 years.

One such item was recently brought to my attention by an AAS Fellow. A piece of correspondence was found in the pages of the songster Greenback and Labor Songs (see the catalog record for this item here). The letter is addressed to a Mr. Verry, who apparently had written to the Greater Joliet Chamber of Commerce (Greenback and Labor Songs was published by the Greenback News of Joliet, Illinois) in search of a copy. Mr. Jack P. Meade, Business Manager of the Chamber of Commerce, responded to Mr. Verry with the unfortunate news that four of the five men involved in the publication of this book – Young and McLaughlin, who compiled the book, as well as Nelson and Ferris, of the publishing firm Nelson, Ferris & Baldwin – had passed away. But Mr. Baldwin was still around, and could help Mr. Verry with his request. Please note all the dates listed on the letter, including the all important footnote at the bottom. Lesson be told, don’t procrastinate!

However, as this letter was folded and stashed away in a copy of the book he was looking for, we can assume Mr. Verry indeed did find a copy!

Shakespeare in the Parlor…and everywhere

As the Prints in the Parlor (PIP) Project begins its last leg of digitization and access to images generated, those of us involved with it find ourselves itching to pull together some of the results into conversation with one another. The reason for this is to show how these book illustrations, sometimes independent of the books they are contained within, can demonstrate larger contexts of print culture of the nineteenth century.

We are also hoping the web pages we are creating – with links to the catalog records and accompanying text files – will show how the resource can enable researchers to think about these prints. (Check out our online tutorial for search tips.) One of these recent forays resulted in the mini-exhibit appropriately titled “Shakespeare in the Parlor.” It features four areas of focus – Shakespeare’s women, comedies, imagining-the-man, and re-using Shakespeare – each area with its own four representative images. Attached are also high-resolution digital photographs of the book pages, excerpts from the cataloging record, and a link to the AAS catalog entry, in addition to a short general introduction.

Being exclusive was a problem in preparing the exhibit because there were so many good images from which to choose. On the chopping block, for instance, were the images of Shakespeare “places”, such as the “Palace of the Duke of Bedford” (still digitized and made available, but not included in the exhibit). Also, developing some sort of a narrative was difficult. But in essence, the prints spoke for – and almost organized – themselves. And while the place of study for Shakespeare in American study is undoubtedly the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., here at the AAS, we like to think we have some pieces of that Bard-pie.

With PIP, and hopefully with several mini-exhibits to follow, we have created a “bank” of images and descriptive cataloging records to work with. Our expectation is that as we make available the last few hundred images generated from the project, researchers and scholars will start to put images together in different ways and across different fields.

Doubtless, following the trail of some of these images has resulted in some fascinating leads. The “Shakespeare in the Parlor” exhibit included the print “Dreams of a Youthful Shakespeare“- after Richard Westall (1765-1836) – who worked for the John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (a collection of the American prints of which are also in AAS collections).

While “Dreams of a Youthful Shakespeare” is featured in our online exhibit, one that isn’t (but is also noteworthy) is “The Murder of the Princes” which was part of Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and is reproduced in PIP as well (in two separate gift books, no less). What makes this even more interesting is an image produced in Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun in November 1860, titled “The Smothering Of The Democratic Princes” shows a new take on the already popular image but in which:

enter two assassins (vide Shakespeare). Catesby Lincoln and Rat-cliff Sanders steal surreptitiously into the Apartment of the Sleeping Princes, Bell and Breckinridge, and smother them with the Pil(lar)low of Squatter Sovereignty.

In this account, Shakespeare is invoked – not the subject.

“The Smothering Of The Democratic Princes” image is part of the Civil War Cartoon Collection. (Currently this collection only has an online inventory, but it is one of the Society’s holdings slated to be re-organized, re-inventoried and re-served as an online resource that will contain digital images.) It is only fitting that the subject matter was re-used as well. What this recognizes even more broadly, is that images are representatives of a sort of language so saturated in print-culture economies that it made its way back to the popular press. The staging and even subject matter could easily move from the museum, to the parlor, to the press and back again.

