Staff News

The Clements Library welcomes new staff members Meg Bossio and Maggie Vanderford.  As a reading room supervisor, Meg is now part of the team providing services to our onsite researchers. In a newly created position, Maggie joins the Clements as Librarian for Instruction and Engagement. Maggie’s mission is to coordinate the teaching program by working closely with university faculty and staff to integrate our collections into curricula.

New Joyce Bonk Graduate Student Assistant Claire Danna joins the staff for the next two years while she attends the University of Michigan’s School of Information. Claire is currently working to digitize real photo postcards from the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography and is participating in a new crowdsourcing program on Zooniverse.

As part of the Clements Library’s grant-funded initiative to digitize the Thomas Gage Papers, we welcome digitization technicians Tulin Babbitt, Katrina Shafer, and Michelle Varteresian. Their skills in scanning and providing metadata will help usher one of our largest and most-used collections into the online environment.

In Memory

Distinguished historian and archivist Philip P. Mason, a member of the Honorary Board of Governors of the Clements Library Associates, passed away on May 6, 2021.

Rare 1761 Manuscript Plan of Detroit Acquired

The Clements Library has recently promoted exciting news of a new acquisition—the “Plan of the Fort at De Troit,” hand-drawn for British officials in 1761. It becomes our earliest original manuscript plan of the fort and an inset is now our earliest pictorial view. Clements staff acted fast to secure this rare resource for its purchase cost of $42,500.

Transatlantic Fellowship Partnership Launched

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new research funding program for 2022-2023. In partnership with the American Trust for the British Library, we will offer a Transatlantic Fellowship designed to support at least four weeks of research between the British Library and the Clements Library, with at least one week of research time at each institution. This opportunity will support researchers whose projects will benefit from the use of primary source materials in both libraries, enabling the production of exciting transatlantic scholarship.

The New Julius S. Scott III Fellowship in Caribbean & Atlantic History

In memory of the late Dr. Julius S. Scott, colleagues, friends and family have established a new fellowship to support early-career researchers traveling to use the collections of the Clements Library to conduct research in the fields of Atlantic and Caribbean history, broadly construed. Dr. Scott, who passed away in December 2021, was a Lecturer in Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan and author of the groundbreaking book The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London, 2018). The Clements is now fundraising towards a $50,000 goal to sustain the fellowship through endowed funds.

I entered the meeting space with curiosity and took in the scene before me. Paper worksheets, clipboards, and pencils greeted me on the first table, and there were a dozen books laid out on another three tables. The books varied greatly, but I was drawn first to a thick volume with a worn leather cover. I recognized it as one of the first objects I encountered at the Clements Library, Mamusse Wunnestupanatamwe Up-Biblum God, also known as the Eliot Indian Bible.

Puritan missionary John Eliot produced this Bible in 1663, translating all 66 books into the indigenous Massachusett language. He felt so strongly about his work and the power of the Bible that he developed a written alphabet for the language. Although there is no evidence to suggest that he was successful in his missionary efforts, this record of Massachusett remains a testament to his undertaking.

Maggie Vanderford (standing at right) leads students in a creative engagement exercise.

We are raising money to bolster the staff at the Clements Library. The NEH grant to digitize the Thomas Gage papers provided us with the salaries for three digitization technicians; two for three years and one for two years. Recent grants from the Delmas Foundation and the Upton Foundation supplied seed money for a two-year graphics cataloging position. These are good starting points, but we must do more.

I watched as students began to arrive. Maggie introduced the materials and provided each student with a worksheet and a pencil. They struggled to read Angelina Grimké’s beautiful cursive notations in the margins of her Bible and mused over the tone set by the various religious illustrations. They asked questions, made observations, and discussed how amazing it is that they can look at volumes that are so old.

I felt rejuvenated and remembered exactly why I love my job as a fundraiser: because of the potential to connect people, build community, and inspire learning. In order for the Clements to operate in the welcoming, inclusive, generous way we dream about, we will need a holistic plan to increase our staff levels. The Clements Library needs your help to build a future-thinking course of action. Please reach out to discuss ideas, ask questions, and to offer your philanthropy. I appreciate all that you do to support the Clements Library.

—Angela Oonk
Director of Development

Throughout American history, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, fires, and other dangerous naturally-occuring phenomena have randomly delivered unsparing destruction in an instant. Many of those who witnessed such tragic ordeals have found themselves leaning into their spiritual beliefs for comfort and explanation in the aftermath. The Clements Library contains many compelling resources that provide insight into religious interpretations of natural disasters.

Diary entry by Sarah Woolsey Lloyd (1719-1760) of Stamford, Connecticut, on the morning of November 18, 1755, describing the Cape Ann earthquake. At approximately 4 a.m. she was “waked by a Terrible Earthquake. This is the Second time the Lord arose to shake terribly the Earth in little more than two months besides sundry smaller shocks – what is the Lord about to Do – may we humbly Enquire when Wars and Earthquakes go before him. O Let every Heart tremble for fear of thy Judgment – Lord spare people and save thine inheritance for Jesus sake – amen – amen.”

On the evening of August 9, 1878, a tornado touched down in Wallingford, Connecticut, for around ninety seconds. By the time the twister departed, at least 34 people had been killed, over 70 wounded, and numerous structures destroyed. John B. Kendrick was tasked with writing an analysis of the tragedy, which remains the deadliest tornado in Connecticut’s history. Kendrick wrote in his History of the Wallingford Disaster (Hartford, 1878) that “Many felt strangely bewildered, and thought themselves dazed when, instead of homes, they saw utter destruction; and instead of dwellings, a plain sown with torn and twisted timber, and with debris of every kind. Strong men wept. Strewn here and there, in roads and gutters, and across the Plain, or wedged in among the debris of the wreck, were the lifeless and the maimed, helpless, and, in some cases, clothesless.” Kendrick’s survey of the Wallingford tornado’s impact is rife with disturbing details of the specific ways in which people were killed and how survivors processed what had happened. He sympathized with the mindsets of two women he interviewed who said they had been convinced Judgment Day itself had arrived, writing that “This destruction, so sudden, so complete, so fearful in every respect, coming truly like a ‘thief in the night,’ seemed to them as it would have seemed to us—the agony and passion of earth’s last hour.”

