THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO FOUND AMONG THE PAPERS OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY ANDREW INCHIOSA CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2019 Table of Contents List of Figures iii Acknowledgments iv Abstract vi Introduction: Not Rubbish 1 Chapter 1: The Antiquaries’ Archives 19 Chapter 2: Authors’ Papers and the Flotsam of Antebellum Literature 55 Chapter 3: Three Secrets and a Lie 87 Chapter 4: About to Be Free: Paperwork and Emancipation 117 Coda: The Document Book 140 Bibliography 152 ii List of Figures Introduction. Figure 1. First page of Walt Whitman’s “The Lesson of a Tree,” 2 University of California, Berkeley. Photo courtesy of The Walt Whitman Archive, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Figure 2. Hetty’s letter to Patrick Reason, 10 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Chapter 1. Figure 3. A page from a hand-bound volume of Christopher 29 Columbus Baldwin's original copies of gravestone inscriptions. American Antiquarian Society. Figure 4: Baldwin always reproduced the visual elements 29 of epitaphs in his transcriptions. American Antiquarian Society. Figure 5. William Lincoln’s album of dinner invitations. 36 American Antiquarian Society. Figure 6. An updated docket, from a letter sent to Baldwin. 38 American Antiquarian Society. Chapter 4. Figure 7. Phebe Henry’s manumission papers. 124 Black History Collection. Library of Congress. All photos are mine unless otherwise noted. iii Acknowledgments Lauren Berlant made every conversation, and every moment of research and writing, a thrill. Bill Brown helped me to hear what I was trying to say. Eric Slauter made me want to be a book historian and a cultural historian. They were wonderful guides and advisors, and they are my models for the kind of teacher and scholar I hope to become. Maud Ellman, Heather Keenleyside, Richard Jean So, Chris Taylor, and Ken Warren inspired me to think in new ways while I was writing this dissertation, and before then, too. My amazing graduate cohort changed me as a reader, and more fundamentally as a person. Special thanks to Hannah Christensen, Kevin Kimura, and Katie Krywokulski for many years of friendship, and to Hadji Bakara, Oscar Chavez, Alex Jacobs, Jose-Luis Moctezuma, Andrew Peart, and Megan Tusler for talking to me about my work and sharing their own research with me. I was lucky to spend a year in Philadelphia learning from my fellow fellows at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Thanks, especially, to my cohort of English, Art History, and Material Text scholars there – Daniel Couch, Elizabeth Eager, Lauren Kimball, Don James McLaughlin, and Laura Soderberg – and to Dan Richter for everything. I am extraordinarily grateful to everyone I met during my time as a fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities. Jim Chandler, Margot Browning, Rebecca Crisafulli, Tom Kelly, Branden Kosch, Daniela Licandro, Adhira Mangalagiri, Jim Conant, Daniel Desormeaux, Ghenwa Hayek, Bob Kendrick, Wei-Cheng Lin, Sarah Nooter, Michael Rossi, and Yuri Tsivian: thank you for a year of the best, most generative discussions that I have ever been a part of. Jim Green and Connie King introduced me to the collections at the Library Company and the joys of looking at things like book bindings. So many other librarians offered me the same support and generosity at the Newberry Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Beinecke iv Library, the New York Public Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Haverford College Library, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, and the Library of Congress. I could not have written a word of this dissertation without their guidance. Thank you to my students in “Letters to America,” whose ideas always surprised and dazzled me. I was so fortunate to spend a year teaching at the Lab School while I finished my dissertation. Thank you to Mark Krewatch, Carrie Koenen, and everyone else in the English Department at Lab for an extraordinary year of good company and encouragement. And I cannot thank my students at Lab enough for the eight months of or so that I spent with them. Their warmth and energy and kindness helped me to finish this project. