Bostonians and Their Neighbors as Pack Rats Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/24/2/141/2744123/aarc_24_2_t041107403161g77.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 By L. H. BUTTERFIELD* Massachusetts Historical Society HE two-legged pack rat has been a common species in Boston and its neighborhood since the seventeenth century. Thanks Tto his activity the archival and manuscript resources concen- trated in the Boston area, if we extend it slightly north to include Salem and slightly west to include Worcester, are so rich and diverse as to be almost beyond the dreams of avarice. Not quite, of course, because Boston institutions and the super—pack rats who direct them are still eager to add to their resources of this kind, and constantly do. The admirable and long-awaited Guide to Archives and Manu- scripts in the United States, compiled by the National Historical Publications Commission and now in press, contains entries for be- tween 50 and 60 institutions holding archival and manuscript ma- terials in the Greater Boston area, with the immense complex of the Harvard University libraries in Cambridge counting only as one.1 The merest skimming of these entries indicates that all the activities of man may be studied from abundant accumulations of written records held by these institutions, some of them vast, some small, some general in their scope, others highly specialized. Among the fields in which there are distinguished holdings—one may say that specialists will neglect them only at their peril—are, first of all, American history and American literature, most of the sciences and the history of science, law and medicine, theology and church his- tory, the fine arts, finance and industry, maritime life, education, and reform. No wonder that in 1889 one of the most articulate of all Boston- ians, when mired in the plethora of materials he had to go through * Paper read before the Society of American Archivists at its annual meeting in Bos- ton, Oct. 5, i960. The author is editor in chief of The Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 11 wish to thank Philip M. Hamer, Executive Director of the Commission, under whose official and personal supervision the Guide has been prepared, for the privilege of consulting the entries for Massachusetts institutions in advance of publication. By the time this paper appears in print the Guide will have been published by Yale University Press. 141 142 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST in writing a two-volume biography of another Bostonian, exclaimed from the depths: Who was that much abused prophet who destroyed the library at Alexandria ? I do not recollect his name. Nevertheless, there should be a monument erected Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/24/2/141/2744123/aarc_24_2_t041107403161g77.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 to his memory. Would that he could come back to life once more, and begin at Harvard College and thence proceed to Washington, leaving a smouldering mass of burning records behind him.2 Yet when Charles Frances Adams, 2d, who uttered this complaint, died, he left a mass of correspondence, diaries, notes, drafts, clip- pings, and other papers that run to many thousand pages and span his career as army officer, public servant, businessman, scholar, and writer. The papers have come to rest, naturally enough, in the Mas- sachusetts Historical Society, where they are consulted with great frequency. The underlying causes for phenomena like these in the Boston scene spring readily enough to mind. In spending a few minutes pointing out a few of them, I can hardly expect to tell this audience anything it doesn't already know. They are not, of course, peculiar to Boston and its neighborhood, but they have been conspicuously operative there, in combination with each other, over long periods of time. In the first place, Massachusetts was settled early, and the early settlers were literate and serious-minded men—the kind of men who make and keep records. The great prototypes were Governor William Bradford of the Old Colony, the manuscript of whose mag- nificently detailed and movingly written record "Of Plimoth Plan- tation" reposes in a special exhibition case in the State House; and Governor John Winthrop of the Bay Colony, whose original journal of the years 1630-49 in the Puritan refuge at Boston is a foundation stone of the Massachusetts Historical Society's collections. There are few other documents matching these in importance, but it would appear that hardly any Puritan clergyman, or for that matter any literate layman, failed to keep a diary in order to discuss how he stood (or thought he stood) from day to day with the Almighty. Cotton Mather says in his Diary that he celebrated his children's birthdays by obliging them "to consider, first, What is their main Errand into the World; and then, What have they done of that Errand. And such of them as are old enough to write, shall give me some written Thoughts upon these Things." 3 To be sure, in 2 Charles Francis Adams to Theodore F. Dwight, Feb. 15, 1889, Adams papers, Mas- sachusetts Historical Society. Adams was writing his Richard Henry Dana; a Biog- raphy (Boston, 1890). 3 Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 7th ser., 8:219 (1912). BOSTONIANS AND NEIGHBORS AS PACK RATS 143 Cotton Mather's time the old religious sanctions were already crumbling, and they were to crumble further, but the habit of jour- nalizing persisted. In the eighteenth century the sons of the Puri- tans were much less addicted to examining the corruption of their souls but marvelously given to recording the weather, the state Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/24/2/141/2744123/aarc_24_2_t041107403161g77.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 of the crops, small business transactions, family events, politics, and all the town gossip. Their endless jottings may only occasionally rise to the level of great literature, as in John Adams' Diary, or to the priceless comprehensiveness of the Rev. William Bentley's. But the collective result is a body of personal records probably un- matched in any other time or place. Thanks to the labors of Mrs. Forbes it has been largely brought under bibliographical control, and her book, happily, is kept up to date by the staff of the Ameri- can Antiquarian Society.4 Since literacy breeds esteem for itself, the Bay colonists founded schools and a college. Harvard had no rival in New England for 65 years, none in Massachusetts for over 150 years, and it con- sequently remained the nerve-center of letters and learning for a large region for a long time. The publishing and book-trade center for the same region very naturally developed in the political and economic capital of the Colony and Commonwealth, a few miles away just across the Charles. By the early nineteenth century it was a truism that Boston and bookishness went together.5 Writing to a friend in Germany in 1839, the historian Prescott said that if a young Bostonian "is not fond of books he may as well go hang himself." e It is perhaps not to be wondered at that most Bostonians found reading and writing books preferable to hanging, but it is remarkable how many became historians of either the first rank or near it. Their names are familiar to all of you: Sparks, Ticknor, Prescott, Bancroft, Motley, Parkman, and a whole shoal of 4 Harriette Merrifield Forbes, comp., New England Diaries, 1602-1S00; a Descriptive Catalogue of Diaries, Orderly Books and Sea Journals (Topsfield, Mass., 1923). This invaluable descriptive listing includes unpublished as well as published diaries, with locations, when known, of the manuscripts in both private and institutional custody. Additions and corrections are entered in a copy in the library of the American Anti- quarian Society. 6 By the end of the century the abundance of authors in and near Boston had be- come a joke. A New England correspondent for the Chicago Evening Post reported to his paper about 1900: "Merely as a matter of general statistics and possibly of gen- eral interest, it may be set down that every family in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, boasts a rubber-tree and an author. In certain instances there are two or three rubber- trees and an author, and in others two or three authors and a rubber-tree, but the average holds good, and we are all very happy and contented." Helen M. Winslow, Literary Boston of To-Day, p. 11-12 (Boston, 1902). 6 Roger Wolcott, ed., The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833-1847, p. 72 (Boston, 1925). 144 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST Adamses. Historical scholarship requires ample sources. Harvard and the Boston Athenaeum could be relied on for printed works, supplemented by the extensive libraries in their specialties that all of these writers and many of their friends assembled. The Massa- chusetts Historical Society offered important manuscript resources Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/24/2/141/2744123/aarc_24_2_t041107403161g77.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 in the field of early New England history, but the collective require- ments of these historians embraced two continents. They covered them thoroughly and eventually enriched the libraries of Boston and Cambridge with what they had acquired, augmented by their own correspondence and other personal papers. The Sparks col- lection in the Houghton Library, the Ticknor collection at the Bos- ton Public, and the Parkman, Prescott, and later portions of the Adams papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society are examples. Wealth was of course a contributing cause to the growth of all kinds of cultural resources in the Boston area.