When the time came to bury the dead, the Rev. Father Slocum of New Haven delivered a powerful speech in which he implored people to take heed of the catastrophe as irrefutable confirmation of God’s fury. According to Kendrick, Rev. Slocum stated that God had allowed the tornado to wreak its deadly havoc in order to make it crystal clear that “no matter where a man’s lot is cast he must die,” and that anyone who might doubt the severity of God’s mysterious wrath should “Come here and see these corpses, and then say that He is not a terrible God, if you can.” Rather than allow such events to dampen one’s faith, Rev. Slocum instead encouraged his listeners to recognize the fearsome powers at God’s disposal and urged them to continue to “try and live according to the precepts of the divine commands, so that when we are called upon to die we shall go without fear, but with a conscience prepared for His judgement.”

Kendrick also recorded one darkly amusing anecdote that hints at cross-denominational rivalries. Among the 34 people who lost their lives, all but one were of the Catholic faith and predominantly of Irish heritage. A deacon who visited Wallingford the day after the tornado was intrigued by this statistic. After striking up a conversation with an injured survivor named Pat Cline, the deacon smugly asked, “My poor fellow, how do you account for the fact that none but Catholics were killed yesterday?” To which Cline replied, “Sure and it’s aisy enough accountin’ for that; the Catholics are ready to die any minute, but your folks ain’t good enough to go suddint like.”

A wood engraving from John Kendrick’s History of the Wallingford Disaster (Hartford, 1878) shows the ruins of a Catholic church that was leveled by the powerful tornado of 1878.

The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 remains the deadliest natural disaster in the history of the United States. With fatalities estimated between 6,000 and 12,000 and nearly $35 million worth of damage, it is nigh impossible to fathom the scale of such suffering. On the night of September 8, 1900, the city of Galveston, Texas, was devoured by the ocean as a Category 4 hurricane brought a storm surge that rapidly inundated the city. Paul Lester’s The True Story of the Galveston Flood (Philadelphia, 1900) described the hellish scenes in extensive detail. According to Lester, dead bodies were found almost everywhere in the following days, including many that were buried under huge piles of debris. One search party even located a man who was found “on his knees, his eyes were uplifted, and his clasped hands were extended as in prayer. It was evident that the man had been praying when he was struck and instantly killed.”

In the days and weeks following the hurricane, there were many reported incidents of traumatized survivors experiencing fits of insanity and attempting suicide. Lester noted that mental health issues began “developing among the sufferers at a terrible rate. It is estimated by the medical authorities that there are 500 deranged men and women who should be in asylums, and the number is increasing. . . . Mentally unbalanced by the suddenness and horror of their losses, men and women meet on the streets and compare their losses and then laugh the laugh of insanity as a newcomer joins the group and tells possibly of a loss greater than that of the others. Their laughter is something to chill the blood in the veins of the strongest men.” Amidst such agonizing chaos it is no surprise that there were many who “in their frenzy blaspheme[d] their God for not preventing such a catastrophe.”

Spiritual leaders shouldered the arduous task of restoring people’s shattered faith. According to Lester, the Rev. Dr. Russell H. Conwell (1843-1925) attributed the disaster to “the working of God’s immutable laws, and declared that the calamity in its end was for the good of all things.” Rev. Conwell readily admitted the annihilation of so many decent God-fearing men, women, and children for seemingly no good reason terrified him, yet still he clung to the belief that “the destruction of that city so suddenly was God’s doing, and consequently it must be for good. It was His doing and what He does is right. The hurricane was the necessary outcome of all the working laws of God. . . . We can not understand that; we sit back in our heart’s darkness and say, ‘God is wrong; He is not governing the universe.’”

As horrific as the Galveston hurricane was, the brutality of the storm was matched in equal measure by the charitable responses of many people and organizations that helped the battered city rebuild. Lester’s account includes quotes from Chicago-based ministers, such as Rev. Samuel Fallows (1835-1922), who felt a strong kinship with Galvestonians after having experienced their own apocalyptic disaster in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Rev. Fallows defiantly proclaimed in one inspiring sermon that the “lesson of self-help which this calamity teaches will not be lost. God intended man to conquer nature, to bind its forces, to ride triumphantly on its seemingly resistless energies. Galveston must not be blotted out. It must rise to newness of life. Like our own Chicago, it must be rebuilt on a higher level. It must rear its structures so that the angriest waves shall not dash them to pieces. Another lesson of American pluck and energy will thus be learned by mankind.”

—Jakob Dopp
Graphics Division Cataloger

Book Division

This newly-acquired volume includes wonderful leaves of publishers’ advertisements in the back of the book. The publisher claims that he has a large collection of books, over 50,000 in stock, on a wide variety of subject matter that are available for purchase, including many scarce and valuable books. He also advertises his paper mill, which is able to supply paper of any quality. In addition, he offers cash for linen, cotton rags, wholesale cloth, and junk. Altogether, this provides an interesting glimpse into the economics of bookselling and papermaking at a particular moment in New York history. “He does bookbinding with neatness and reasonable prices and also job printing of all kinds, executed at moderate rates”—an all-in-one business model. A notable feature of this particular copy is that it is bound in contemporary paper over scale board with a hand-sewn leather overcover. It includes ownership inscriptions from Jacob and Lydia Garretson, and then “a present to Phebe Angeline Walker 1851” in the back of the book, with cloth flowers tucked into the binding, a lovely example of repair and continued use of the book long after it was printed.

