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http://www.neh.go v/humanities/2014/januaryfebruary/feature/paper-trail

Paper Trail
By Nicholas A. Basbanes | HUMANIT IES, January/February 2014 | Volume 35, Number 1
Without a minute Diary, your Travels, will be no better than the f light of Birds, throughout the Air. Whatever
you write preserve. I have burned Bushells of my Silly notes, in f itts of Impatience and humiliation, which I would
now give anything to recover. T hese f air creatures are thyself . And would be more usef ul and inf luential in
Self -Examination than all the Sermons of the Clergy.
John Adams to his grandsons as they prepared to join their parents in England, 1815
Chartered in 1791, during George Washingtons f irst term as president of the United States, the
Massachusetts Historical Society was the brainchild of the Reverend Jeremy Belknap, a Harvard graduate and
Congregational minister whose single-minded purpose in lif e was to document the American experience. As an
amateur scholar, Belknap achieved a modicum of renown with a painstakingly researched history of New
Hampshire that drew heavily on obscure materials he had uncovered during the twenty years he spent as a
village pastor in the Granite State, much of it dismissed by others as rubbish and not worth saving. I am willing
even to scrape a dunghill, if I may f ind a jewel at the bottom, he declared boldly of his research method. Issued
in three volumes between 1784 and 1792, his history earned the esteem of Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote
that readers will f ind in Belknap more general ideas and more f orcef ul thinking than in any other American
historian to date, while a duly impressed Noah Webster anointed him the American Plutarch.
Belknaps zeal to preserve every manner of written artif act was decades ahead of its time, and he was clear
about the way he wanted the nations f irst historical society to go about the task. We intend to be an active,
not a passive, literary body, he wrote in a letter to a colleague who had pledged assistance, not to lie waiting,
like a bed of oysters, f or the tide to f low in upon us, but to seek and find, to preserve and communicate,
literary intelligence, especially in the historical way. One f oresighted strategy was to encourage prominent
people of the day to donate their f amily papers, a precedent that led to the acquisition of numerous domestic
archives, most spectacularly f our generations of documents maintained by the Adams f amily of Brighton and
Quincy, as well as those of such f ounding New England dynasties as the Winthrops, Mathers, Cabots, and
Lodges. He was similarly keen on acquiring the papers of clergymen, entrepreneurs, and everyday people like
Peter Brown, a soldier at the Battle of Bunker Hill whose letter to his mother on June 25, 1775, has been
described as the f ullest account that survives of the f eelings and observations of a participant in the ranks.
T hough its name suggests that it is the repository of a single state, the Massachusetts Historical Society set
a mandate f or itself that embraced the entire country, and as pretty much the only game in town during this
f ormative period of the early republic, Belknaps labor of love established the f oundation of an institution that
today numbers among its holdings some twelve million pieces of manuscript, most of them coming as gif ts, the
vast majority in the f orm of letters, diaries, notebooks, journals, sketches, or drawings. I have, over the past
several decades, been shown through the vaults by two of the institutions chief librarians, the f irst time in
1988, when I was starting research f or what seven years later would become A Gentle Madness.
My guide at that time was Stephen T. Riley, then the director emeritus of the MHS and esteemed by colleagues
as one of the outstanding librarians of his generation. Among the treasures Riley showed me that day were
George Washingtons Newburgh Address of 1783; Cotton Mathers seventeenth-century Biblia Americana, an
unpublished ecclesiastical history comprising 4,500 manuscript pages; the holographic copy of Richard Henry
Danas Two Years Before the Mast; a number of Revolutionary-era documents in the hand of Paul Revere; and
the detailed journal the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman kept while researching what became his

magnum opus, The Oregon Trail. Riley selected as his f avorite item of them all a pair of letters exchanged
between Abraham Lincoln and Edward Everett immediately f ollowing their respective addresses at Gettysburg
on November 19, 1863. I should be glad, if I could f latter myself , that I came as near to the central idea of the
occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes, Everett wrote the president within hours of their remarks.
Lincolns reply, posted the next day f rom the Executive Mansion, was magnanimous. In our respective parts
yesterday, you could not have been excused to make a short address, nor I a long one. I am pleased to know
that, in your judgment, the little I did say was not entirely a f ailure.