We have had fun organizing the images, making connections, and even finding the necessary scaffolding for our future projects. Our hope is you will do the same!

The Acquisitions Table: Charles Eastman & Co. Letterbook

Charles Eastman & Co. Letterbook, 1828 – 1834

The South Hadley (Massachusetts) Canal opened in 1795 to bypass waterfalls on the Connecticut River and it was one of the earliest canals in the United States. Steamboat traffic on the canal began in 1828. This letter book was kept by Charles Eastman (1803 – 1884) and contains copies of outgoing correspondence. Charles Eastman and Co. was engaged in the manufacturing and wholesale trade of buttons, lastings, sheets, fabrics, pins and hardware. His letterbook contains over 100 letters relating to his business trade on the canal. The volume also contains two inventories, apparently for a store, from 1829

California Gold

Although the majority of AAS’s manuscript collection is focused on New England, we do have collections that cover other parts of the country. Our Book Trades Collection and Slavery in the US Collection, for example, have a national scope, and collections such as the Louisiana Collection and the California Papers are focused outside of New England. These collections help diversify our holdings, and have definitely proven useful to our readers. Former AAS Fellow Sarah Keyes utilized our California Papers during her fellowship and shares with us an interesting item found in this collection.

More than a year after he left Ohio for the California gold fields, David Howlett answered his wife’s demand that he tell her “all the partickulars (sic)” of his overland journey. Howlett acquiesced, assuring his wife that he had not “left all of his clothes on the Plains” but rather still possessed two under shirts, two pairs of summer pants, one pair of boots and his bed clothes. His pillow, he declared, was especially “grate”: “I do not see many pillows here when A man goes to bed here he pulls off his coat or boots & puts them under his head.” By telling her of this luxury, Howlett helped to lay his wife’s fears to rest regarding his life in far-away California.

This document is an example of a very rare find, a letter penned inside a letterbook produced by the short-lived Gregory’s Express Company. Joseph F. Gregory created these letter books “To facilitate correspondence between cities and towns, and the mining districts in California, and all parts of the United States.” Gregory expanded his business too rapidly, and, unable to meet demands, he closed the company in 1853.

Although Gregory failed, his letter books attest to the increasing importance of the postal service. The rise of the postal system in the mid-nineteenth century helped the Howletts and other families separated by vast distances to maintain their relationships. The growth of communication by letter was particularly significant for the approximately two hundred and fifty thousand EuroAmericans who left their homes in the mid-nineteenth century in search of opportunity on the Pacific coast. The departure from home initiated a process of familial separation that stretched across the over two thousand miles overlanders traveled to the Far West. Measured in time as up to six months, the sheer length of the journey helped it to overshadow the majority of other contemporary migratory movements such as the move toward urban centers, Texas, and the region now known as the Midwest. Letters, journals as well as material objects allowed family members to share the experience with relatives who had not traveled to the Pacific Coast.

The Acquisitions Table: The White Knight or The Rock of the Candle

Brother Joseph. The White Knight or The Rock of the Candle. (Brother James’s Library). Philadelphia: Henry McGrath, 1867.

American Catholic children’s literature is rare before 1850, and The White Knight exemplifies the modest boom in Catholic publishing after the Civil War. The back pages contain advertisements for the Catholic Pocket Library, and books for parochial libraries published in England, Ireland, and Scotland—giving us a glimpse into the transatlantic world of Anglo-American 19th-century Catholic publishing.

Frankenstein Book

Recently we acquired an interesting new addition to our ever growing scrapbook collection. In 1869, Mary H. Hill of Nelson County, VA, somehow got her hands on a salesman’s sample book and proceeded to use it as a scrapbook for her favorite recipes over the next decade or so. What makes her book stand out is its non-categorical nature. The volume has newspaper clippings of recipes pasted on some pages. Other pages feature handwritten recipes. And the book itself is a repurposed salesman’s sample book. So we could label this book a scrapbook, a cookbook, a salesman’s sample book, or a bit of all three!