The Carrier Dove, a Spiritualist newspaper published in San Francisco and edited by two women, Elizabeth Lowe Watson (1843-1927) and Julia Schlesinger (1847-1929).

A publication with a feminist perspective, the Carrier Dove adds to our growing materials on Spiritualism. It includes articles on topics such as women in journalism, reporting that “Progressive newspaper makers are fast realizing the fact that some of the ablest and most earnest workers in journalism are women. A few years ago, a woman novelist was regarded as something of a curiosity and a woman journalist as little less than a monstrosity. Time has abundantly demonstrated the fact that a woman can earn her living with her pen and still preserve her womanliness and she can put a snap, a go, a delicacy in her work which few men can imitate.” There is more reading to be done in this volume on many Spiritualist and feminist topics. The Clements also recently acquired a volume of biographies of Spiritualists written and edited by Julia Schlesinger.

Manuscripts Division

The Le Maire papers include this very detailed description of the real and personal property of the Le Maire plantation in 1789.

Cuba Collection, 1830-1893. 68 Manuscripts and growing.

Graphics Division

[Portrait of Long Otter], by Richard Throssel.

A striking portrait of Long Otter (mis-titled Long Otto) has joined the Clements collections. Taken by Richard Throssel (1882-1933), a photographer of Native American descent, the platinum print shows Long Otter of the Crow Indians wearing a headdress topped with what appears to be a golden eagle. This exciting and unusual photograph, where both creator and subject were Native Americans, will be added to the Richard Pohrt, Jr. Collection of Native American Photography.

Also new to the Graphics Division are two cabinet photographs of students who attended the United States Indian Industrial Training School (known as the Haskell Indian School and currently in existence as the Haskell Indian Nations University), a boarding school for Native Americans started in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1884. The only identified individual is Robert Agosa, who was Ojibwe and whose grandfather was a tribal leader. Agosa went on to become a prominent tailor in the Traverse City area.

Map Division

Detail from Guinea propria, nec non Nigritiae vel Terrae Nigrorum maxima pars, geographis hodiernis dicta utraq . . . ([Nuremberg], 1743).

Guinea propria, nec non Nigritiae vel Terrae Nigrorum maxima pars, geographis hodiernis dicta utraq . . . [Guinea itself as well as Nigritia or the greatest part of the Land of the Blacks as told by today’s geographers…] ([Nuremberg], 1743).

The long full title in Latin and its French equivalent at the top of this highly detailed map tells us much about the sources of this depiction of the coast and interior of the West African region now known as the sub-Sahara. Many notes in Latin populate this map of northwest Africa and its coastline, providing a wealth of detail about trade opportunities, local people, and geographic features. A lettering system of F. H. A. or D. is used to indicate which Europeans (French, Dutch, English, or Danes) held coastal trading posts or factories, used as clearing houses for trade goods and human beings destined for transport in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. At the same time, African kingdoms which controlled the coast and the near interior are also labeled and described. A detailed and evocative illustration in the lower left describes visually the way of life of locals in Cap Mezurado (on the coast of what is now Liberia)—house, kitchen, milling works, meeting house—and the style of dress of the king and queen of Juda, on the Gold Coast in what is now Benin. These sympathetic depictions and the geography are based, according to the title, on the travels of the chevalier Des Marchais (d. 1728) in the region from 1725-27, described and published by Jean Baptise Labat (1663-1738), in Voyage du chevalier Des Marchais en Guinée (Paris, 1730) with maps by the French geographer, J.B.B. d’Anville (1697-1782). The Latin/French map was compiled from these sources by the German geographer, Johann Matthias Hase (1684-1742), who used a new projection of his own devising, and published by the Nuremberg map firm, Homann Heirs, in 1743. Thus the map represents the result of on-site observations and leaves blank what is unknown. The map is an important connection to other Clements material on the centuries-long trade in enslaved people.

Kauai, Hawaiian Islands, by Walter E. Wall, surveyor (Washington, D.C., 1903).

This map of Kauai is one of a set of maps of the Hawaiian Islands recently acquired for the Map Division. Surveys of the Islands were begun by the Hawaiian monarchy in the 1870s. After the United States-backed overthrow of the monarchy in 1893 and annexation of the islands in 1898, new maps were issued based on these surveys, in the time-honored tradition of an imperial power claiming its territory. Published by the United States Department of the Interior, they focus on arable land and the exploitation of natural resources, containing information on pineapple and sugar plantations, forest lands and reserves, grazing lands and wetlands, public lands and homestead settlement plots. Although the Clements collections are not currently strong in Hawaiian material, the acquisition of these beautiful maps may spark reflection and conversation on the commercially-driven land grab that evolved into statehood for Hawaii in 1959. The maps now at the Clements include Niihau, Maui, Lanai, Kauai, and Molokai; the set lacks Oahu and the Big Island, which we continue to seek.

Director’s Choice

Official Map of Chinatown in San Francisco (San Francisco, 1884-85).

Paul Erickson has an abiding interest in adding to the Clements Library’s strengths in 19th century crimes and associated material. To broaden the collection, he recently acquired an interesting new item on the subject of local crime. This map of Chinatown in San Francisco from a municipal report of 1884-85 depicts the area as a vice district, marking houses of prostitution, gambling houses, and opium dens. Produced two years after the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, this is a fascinating cartographic example of criminalizing race, by presenting the densest settlement of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco as the epicenter of criminal activity, even though crime was taking place all over the city. It is a great example of how a majority white community defined crime racially and how it used perceived differences to create boundaries defining communities.

Another crime-related addition is a photograph from a notorious serial murder case at the turn of the 20th century. This is a real photo postcard from the investigation taking place on the Indiana farm of Belle Gunness (1859-1908?), a Norwegian immigrant who settled in Illinois and then Indiana. Gunness’ victims included several children who died under mysterious circumstances in addition to at least 14 men lured to her farm in answer to an advertisement for a husband, instead being robbed and bludgeoned.