My host twenty years later was Peter Drummey, a young librarian on the staf f when I f irst visited, by this time
the Stephen T. Riley librarian, appointed to that position in 2004. Like Riley bef ore him, Drummey lives with
paper; the older it is, the better. His passion f or the task is palpable, his knowledge of the materials
encyclopedic. In the acknowledgments to his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Adams, the historian
David McCullough paid tribute to the incomparably knowledgeable Librarian of the Massachusetts Historical
Society, Peter Drummey, f or helping him navigate his way through the collections. When I interviewed
McCullough in 2004, f or Every Book Its Readerwe met on that occasion, in f act, at the Massachusetts
Historical Societyhe told me that what impressed him so much about Drummey was the dedication he has f or
placing in context every document he retrieves f rom the stacks, and the way pivotal events and great minds
intersect across a quarter-millennium of American history through their interpretation. It all comes alive in
Peters hands, McCullough said.
Drummey led my wif e and me to the most secure area of the library, an inner sanctum aptly named the
treasure vault. He directed our attention f irst to a single sheet of paper that he declared straightaway to be
his personal f avorite. A good-size document measuring twelve inches by just under eight inches, the sheet
bore creases where it had been f olded many decades earlier. T his is a letter by William Bradf ord, the f irst
governor of Plymouth Colony, to John Winthrop, the f irst governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
Drummey explained and noted the date written to the lef t of the signature at the bottom: April 11, 1638.
Plymouth is only f orty miles south of here, but at the time of the writing, they were independent colonies.
T he main body of the letter discusses in a f irm but cordial way a disputed border, a matter that remained
unresolved, even though the two colonies had united the year bef ore in a war against the Pequot Indians. At
issue still was whether Scituate, considered by the Pilgrims to be the northernmost town in Plymouth Colony,
actually lay within the bounds of Massachusetts Bay, and whether Hingham, settled by Massachusetts Bay,
actually f ell within territory assigned by the Crown to Plymouth. Bradf ord used the occasion to express
mounting concern over whether the religious dissident Anne Hutchinson, who would be expelled f rom
Massachusetts Bay shortly af ter the Antinomian Controversy of 163638, might move with her f ollowers into
Plymouth, and he asked Winthrop f or more inf ormation about Mary Dyer, a supporter of Hutchinson who would
die as a martyr to religious f reedom in 1660.
All in all, it is a letter of some substance, penned in a tight, caref ul hand on a large sheet of rag paper,
handmade in Europe, of courseas the establishment of the f irst paper mill in British North America was still
f if ty-two years awayand in remarkably good condition. T he considered response Winthrop draf ted f or
Bradf ord was summarized on the reverse side of the same letter, on which the recipients address had been
written but which otherwise was lef t blank. Paper was very scarce in the colonies, not something to be wasted,
so precious that an important exchange between two governorstwo heads of state, reallywould be written
on a single sheet, Drummey said.
T his prof ound respect f or paper is by no means restricted to the seventeenth century, either, Drummey
continued, and he cited the example of Horace Mann, who was a distinguished ref ormer, abolitionist, and
politician in the 1800s. Horace Mann was born in the small town of Franklin, Massachusetts, in 1796, and he
was brought up in the f rugality of the countryside. So when he writes out lectures or speeches, hell do it on
the back of a letter he has received, or something else that might be lying around, because no piece of paper
goes unused. What you have so of ten with him are two dif f erent documents on one sheet of paper, more

goes unused. What you have so of ten with him are two dif f erent documents on one sheet of paper, more
of ten than not unrelated to each other. It can be very problematic if youre an archivist: You go looking at one
thing and wind up trying to decipher another. My point is that you may say William Bradf ordthats the 1630s.
Im saying Horace Mann1830s. Its still doing the same thing.
T he respect early Americans had f or paper was evident yet again in the next item Drummey had laid out, a small
volume, bound in leather, that he identif ied as an early diary of John Adams. It dates f rom 1755, when Adams
graduated f rom Harvard and moved out to Worcester to be a schoolteacher. He invited me to pick up the
f ragile octavo and examine the pages. Look how tight the writing is, he prodded, noting how Adams had
written with extraordinary concision and economy. Once again, paper is dear, so you write small. We have
thousands of diaries in this building, probably hundreds f rom the time of the Revolution alone, and what is
striking is that they are all little books just like thisand not an inch of space is wasted in any of them.