Before this book became a scrapbook, it was a sample book for The Women of New York, or, The Under-world of the Great City. Illustrating the Life of Women of Fashion, Women of Pleasure, Actresses, and Ballet Girls, by George Ellington, published in 1869. Salesman’s sample books (or subscription books or dummies, as they are also known) feature excerpts from the books they were promoting, along with plates and a brief description. The remainder of the pages of the sample book were left as space for the salesman to list interested subscribers’ information (names, addresses, numbers of copies desired, prices, etc.). Unfortunately, Mary’s scrapbook has all of the front pages ripped out and only the blank subscriber pages remain. She used these blank pages for her scrapbooking. I guess no one in Virginia was interested in learning about women from New York!

Mary included some great recipes found in newspapers, as well as household recipes for items such as bleach and dyes. Her handwritten recipes include how to prepare an East India pickle, apple custard, and tip top cakes. Finally, at the end of the volume, Mary pasted a newspaper clipping about the unveiling of the Stonewall Jackson statue in Virginia.

If you’d like to learn more about salesman sample books, check out a description here. There is an online bibliography that includes a portion of AAS’s holdings, but the most comprehensive search strategy would be to search the AAS online catalog for the genre term “dummies (publishing)“. You’ll find records for well over 600 examples in AAS collections!

The Acquisitions Table: Travels by Land & Water

Barnard, H. D. Travels by land & water. [Hartford: H. D. Barnard, 1860]

A very rare and unusual biography and travel narrative authored by 11-year-old H. D. Barnard, who also set this small-format pamphlet in type and printed it on an amateur press. Born in Detroit, Barnard describes several long journeys to Michigan and Wisconsin, and several shorter trips within southern New England, that he took with his father. Another brief chapter describes a visit on board the S.S. Great Eastern while docked in New York during its maiden voyage to the United States.

The Cosmopolitan Lyceum

On September 23-24, 2011, the American Antiquarian Society will host a symposium titled “The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Globalism & Lecture Culture in Nineteenth-Century America.” This conference was organized by Dr. Tom Wright, of the University of Oxford.

So what’s a lyceum, anyway? Throughout the nineteenth century, the lyceum—a scheduled public lecture that was intended to be both educational and entertaining—was one of the dominant modes that Americans in cities large and small learned about the larger world and spent their evenings. These lectures were delivered in learned societies (like AAS), academies, mechanics’ institutes (like Worcester’s own Mechanics’ Hall), or on commercial tours, and they provided writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain with a way to make a reliable living. As such, these lectures occupied a middle ground between the printed world of books and the purely performative world of the theater. They also helped spread both scientific knowledge and social reform, as topics ranged from geology and medicine to temperance and women’s suffrage.

The lyceum was also “cosmopolitan,” in that it provided a venue for well-known foreigners to speak, and it familiarized American audiences with parts of the world they would never see. This conference will be similarly cosmopolitan, as it features speakers from the U.S. and Europe, as it explores the ways in which lecturing engaged with and made use of global knowledge, realities, and experience.

The Cosmopolitan Lyceum symposium is open to the public. Further information, a conference program, and registration details can be found on the AAS website at www.americanantiquarian.org.

Lucy Chase, Part II

Last week I shared a letter from Lucy Chase to a Henry Sargent, and promised more about it this week. Here’s the letter again, as a refresher!

Any thoughts? Well, according to those who have studied this letter, many agree that it is, in fact, a joke! Knowing Lucy’s personality (her wit, her humor, and her intelligence) it hardly seems in character for her to write such a dramatic, love scorn letter. The fact that it is incredibly over the top reaffirms its role as a piece written to give Mr. Sargent a good laugh.

And for those who are wondering, Mr. Henry Sargent was a doctor living and practicing in Worcester. His older brother, Joseph, was also a doctor in Worcester. Henry married his “Miss Whitney”, Catherine Dean Whitney, in 1849. Henry unfortunately died at the young age of 36.

This letter proves the importance of context in historical research. Reading the letter without any background information about Lucy, one would probably take the letter at face value. Even knowing basic information about Lucy, such as her birth and death, where she lived, and what she did, might not be enough. It is because this letter lives in the larger context of the Chase Family Papers that we are able to understand its value. By piecing together an entire picture of Lucy through her correspondence and diary entries, we can recognize this letter for what it truly is.