Lost, missing, or nonexistent papers have a meaningful impact on the way we understand our histories. We mourn the absence of manuscripts that may have provided us with a more nuanced picture of life in and about the Americas. Many examples come to mind, but one significant loss to history is the first record book of the Massachusetts Bay Court of Assistants, dating from its establishment in 1630 through 1673. This volume contained documentation of the proceedings of the colony’s supreme judicial jurisdiction for civil and criminal cases. According to the Massachusetts Archives, the book remains missing and may well have been destroyed along with other early Massachusetts records during the American Revolution. In a best attempt to piece together this essential record, Clerks of the Massachusetts Supreme Court John Noble (1829-1909) and John Cronin (b. 1872) sought out and compiled original and copied manuscripts (from various other public and private papers) bearing on the activities of the Court of Assistants during these formative years. They were published in Records of the Court of Assistants of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, volumes II (1904) and III (1928). While not a continuous record of the pre-1673 court, the labors of these clerks are a lasting contribution to the source materials of the colony.

Within the missing record book were court documents produced as part of the state-sanctioned murder of Quakers William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, Mary Dyer, and William Leddra/Ledra between 1659 and 1661. The Clements Library is privileged to hold the only known official manuscript copy of the court proceedings and judgment of any of these Quakers: William Leddra, who was executed in 1661. Part of the Quaker Collection, the document, dating from 1660/1661, was copied for a yet unknown official purpose by court secretary Elisha Cooke circa 1716. The provenance of this manuscript is opaque, except that it was owned in 1924 by William Oliver of Sharon, Massachusetts, who had inherited it from his father. It disappeared once again, only to reappear in a circa 1967-1970 mimeograph listing by a Texas rare bookseller as a generic 17th-century New England document. Future Clements Library Director John C. Dann, then a graduate student at the College of William and Mary, purchased the manuscript before discovering its staggering import. Dr. Dann generously donated it to the Clements Library in 1986.

This March 5, 1660/1 legal record was copied around 1716 by Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature clerk Elisha Cooke (1678-1737). It provides scholars with the only primary source trial and sentencing document known to exist for the Quakers executed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1659 and 1661.The vermin-eaten edge is a pre-20th century modification.

The story behind this document and these events lies in the push-pull between conservative and radical visions of the English Reformation. In the early 1600s under King Charles I, English Puritans found themselves in increasing opposition to what they perceived to be a resurgent Catholicism within the Church of England. The conservative Anglican Church, they believed, incorporated various religious ceremonies and practices not found within the Hebrew Bible or Christian Testament that came perilously close to Roman Catholicism. The Puritans were not separatists who sought to break away from the Anglican Church, but instead wished to purify the established church to conform to Hebrew and Christian holy writ. Especially after Charles I took the throne in 1625, hostility toward the sect blossomed, prompting many Puritans to leave the country for the freedom to practice their religion elsewhere.

In 1629, the joint-stock Massachusetts Bay Company secured a charter from Charles I to establish an economically productive colony in New England. This decree allowed shareholder colonists to elect their own executives and judiciary, provided that Massachusetts Bay laws conformed to English law; by 1631 the company became the de facto government. The fleeing Puritans were the primary settlers in the new colony and by the early 1640s, the population swelled to over 20,000. While John Winthop (1588-1649), the first governor, described it as the “City upon a Hill” (in an allusion to Matthew 5:14), the new colony did enjoy a certain level of theological freedom, allowing interpretive challenges and discussions in which alternate views might be deliberated for pursuing the Puritanical Truth.

The colony flirted with theocracy, but provided a glimmer of religious liberty to dissenters by balancing laxity and orthodoxy. Although they believed in the separation of ecclesiastical and governmental roles in the community, the Massachusetts Puritans believed the State itself was a religious body, in which their God was the ultimate lawmaker, and his laws were clearly stated in the Hebrew and Christian scripture. Their legislative and judicial mandate then, was to establish and interpret laws bestowed on the Israelites by Moses (selectively stripping out laws related to ceremony and methods of worship), and with guidance from Jesus’ words and example. Heterodox religious views that magistrates believed were disruptive to the Puritan colony were considered a critical threat to both Church and State. Religious freedom extended only to a set of acceptable, malleable boundaries established by the community leaders. And any persons whose beliefs fell outside these squishy parameters had the freedom to leave the colony.

The English colonies in America, especially Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland, had statutes to prosecute religious crimes such as heresy, blasphemy, profanity, slander, the breaking of the Sabbath, and other acts. Punishments included physical, psychological, and symbolic violence. Convicted persons might be publicly shamed in the stocks, beaten, whipped, mutilated, branded, dismembered, exiled, executed, or otherwise injured. These castigations were indeed carried out. However, contrasted with the devastation of contemporary religious wars and executions of Europe, the English American colonies appear to have been more reserved in meting out punishments for these crimes.

The Quakers entered into this environment in 1656. Formed in England in the earliest years of the 1650s, the Quakers followed and follow the teaching of George Fox (1624-1691), who preached that individual persons have the spirit of their God within them—an Inward or Inner Light—and that God can speak through them without clergy as intermediaries. In the beginning, they were also an apocalyptic sect, believing that the return of Jesus Christ and the final judgment were imminent. Desperately seeking to save as many persons as possible before the end of the world, Quaker evangelists reached America with a message that they would carry quickly, loudly, and publicly to the colonies. This first generation of Quaker immigrants and missionaries were not the quietist pacifists that would form later in the 18th century. They were instead aggressively disruptive, storming into Puritan courts and churches during service, and advocating recusancy. They refused to pay legally obligated tithes, published intensely critical texts against the colony’s leadership, and proclaimed the future of the state officials in perdition. The invasion of Quakers into the colony during its formative years was met with horror. This threat was deemed a satanic effort to deceive and to undermine the religious authority that Puritans believed was vital to keeping their recently established colony intact.