We then turned to another John Winthrop item, one f ar more f amous than the response to William Bradf ord
we had examined a f ew minutes earlier, this one showing the physical ef f ects of continued consultation over
the previous three centuries. T his has magnetized people f or hundreds of years; everybody has handled and
touched it, Drummey said, and he allowed me to go ahead and add my f ingerprints to the vellum binding. It was
one of the two surviving volumes of the journal Winthrop kept f rom the time he set sail f rom Yarmouth on the
ship Arbella, in 1630, and maintained through 1649, the year of his death, by common consent the most
important f irsthand account relating to the earliest years of European settlement in North America. T his is the
third volume, at the end of Winthrops lif e, and what I suggest you observe is how thoroughly the book has
been read. Once you get into the meat of his descriptions, you can sense the number of people who have
actually turned the pages of this volume; what you are looking at is the human ef f ect on documents.
In 1984, Richard S. Dunn, a University of Pennsylvania historian and at that time the most recent editor of the
Winthrop journal, described the problems a scholar encounters when beginning a project of this complexity.
T his set of texts is surely the most baf f ling of all major early American documents to decipher or to edit, he
wrote.
T he handwriting in the two surviving volumes is notoriously hard to read, the ink is f aded, the paper is of ten
stained, worn, or torn, and the text is studded with marginalia, insertions, cancellations, and underscorings.
Other scholars who worked directly with these texts over the decades have included William Hubbard and
Cotton Mather in the seventeenth century; T homas Prince, Ezra Stiles, Jonathan Trumbull, and Jeremy Belknap
in the eighteenth; and James Savage in the nineteenth. T hree separate editions preceded the 1984 ef f ortin
1790, 182526, and 1908. T he second volume of the journal, containing 366 manuscript pages and the largest
of the three, was destroyed in a f ire at Savages home in 1825, a grievous loss, although a modernized
transcription he had made of the text survives to preserve some sense of the content. Twentieth-century
historians who consulted the journal include Bernard Bailyn and Walter Muir Whitehill.
Once again, Winthrops prof ound appreciation f or paper is immediately apparent: When he f ormally began the
chronicle of his great adventure to the New World on March 29, 1630, he started at the back of a journal he
had already been using f or other purposes. He simply f lipped the volume upside down and wrote in reverse
direction f rom the back, f illing up all the pages bef ore resuming his narrative with the now lost volume 2. Only
volume 3the copy I handledbegan on paper that had not been written on previously.
As we moved away f rom this cubicle, Drummey paused to indicate an alcove that contained a teeming archive
of correspondence, letter books, diaries, literary manuscripts, speeches, and assorted legal and business
documentssome half a million pages of materials generated primarily by f our generations of the Adams
f amilyand took a moment to appreciate the enormousness of what is preserved in this compact space. It
begins with John Adams, the second president of the United States, and continues with his son, John Quincy
Adams, the sixth president. Next come John Quincys descendants, including his son Charles Francis Adams,
the ambassador to Great Britain during the Civil War, in the third generation, f ollowed, in the f ourth, by
Charless sons, who included the author Henry Adams and the historian Brooks Adams.

Charless sons, who included the author Henry Adams and the historian Brooks Adams.
T he archive came to the MHS in 1956, and editing it f or publication has occupied a team of textual scholars f or
more than half a century now, with f if ty-two volumes published by Harvard University Press through 2010. A
microf ilm edition of the papers, issued in 608 reels bef ore the move to digital preservation began in the 1990s,
runs to more than f ive miles in length. But f ar more impressive than sheer size is the realization that this is
arguably the most signif icant gathering of documentary material relating to one f amily to be f ound anywhere in
the United States. Of its kind, the collection known as the Adams Papers is beyond price and without peer, L.
H. Butterf ield, who served as editor-in-chief of the project during its earliest years, wrote. No such
assemblage of historical records touching so many aspects of American lif e over so long a period has ever
been created and kept together by any other f amily in this country.
For Drummey, the personal impact of the archive is beyond words. T his is where history lives, he said simply.
Certainly the best known component is the 1,160 letters exchanged between John Adams and his wif e, Abigail,
f rom 1762 to 1801they were the centerpiece resources f or David McCulloughs 2001 biography and f or a
greatly admired seven-part miniseries that aired on HBO in 2008but there are other high spots equally as
compelling, not least among them the two-way correspondence between John Adams and the man who
succeeded him as president, T homas Jef f erson.