Finally, I love this letter for proving to those who think people were so different “back then” that they really were not. People have always had a great sense of humor!

Featured Fellow: Carsten Junker

Carsten Junker, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies, University of Bremen, Germany

Ebeling Fellowship Project: “Reading Affect in 18th-Century Abolitionist Debates”

Professor Junker’s project examines late eighteenth-century texts that envisioned an end to the enslavement of African-diasporic people in the North American colonies and early republic. The struggle to overcome slavery was fought by many – by the enslaved themselves and by white abolitionists – and in many different genres. Essays, letters, pamphlets, and other short texts are the genres Carsten Junker plans to analyze closely at the American Antiquarian Society. Within this framework, the question of how abolitionists sought to provoke affective responses in their audiences – from empathy, guilt and shame to fear, outrage and grief – will be central to his analysis.

While Professor Junker is at AAS on an Ebeling Fellowship, he also intends to learn more about the namesake of his fellowship – Christoph Daniel Ebeling (1741-1817). The Christoph Daniel Ebeling Fellowship is jointly administered by the German Association for American Studies (DGfA) and AAS. Application for this short-term fellowship is made through the DGfA. The AAS-DGfA Fellowship is open to German citizens or permanent residents at the post-graduate or postdoctoral stages of their careers. The Fellow will be selected on the basis of the applicant’s scholarly qualifications, the scholarly significance or importance of the project within the field of American studies in general and its German context, and the appropriateness of the proposed study to the Society’s collections. For more information about applying for the Ebeling Fellowship, see the German Association for American Studies website.

More information about fellowships at AAS, including a directory of fellows and their work, is available on our website.

“Past is Present” in the Future

One of the greatest strengths of the AAS fellowship program is that researchers from around the globe, working in diverse disciplines (history, English, art, creative writing, archaeology, etc.), all live together just up the street from Antiquarian Hall. During their lunch hour and after being forced out of the reading room at 5 pm, they gather together in our new fellow’s residence (and sometimes down the street at Nick’s bar over beers and burgers). They discuss their research, insights, and the really exciting things they stumbled upon that day. Sometimes the staff is even lucky enough to join in. Past is Present will give everyone the opportunity to participate in the discussion.

The paragraph above comes almost verbatim from the “About” page on this blog. It was written to describe the vision for Past is Present when the blog debuted almost two years ago. A biennial (two year anniversary) may not seem like much at an institution that next year will be celebrating its bicentennial (two hundred year anniversary). In the blog-o-sphere rather than the archival world, though, we feel it is something to be celebrated.

Take a browse through our archives to see the hundreds of posts from AAS staff, fellows, readers, council members, volunteers, interns, and friends. If you’ve done research at AAS or participated in a program here lately, please take this opportunity to consider writing about it for Past is Present. Your name could be the next to appear in our authors section!

As part of our biennial assessment at Past is Present, we are making plans to beef up the content and frequency of publication. We are also considering a re-design and re-launch of the blog. This is your chance to let us know what you would like to see more of (or less of) on the blog.

One new feature we know we want to debut is a weekly post introducing one of the many people doing research at AAS — you know, the ones we mentioned in the introductory paragraph that come from all different disciplines, states, and even countries. Tune in tomorrow for our first “Featured Fellow” — and an international one at that. Bonus points (or extra research assistance?) will be awarded to anyone who can guess what country our featured fellow is from, or to anyone who provides feedback on what you would like to see at Past is Present in the future.

John Adams: Deadbeat, careless accountant, or the continuing victim of partisan politics?

Since last October, the project catalogers creating online rare-book level records for 1801-1820 imprints have been working on United States’ federal documents. Admittedly, some government documents are boring. But much more often than I imagined they have been a source of interesting, even surprising, information.