In an effort to quell the influx, Puritan administrators passed laws in 1658 forbidding the heretics from landing ships in the colony and demanding that Quakers already present be taken into abusive custody and leave the jurisdiction on threat of death. Those who refused could even be enslaved. Many Quakers departed, but some, armed with their faith, returned to the colony to declare their religious message and a rejection of their persecution. William Robinson, an Englishman who was a “public witness” or missionary in Barbados, traveled to the American colonies to protest these oppressive laws. He met likeminded Londoner Marmaduke Stevenson in Rhode Island and the two traveled to Massachusetts Bay in the late spring of 1659. They were arrested and banished, but they then returned to the colony from exile and found themselves in jail once again. Meanwhile, Rhode Islander and Quaker prophet Mary Dyer, herself having been imprisoned previously in Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay, traveled to Boston to support the imprisoned Robinson and Stevenson. She, too, was arrested and banished, but also returned to minister. The three were sentenced to death on October 27, 1659. On that day, the men were executed and Mary Dyer, after standing at the hanging tree, bound, face covered, with a noose around her neck, received clemency on the condition of another banishment. While in the ensuing months other Quakers tread onto Massachusetts Bay soil, magistrates opted not to implement capital punishment. In the spring of 1660, however, Mary Dyer again followed her conscience to Boston, again received a death sentence, again stood to hang at the tree, and died there on June 1, 1660. To the Puritans, these dissenters were committing suicide by willfully defying the law. To the Quakers, they were listening to their God and pursuing their religious convictions according to their faith, even to death as martyrs.

The last person to be executed for Quaker beliefs in what is now the United States was a Cornish man named William Leddra. Like William Robinson, he followed his convictions to Barbados before sailing for Rhode Island, where he arrived in March 1658. His missionary work and meeting attendance took him to Connecticut, where he was arrested, abused, and banished. Leddra traveled to Salem, Massachusetts, where, according to Essex County Court Records, he was held on June 29, 1658, for being a stranger at “a disorderly meeting of certeyne suspected psons” on the Sabbath. He was imprisoned, starved, beaten, banished, and moved to Providence, Rhode Island. Persistent in his efforts to proselytize and to support other Massachusetts Bay Quakers, Leddra immediately returned to Boston, where he yet again found himself in jail, harmed, and banished. Then, in October 1659, the Plymouth Colony detained him for being a foreign Quaker. He remained there, fighting the “vnjust and Illegall” detention until he departed Plymouth on April 17, 1660. During this detention, he wrote a public letter to “ye Rulers: & others of ye People,” decrying the banishment/execution laws. Acting under “Necessity of conscience,” Leddra again returned to Massachusetts Bay. Magistrates promptly arrested him, locked him in chains, and fastened him to a log of wood “in an open Prison, during a very cold winter.” Finally, he was brought before Governor John Endicott and secretary Edward Rawson at the Court of Assistants in March 1661, “with his Chains and Log at his Heels.”

The Clements Library’s Massachusetts Court of Assistants document provides an account of the ensuing trial and death sentence. The court proclaimed that Leddra, “for not having the fear of God before his Eyes” despite being banished on pain of death, returned to the jurisdiction “in a Rebellious and Seditious Manner contrary to the wholesome Laws” of the colony. The court also noted the purpose of the laws, which were “made for the Preservation of the Peace & wellfare of the same.” Leddra was then challenged to find English laws in opposition to the colonies’ legislation against the Quakers. He countered by expostulating that he would neither accept the Governor as his Judge nor submit to the “wicked Laws of this Jurisdiction.” The Governor asked Leddra about his intrusion on the colonies’ “Concience.” Leddra replied that the court had no knowledge of what constitutes conscience, that those whom the court had put to death were the “Servants of God” and not, as the Puritans claimed, worshippers with a spirit “callest the Divell.” Drawing on scripture to defend himself, Leddra compared the Quakers’ resistance of the Puritans’ laws to Daniel’s (and other Israelites’) resistance to Nebuchadnezzar II—and the King’s ultimate acceptance of the Hebrew God as the highest authority. In a harsh rebuke, Leddra added that the Puritan “Ministers are deluders & yourselves Murderers”, and that he would never turn from his God in order to gain favor from murderers. With unwavering conviction, Leddra assured the court that this promise he would “seale with [his] blood.” The court gave him another opportunity to leave the colony. He refused, saying that he was “willing to dy for it, Saying he spake the truth.” Frustrated, the court (drawing on Titus 3:1) demanded to know why, if he believed scripture to be the word of their God, did he “revile Magistrates & Ministers”? Leddra declared that speaking the truth is not the same as reviling them, and he compared the Quakers’ plight with that of Stephen, who was stoned to death for preaching that Jesus was the Christ, in the Book of Acts. With no further questioning, the indictment was read, the jury convened, and the guilty verdict reached. “The Governour in the Name of the Court Pronounced Sentence agt. him That Is You William Ledra are to goe from hence to the place from when you came & from thence be carried to the place of Execution and there hang till you be dead.”

Later the same year, after William Leddra’s execution, the Massachusetts Puritans recognized the changing tides in English leadership and opinion, and revised their laws to include new tortures (in the “Whip and Cart Act”) and the continued banishment of Quakers, but to remove the death penalty as an option. Sure enough, after the restoration of Charles II as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, he formally forbade executions for Quakerism as the capital punishment did not adhere to English Law. By 1665, King Charles also forbade the torture of Quakers. The ensuing decades saw a decrease in corporal punishment and banishment, marking an end to the legal persecution of Quakers in Massachusetts Bay.

During and after the state-sanctioned murder of Quakers for their religious beliefs, Puritans and Quakers published differing explanations and meanings for the persecutions. Writers like Cotton Mather retold the events downplaying the religious aspect and rewriting the history to focus on purely civil motivations for the hangings. Quaker writers focused on the barbarity of Massachusetts laws, the calm martyrdom of those executed, and the hypocrisy of the growing myth that New England was founded with a spirit of religious liberty. Each publication played a hand in creating narratives best suited to the contemporary needs of their religions and societies. The Clements Library holds many of the original 17th-18th century printings of these works.