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, to Leslie, and to Bum, whose love and support mean more to me than I can say. v Abstract In my dissertation, I study the fate of loose manuscripts in an age we more often associate with print. Starting in the early nineteenth century, families began to give the wills and letters that they’d always stored in dresser drawers to new libraries and historical societies. Historians consulted these papers and other old documents and started to think of manuscripts as primary sources for their work. Authors and politicians wondered who might someday read their drafts and private notes. Studies of early American print and manuscript cultures tend to focus on the production, publication, and circulation of texts. But men and women in the early United States also lived with, and held onto, manuscripts – written by themselves, by their loved ones, and by people who were strangers to them. A list dashed off in an instant was a manuscript; a list kept for decades, bundled together with other lists and messages, was also part of someone’s papers. I argue that this new name points to something larger: manuscripts became public texts through their preservation. Michael Warner made “publication” a crucial term for understanding the political and cultural impact of print in his exploration of the eighteenth-century American public sphere. The papers of famous politicians and writers were sometimes published, in bits and pieces, during the first half of the nineteenth century. But these papers, like the papers of far less prominent men and women, were already public, in ways that didn’t begin or end with publication. My four chapters and coda move across the domains of history, literature, politics, and law, traveling from attics and studies to the halls of Congress, before winding up in local courtrooms. In my first chapter, I offer a group portrait of four American antiquaries: Christopher Columbus Baldwin, William Lincoln, Thomas Wallcut, and Thomas Jefferson. These men collected old manuscripts with a zeal that was sometimes confusing to other people. vi Baldwin planned to write a history of every family that had lived in the town of Sutton, Massachusetts. He and Lincoln looked through all the court ledgers in the garret of the Massachusetts Court House. Wallcut searched for deeds and treaties that gave English and French colonists ownership of the Wampanoag and Penobscot Indians’ land. And Jefferson spent thirty years amassing lists of words from fifty Indian languages. These four men shared an archival consciousness that wasn’t just a variety of historical consciousness. It involved transferring notes from one page to another, finding a place to label a letter, and feeling a document slip through one’s fingers. Obsessive antiquaries have a place in the nineteenth-century literary imagination. The protagonists of Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) mistake a signature carved recently onto a stone for an ancient inscription; Diedrich Knickerbocker, the supposed author of Washington Irving’s A History of New York (1809), leaves all his papers behind him in his hotel room. In my second chapter, I propose that some of the found manuscripts that turn up in antebellum novels and tales are connected to another phenomenon: the emergence of an audience for authors’ papers. When Irving died, in 1859, his nephew opened a drawer in his desk that had always been locked and found a package labeled “Private Mems.” Irving wasn’t the only American author with a reason to worry about the fate of his papers. After Edgar Allan Poe died, ten years earlier, his aunt sold his papers to his literary rival, who proved to be a disastrously bad executor. And, in the early 1870s, Caroline Dall borrowed the letters of Elizabeth Whitman, whose story had inspired Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), from the woman who had inherited them. She then refused, for decades, to give them back. During this era, authors were never sure of which manuscripts they should tear up or hide under a floorboard. The readers who loved and hated their work were sometimes stuck with the same question. vii Until the twentieth century, government documents were not subject to clear standards of classification. But during and after the American Revolution, manuscripts passed between officials were often marked “Confidential” or “Secret.” In my third chapter, I examine some of the earliest versions of what we now call classified and declassified documents, to show that classification and declassification are always political acts, often inspired by other agendas. In the winter of 1812, after a few covert meetings on rainy nights, James Madison, who was then the President, purchased a dozen letters from a former British spy named John Henry. These letters were three years old, and they were mostly filled with gossip from Boston and Vermont coffeehouses. But when Madison shared them, first with Congress, and then with the public, he used their existence to justify the War of 1812. The first clause of the Fourth Amendment, written in 1789, protected papers, along with persons, houses, and effects, from unwarranted searches. These were papers that people kept in their homes: the notes that Baldwin took for his history of Sutton; the letters that Dall wouldn’t return. Around the same time, though, a new set of local laws emerged requiring some people to carry papers with them everywhere they went.