Many documents, but especially Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin’s report to the House of Representatives, dated November 6th, 1807, remind us that the questions the country is grappling with today are the same as occupied Congress and government officials two hundred years ago:

On the first day of January, 1809, the principal of the debt, will, if the proposed modification be not assented to by the public creditors, amount to near fifty-seven millions and five hundred thousand dollars … That the revenue of the United States will … be considerably impaired by a war, neither can or ought to be concealed. … It is, on the contrary, necessary … to examine the resources which should be selected, for supplying the deficiency, and defraying the extraordinary expenses. … Whether taxes should be raised to a greater amount, or loans be altogether relied on for defraying the expenses of a war, is the next subject of consideration. …

Depending on one’s point of view, knowing this can be oddly reassuring (we’ve gotten through this before, we can do it again), or the cause for sadness (why don’t we learn from history?)

But the documents which have most recently piqued my interest and imagination are three statements from the Comptroller of the Treasury, dated 1814, 1815, and 1817. They report “unsettled balances” remaining on the books of the Treasury Dept. In the 1814 statement, John Chisholm, “conductor of Indians,” is listed with a balance of $926.24. The accompanying note reads, “He is not to be found.” Was he killed by Indians, did he die of illness or accident en route, or did he take the money and run? In the 1815 statement, Robert Alexander, contractor for building a custom house at New Orleans, is listed with an outstanding balance of $19,000. The note reads, “Custom House built, no account rendered.” Lost in the mail? And in the1817 statement, Samuel Sitgreaves, “commissioner under 6th article British treaty,” is listed with a balance of $6,857. 20. The note reads, “Advanced by Department of State. No account rendered. Mr. S. alleges that the public is in his debt.” Call me a cynic, but what are the odds that this was ever settled?

Others with outstanding balances were noted as deceased, insolvent, or subject to suit. Among the debtors are some familiar personages: William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory, Joel Barlow, late minister plenipotentiary to France, and John Adams, late president of the United States. John Adams? Yes, on all three statements the second president of the United States is listed with an outstanding balance of $12,898 for “household accommodation.” In both the1814 and 1815 reports the note reads, “The money alleged to have been expended, but no sufficient vouchers produced.” In 1817 the note was expanded and softened a bit:

Advanced to him for the accommodation of the household of the president. Mr. Adams forwarded a certificate of his then secretary, that the money was expended according to law; but this has been deemed an inadmissible voucher by my predecessors, and cannot now be found in the office.

My imagination runs wild. Was Adams avoiding specificity so that it would not be known exactly how many place settings of china Abigail purchased? Or was he always a bit careless with his accounts? Or should the sloppy accounting be attributed to the Treasury Dept. rather than to Adams? By this time John Adams had been out of office for more than a decade. If there was a problem, why hadn’t it been resolved before this? The matter might simply have been ignored to avoid confrontation. Can you imagine being the clerk charged with contacting President Adams and requesting “proper” vouchers? Or maybe no one ever contacted Adams because some partisan official in the Treasury Dept. expected that the inclusion of Adams’s name on the list of “unsettled balances” would repeatedly embarrass the former president.

Well, time to shut off the imagination, end the speculation, and move on to the less interesting “Letter from the acting secretary of the Treasury, transmitting a report of the names of the clerks employed in the several offices of the Treasury Department …”

The Acquisitions Table: Taxation, Exactly 149 Years Ago Today

“Strike, but hear.” Homer, NY, August 16, 1862.

This broadside, found between the pages of an August 1862 issue of the Cortland County Republican newspaper, recounts the difficulties of taxation and raising bonds in the small town of Homer, NY, during the Civil War. Issued by dry good merchant (and Town Supervisor) George W. Phillips, the broadside documents the difficulties Phillips encountered when dealing with bounty payments for soldiers enlisting in local regiments. Phillips felt that the state should tax its citizens evenly to raise equivalent funds for bounties, while some Homer residents wanted to levy only enough tax to supply each soldier with a flat $50 enlistment bounty. Phillips explains his unpopular position of waiting for the state government to take action (he was accused of being unpatriotic) and the failures of earlier locally-funded bounty systems. The problem was real, and enlistment calls were often delayed as young men waited to see which towns offered the best bounties. By 1863, some New York towns offered up to $400 per soldier, making the town of Homer’s $50 bounty quite unattractive.

Gift of the Phillips Free Library, Homer, NY.