The missing record book of the Massachusetts Court of Assistants would have provided historians with much-desired data and case studies on the implementation of law in the colony in a court setting. The Clements Library’s document provides details about arguments made in court, the use of specific biblical scripture in the prosecution and defense of William Leddra’s case, and the weight given in court for the combined religious and civil disruption caused by Leddra. What have we lost with the absence of court records for William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, and Mary Dyer? We lost comparative examples of similar trials and sentencing, which would have enlightened us on the similarities and variances of legal argumentation used in the Quaker executions. We certainly lost the words of the first three Quaker martyrs, used for their defense and for criticisms of the legality of the persecutions. We also lost a vital female voice to counterbalance the chorus of male voices in the archives.

William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, Mary Dyer, and William Leddra were not the models of quietism and peaceful martyrdom often portrayed, but they were certainly the victims of a mid-17th-century legal codification of a borderline theocratic state. In current times, the nature of religious freedom continues to foster division. Factions still argue that this freedom should only apply to believers of the same faith or to non-believers who practice in a non-disruptive and quiet manner. Religious authority and the power dynamics it seeks to perpetuate strike figuratively, legally, and violently at those who vocally argue against it. As we continue to champion diversity, equity, and inclusion, strive toward genuine religious freedom, and seek to better understand and support one another, the tragedy of William Leddra’s story can be instructive. We might remember where the legal codification of a dominant set of religious beliefs may lead us if we are not ever attentive.

—Cheney J. Schopieray
Curator of Manuscripts

The Second Great Awakening swept the country in the 1830s and 1840s, reviving established churches and spawning fringe sects. Millennialism and the anticipated Second Coming of Jesus Christ were some of the main motives for religious conversion. The question of exactly when was answered by Baptist minister, evangelical apocalyptic theologian, and farmer William Miller (1782-1849).

Miller’s study of the books of the Bible, particularly Daniel and the Book of Revelation, led him to believe that “prophetical scripture is very much of it communicated to us by figures and highly and richly adorned metaphors.” He believed his analysis of the chronology of events in the Old and New Testaments could determine the date of the Second Coming of Christ and the “cleansing of the sanctuary” prophesied by Daniel. Miller based his calculation on the number 2300 which he found in Daniel 8:14: “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed” (King James Bible). Miller calculated that “the vision of Daniel begins 457 years before Christ; take from 2300, leaves 1843, after Christ, when the vision must be finished.” Miller presumed that biblical days meant years. From this equation, as well as other numerological combinations from the Bible that yielded 1843, Miller concluded that the Second Coming must occur between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844.

Riding the wave of the Second Great Awakening, Miller gathered a following with fiery sermons on this topic. He promoted his vision to credulous audiences in churches and meeting houses across the northeast United States.

By 1839, Miller had crossed paths with Boston lithographer, publisher, and social reformer Joshua Vaughan Himes (1805–1895). Himes sat in on several of Miller’s sermons and soon became both a follower and promoter. Himes published the sermons and Millerite newspapers Signs of the Times (Boston) and Midnight Cry (New York), organized Miller’s speaking tours, and boosted Miller’s following to a peak of perhaps 50,000.

Miller’s references to the books of Daniel and Revelation and the calculations essential to Millerite belief were complicated and hard to follow. Visual aids would help explain the premise and hold attention. Himes worked with preachers Charles Fitch and Apollos Hale to design a prophetic chart that would summarize and illustrate Miller’s vision. Himes’ 1842 broadside print, Chronological Chart of the Visions of Daniel & John was produced from four lithography stones on a large 60 by 45 inch piece of fabric that could be easily folded, transported, and hung at the front of a lecture hall or from the branch of a tree outdoors.

Simultaneous with the Second Great Awakening were rapid advances in visual culture through printing technology and growing literacy. Print media became cheaper, faster, and more persuasive with sophisticated combinations of text and image. Social movements such as abolitionism leveraged this with provocative broadside prints that compelled an emotional response, such as the heart-wrenching kneeling slave image or the dramatic diagrams of slave ship interiors.

Religious pictures are often persuasive through emotional connections of a different sort. Iconic saints and holy family depictions can be deeply reassuring in their humanness. Last Judgment images threaten unending pain. The images associated with Himes’ Millerite banners are altogether something else.

A Chronological Chart of the Visions of Daniel and John ([Boston]: J. V. Himes, [1843]). Printed on fabric by Benjamin Thayer. A timeline from circa 700 to 1843 runs vertically along the left, with images of mythical beasts from Revelation and calculations based on biblical numerology. Later editions recalculated the final date to 1844, 1850, and 1853, by which time interest had waned.

Joshua Himes’ Millerite broadside combines images, numbers, texts, and timelines to generate a powerful, mysterious manifestation. Representing history from the year 700 to 1843 it addresses the unknowable future with the logic of a mathematical equation and the certainty of advancing measurable time, coupled with strange and compelling mythological metaphorical creatures, biblical figures, and monarchs from pre-history. All this, combined with the impossibility of disproving an event that has not yet occurred, made a powerful, if not fully understandable case.

As Millerites grew in numbers, their opponents grew as well, with refutations such as Abel Tompkins’ self-published Miller Overthrown: Or The False Prophet Confounded. By a Cosmopolite (Boston, 1840). “This is the day of strange things. We have phrenology, animal magnetism, sleeping preaching, political crisises [sic], and the end of the world. . . . science is always followed by her shadow, which some mistake for the substance. The same may be said of religion. Many deceivers have crept under the sacred mantle of religion, and William Miller is one of them.” A defensive Miller struck back. “My opponents have been in the habit too of spreading false reports, in order to destroy the influence of what they cannot refute. They have published my death in public papers . . . that I had altered my calculation of prophetic time a hundred years. . . . that I would not gamble away my little home. . . . that I built a stone-wall instead of a rail-fence on my farm.” Rationalists, Deists and Universalists received Miller’s scorn “In every place that this subject has been judiciously preached, [they] have been made by the power of the Spirit to see and feel their danger. . . . I beg of you to lay aside your prejudice, examine this subject candidly and carefully for yourselves. Your belief or unbelief will not effect the truth.”