T he reason the Jef f ersonAdams correspondence is so wonderf uland the reason we know it so wellis
because John and Abigail kept every letter Jef f erson wrote to them, and made copies of all the letters they
sent to him. So we have both sides of the correspondenceand we have it here, in one collection of papers.
And every bit as vital as the JohnAbigail letters and the Jef f ersonAdams letters is the diary kept by John
Quincy Adams, begun in 1779, at the age of twelve, and maintained f aithf ully f or close to seventy years. T he
f inal entry was made just a f ew weeks bef ore Quincy Adams collapsed on the f loor of the House of
Representatives, in Washington, in 1848, dying two days later. L. H. Butterf ield regarded the diary as probably
the most extensive and f aithf ul record of its kind ever compiled. During one period of half a century, there are
no breaks at all in the daily journal365 entries a year, 366 during leap yearsprompting Quincy Adams to
complain, in one instance, that the marathon ef f ort was like the race of a man with a wooden leg af ter a
horse, creating, in his irritated view, a multiplication of books to no end and without end.
Comprising some f ourteen thousand pages, the f if ty-one volumes were f irst prepared f or publication in a
heavily truncated edition by John Quincys son Charles Francis Adams (himself a committed diarist), and more
recently in its entirety, as part of the ongoing collaboration with Harvard University Press. T his is another
interesting thing about paper records, be it f aithf ul letter writing or the keeping of a diary across many
decades, Drummey said. It is not simply a record, but a f orm of discipline. Someone who keeps a journal like
this with an unbroken series of entries is doing a lot more than maintaining a diary. It represents so much of
who he was. John Quincy Adamss diary was so f amous that people would ref er to it in his own lif etime. A
question would come up about some obscure matter bef ore Congress, and someone would say, Well, John
Quincy Adams must have that in his diary. And it was considered to be probative.
Bef ore leaving the Adams Papers, we spent some time with two of the most f requently quoted letters f rom the
archive: one f rom John to Abigail, announcing the f ormation of the new nation in Philadelphia; the other f rom
Abigail to John, urging him in clear language to remember the ladies in whatever plans might be f ormulated f or
the new republic. Drummey also pointed out a number of letters that lacked the usual salutationsmy Dearest
Friendnot through any oversight but because they were written over several days f or purposes of paper
conservationsometimes twice on the same dayuntil the entire surf ace was used up.
Drummey encouraged me to read aloud the letter f rom John, dated July 3, 1776, in which he discussed the
momentous events of the previous day. Adams thinks that July 2, the day they voted f or independence, will be
the one celebrated f or generations to come, not when it was publicly declared, he said. When this letter was
written on July 3, the Declaration had already been draf ted and approvedbut it had not yet been set in type
or printed. So here you have a person who is on the committee to write the Declaration of Independence, hes

or printed. So here you have a person who is on the committee to write the Declaration of Independence, hes
a direct participant, and what is most remarkable about this letter is that he predicts precisely the way the day
will be rememberedonly hes got the exact day wrong.
At this point I picked up the letter, ever so gently, and read into my digital voice recorder the f ollowing excerpt: I
am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It
ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to
be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonf ires and Illuminations f rom
one End of this Continent to the other f rom this Time f orward f orever more. I took several photographs of
the document and waited f or Drummey to summarize what I had just held in my hands. John Adams describes
Independence Day exactly as we celebrate it, he said. Only he doesnt know just yet that it is going to be the
Fourth of July.
T hough written privately to his beloved Abigail, it seemed clear to me that Adams was aiming f or a much wider
readership. Hes documenting everything f or posterity, I said. Exactly, Drummey replied, and perf ectly, too.
Once again, this is a letter without an introduction, because hes writing to his wif e more than once a day on
the same sheet of paper. Notice that the handwriting is more compact, neater, and more controlled. T he paper
was smaller, too, than most of the others, undoubtedly a consequence of the shortages brought on by the
war.