Miller’s deadline for the apocalypse (shifting several times as it passed) came and went, marking not The End, but the beginning of the phase known now as The Great Disappointment. The disappointment was especially profound for those who had sold their possessions, down to their shoes, in expectation of never walking on Earth again.

Scorn, criticism, and outright violence erupted as Millerite congregations turned against themselves. Many theories came forth as to what happened—the date should have been based on the Karaite Jewish calendar and not the Rabbinic calendar; the appearance of Christ was invisible to mortals; the predicted “cleansing of the sanctuary” was occurring in heaven, not on Earth; and many others. Millerite sects gathered around several main theories and carried on, but in understandably smaller numbers. Miller’s prophecies continue in varying degrees in the Adventist movement and in the theology of the Baháʼí Faith.

The absurdity of setting an exact date for The End is easy to ridicule, but at the core it was driven by ordinary people dealing with legitimate fears during times of stress and social upheaval. The decades of the 1830s and 1840s saw massive societal changes in urbanization, industrialization, financial instability, enslavement, immigration, citizenship, and other social issues in addition to emerging religious movements such as Mormonism. It is no wonder there were questions about destiny and finality. Who wouldn’t want to know when it all will end? Those with answers could draw a crowd. Miller and Himes, with mysterious mathematical formulas and dazzling diagrams, packed the house.

—Clayton Lewis
Curator of Graphics Material

In April 1815, a Presbyterian minister named William Dickey who lived in Salem, Kentucky, received an exciting delivery. Salem is located at the confluence of the Cumberland and Ohio Rivers, and had been settled by westering migrants from Salem, North Carolina, only fifteen years before. Located near the border of what was then Illinois Territory, Salem was a tiny backcountry settlement, far removed from any centers of publication. Yet Dickey was waiting for books. A lot of books.

Rev. Dickey and his flock were the beneficiaries of the work of Samuel Mills and of charitable organizations dedicated to the mass production of religious books. Mills was an itinerant minister who toured the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys starting churches and distributing tracts and Bibles on behalf of the American Tract Society and other groups. Rev. Dickey wrote to Mills on his receipt of the bundle of several hundred tracts, saying that he had distributed them to his parishioners: “I directed those who received them, to read them over and over, and then hand them to their neighbors. . . . Religious Tracts have been much desired by us, ever since we heard of Societies of this kind. That so many numbers, and 6,000 of each, should be printed for gratuitous distribution, astonishes our people. They say, It is the Lord’s doing, and marvellous in our eyes.”

Mills described this exchange in an account of his travels published later that same year, Report of a Missionary Tour Through that Part of the United States Which Lies West of the Allegany Mountains (Andover, 1815). This encounter, and thousands of others like it, points to a profound transformation in American book history: the achievement by Protestant evangelical groups of the dream of mass communication, of giving everybody in the United States access to the same printed message at the same time, no matter if they lived in Boston or Philadelphia or in a tiny hamlet in far western Kentucky. The consolidation of hundreds of smaller missionary and tract societies into national media monoliths—the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, the American Sunday School Union, the Methodist Book Concern—would flood the new republic with cheap (if not free) religious books. The legacy of their work can be found in library catalogs across the United States, including that of the Clements Library.

The American Tract Society published different versions of the perennially popular religious allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan, in different languages and formats, many for low-cost distribution. This ca. 1849 volume is an exception, printed by the Society but directed toward a more affluent audience. According to an advertisement, it “well deserves the neatest style of typography—the choicest engraving and the richest binding that art can bestow.”

The metaphor of the early United States as being a “religious free market” is by now quite tired, but that does not mean that it’s entirely wrong. Compared to the countries from which most European settlers came, the American colonies and then the United States were characterized by a shocking amount of religious variety. The earliest settler colonies in North America reflected this diversity: Catholic Québec and Mexico bracketing Calvinist Massachusetts, polyglot New Amsterdam/New York, Quaker Pennsylvania, and Anglican Virginia. Alongside these various faith traditions existed the varied belief systems of Native American peoples and the many religions of West and Central Africa (including Islam) that survived the Middle Passage and evolved in multiple ways on American and Caribbean plantations. While elements of state religious requirements existed in certain colonies, as in the case of 17th-century Massachusetts, by the First Great Awakening in the mid-18th century variation and denominational division were the salient characteristics of North American religion, and these trends would only accelerate in the 19th century.

Nothing about the United States struck Alexis de Tocqueville as being quite so uniquely American on his travels in the early 1830s as what he called the “spirit of association.” The freedom to form associations around particular interests or beliefs was universal in the new nation, Tocqueville wrote: “Each new need immediately awakens the idea of association. The art of association then becomes . . . the mother science. Everyone studies it and applies it.” This quality particularly applied in the realm of religion, where small groups of like-minded believers would without restriction break away from churches and denominations to start their own. And especially for religious groups, one of the most important markers of legitimacy was having a publication program. These small printing operations functioned at the opposite end of the media spectrum from the huge cross-denominational publishing houses based in Philadelphia and New York, but they had the same goals: solidifying a body of accepted beliefs and winning converts to it. From Strangite Mormons on an island in northern Lake Michigan to Massachusetts Congregationalist missionaries in Maui to frontier Methodist circuit riders, the production and distribution of religious books and tracts often marked the first appearance of print in newly appropriated parts of the American empire.