From the Adams Papers we turned to an archive of materials central to the lif e and career of T homas
Jef f erson, including approximately 8,800 pieces of correspondence, of which 3,280 are letters written by
Jef f erson. Other materials include a number of journals Jef f erson kept f or more than f if ty years, various legal
papers, a catalog he compiled in 1783 of his personal library, and f our hundred architectural drawings. It is, in
f act, a larger collection of Jef f ersoniana than the one held at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, an
institution that the third president f ounded and where another considerable collection of his papers is
preserved. T he materials Drummey was about to show us had been given to the Massachusetts Historical
Society in 1898 by T homas Jef f erson Coolidge of Boston, a great-grandson.
We began with a journal Jef f erson kept on beautif ully made rag paper that bears no f ormal title but is
cataloged by the society as T homas Jef f ersons Farm Book, a generic way of identif ying what is essentially a
record of the minutiae that went into the operation and management of a considerable Southern estatesome
10,600 acres, according to the journalf rom 1774 to 1824. How many hogs may have been slaughtered in a
certain month, whatever repairs had to be made on the outbuildings, provisions that were purchased and the
amounts paid, all the plowing, sowing, planting, and cutting activities that were perf ormed, the crop f orecasts,
and the harvests realizedall are part of the seasonal chronicle.
If you want to understand how a plantation operates at this point in American history, this is where you go,
Drummey said. Scholars today want to know how everyday lif e was lived; I wont say this is unique, but its
extraordinarily detailed. My wif e was taken by an entry that itemizes the precise number of turns a waterpowered grinding wheel made over a certain period of time. Hes an engineer, remember, Drummey said, so
hes f ascinated by that stuf f . I marveled at the excellence of Jef f ersons handwriting. And it sustains
throughout his lif e, Drummey said. T he last letter he writes is as clear and as legible as the letters he writes
as a young man. Also in the societys collection is a companion volume to the Farm Book called the Garden
Book, in which Jef f erson recorded the varieties of vegetables, f ruits, f lowers, and trees planted at Monticello
and at Shadwell, a f ourteen-hundred-acre tract along the Rivanna River that he inherited f rom his f ather, as
well as data on sowing locations, harvesting dates, and weather conditions; it spans the years 1766 to 1824.
Of consuming interest to people who examine the Farm Book are the names and personal details of the many
hundreds of tenant f armers and servants who tended Jef f ersons f ields and maintained his household. T he
central dilemma of American history is on almost every page of this journal, Drummey said. T hese are slaves
that belong to Jef f erson, and you cant disguise it. T here are hundreds of people listed here. T he journal
Jef f erson ref ers to it as a diaryincludes lists of the names and locations of his slaves, including Sally

Jef f erson ref ers to it as a diaryincludes lists of the names and locations of his slaves, including Sally
Hemings, who was determined through DNA testing in 1998 to have been the mother of a son by Jef f erson,
and of her other children, who are listed on numerous pages. T here are also itemizations of the cloth, bedding,
and f oodgenerally f ish, bread, and beef that was distributed to the slaves. Its all here, in his hand, and the
record, again, is meticulous. It also includes data f or Poplar Forest, the retreat he owned about eighty miles
south of Monticello, and a number of other places that he owned as well.
Among other items Drummey showed us was paper money printed during the Revolution, a good deal of it
designed by Paul Revere, and a sheet of stamps of various denominations issued by the British government in
accordance with the Stamp Act of 1765, materials that would be regarded as ephemeral f or the periods in which
they were produced, and thus very rare today. T hese revenue stamps are vanishingly small in number and
almost impossible to f ind, he said. Just about all of them were destroyed, most of them in anger by the
colonists. How these examples managed to be preserved goes back to principles put in place when the
historical society was established in 1791. T he only person I can think of who made any ef f ort to preserve
them was our f ounder, Jeremy Belknap. He kind of got what it was all aboutright f rom the beginning,
Drummey said in summation, his presentation f inally f inished, a three-hour tour de f orce in every way. You
know, he said as we headed back downstairs to his of f ice, I sometimes wonder if you can love these
documents too much; I say that because I havent f ound one among the twelve million yet that bores me.
From the book: On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History by Nicholas A. Basbanes. Copyright
2013 by Nicholas A. Basbanes. Published by arrangement with Alf red A. Knopf , an imprint of T he Knopf
Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.
Nicholas A. Basbanes, the author of A Gentle Madness and several other well-regarded books, received a
$50,400 research f ellowship f rom NEH in 2008 to support work leading up to On Paper, f rom which this essay
is excerpted.
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