Lemuel Kelley Washburn (1846-1927) compiled the Cosmian Hymn Book (Boston, 1888) for the Freethought community, with the goal of keeping it “perfectly free from all sectarianism.” The hymns extol the virtues of nature and of freedom from all dogma with lines such as, “No king-craft is dreaded, no priest-craft is feared, our laws, our own making; our counsels, revered.”

To be a Protestant Christian in early America was to by definition be interested in print, since Protestantism of all varieties relied on the individual believer’s reading of the Bible. Further avenues for research remain to be explored in the faith traditions of people who had different levels of access to print, such as Native Americans and enslaved Africans. All too often their belief systems were targeted for destruction by Christian missionaries who circulated print to combat what they saw as heathenism. But, over time, some of these religious traditions (and their syncretic offspring) also turned to print to bind their communities together. Groups who defined themselves by their non-belief and their lack of institutional ties—agnostics, Freethinkers, and Spiritualists—also turned to print, publishing their own periodicals and, in the case of one recent Clements acquisition, even producing their own hymnal.

These groups will pose a particular challenge for historians of the 21st century. According to a 2019 report from the Pew Research Center, 26% of Americans said their religious affiliation was “nothing in particular.” These “nones” represent the fastest-growing “religious” group in the United States. But how will future scholars learn what they believe (or do not) if they don’t write about it? Agnostics in the 19th-century United States published endlessly about what they thought about religion, perhaps in an effort to push back against the overwhelming tide of religious books and pamphlets. Even in their unbelief, they associated with other unbelievers, and left records for contemporary scholars to study. One hundred years from now we may know far less about our current society’s religious or non-religious beliefs. But the rich holdings of materials at the Clements for the study of the history of American religion—“marvellous in our eyes” in their own way—can help explain how we arrived where we are now.

—Paul Erickson
Randolph G. Adams Director of the Clements Library

Clements Library Associates Board of Governors News

M. Haskell Newman served on the board from 2010 until 2017. He passed away on April 12, 2021.

Martha Seger was a long-standing and active member of the board from 1994 until her death on June 30, 2021.

Paul Ganson died on January 2, 2021 after serving on the board since 2005.

Four new board members were elected by a special electronic vote this summer. Derk J. Finley of Brandon, MS; Troy E. Hollar of Tuscon, AZ; James E. Laramy of Ada, MI; and Kristin A. Cabral of McLean, VA.

2021-22 Fellows

Long Term Fellowships (3 month)

Howard H. Peckham Fellowship on Revolutionary America

• Camden Elliott, Harvard University. “Sisyphus in the Wilderness:  Environmental Histories of the French and Indian Wars, 1676-1766.”  

Jacob M. Price Dissertation Fellowship

• Jessica Fletcher, Vanderbilt University.  “Before the Amistad:  Atlantic Litigants and the Politics of Haiti and Cuba’s Legal Currents in the Early Nineteenth-Century US.”  

Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship

• Mariah Gruner, Boston University. “Puncturing Femininity: The Construction of Race and Gender in Antislavery Needlework.”

Short Term Fellowships (1 month)

Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship

• Dr. Richard Bell, University of Maryland. “The First Freedom Riders: Streetcars and Street Fights in Jim Crow New York.”
• Dr. Greta LaFleur, Yale University. “A Queer History of Sexual Violence.”
• Phillippa Pitts, Boston University. “Picturing a Medical Democracy: The Art & Visual Culture of American Pharmacopeia, 1800-1860.”

Alfred A. Cave Fellowship

• Dr. Samantha Davis, The Pennsylvania State University. “In Plain Sight: Negotiating Gender and Race in Yucatán, 1521-1821.”
  

Reese Fellowship in the Print Culture of the Americas

• Dr. Daniel Diez Couch, United States Air Force Academy. “Literature, the Subject, and the Act of Erasure.”
• Dr. Danielle Skeehan, Oberlin College. “Genealogies of the American Quill: Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and the Natural History of Handwriting.”

Howard H. Peckham Fellowship on Revolutionary America

• Adam McNeil, Rutgers University. “‘I Would No Go With Him’: Black Women, Liberty, and Loyalism in the Revolutionary Era Mid-Atlantic, 1775-1815.”
• Sarah Pearlman Shapiro, Brown University. “Women’s Communities of Care in Revolutionary New England.”
• Keely Smith, Princeton University. “Communicating Power and Sovereignty: Creek and Seminole Communication Networks from 1715-1880.”
• Emily Yankowitz, Yale University. “Documenting Citizenship: How Early Americans Understood the Concept of Citizenship, 1776-1840.”

Week-Long Fellowships

Richard & Mary Jo Marsh Fellowship

• Dr. Carrie Tirado Bramen, University at Buffalo. “‘The Journey-work of the Stars’: A Cultural History of Astrology in the American Nineteenth Century.”

David B. Kennedy and Earhart Fellowship

• Dr. Carolyn Eastman, Virginia Commonwealth University. “A Plague in New York City: How the City Confronted—and Survived—Yellow Fever in the Founding Era.”

Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship

• Dr. Aaron Hall, University of Minnesota. “The Founding Rules: Slavery and the Creation of American Constitutionalism, 1789-1889.”
• Dr. Amanda Moniz, Smithsonian Institution. “Isabella Graham, Founding Philanthropist.“ Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship.
• Heather Walser, The Pennsylvania State University. “Amnesty’s Origins: Peace, Federal Power, and the Public Good in the Long Civil War Era.”

Mary G. Stange Fellowship

• Dr. Nikki Hessell, Victoria University of Wellington. “Lewis Cass and the Poetics of Treaties.”

Howard H. Peckham Fellowship on Revolutionary America

• Dr. Marcus Nevius, University of Rhode Island. “The Revolution from Below: A Story of Race and Slavery in the Old Dominion, 1760s to the 1790s.”

Forty-three Foundation Fellowship

• Rachael Schnurr, Eastern Michigan University. “Adapting to Americanization: Mixed Race Families and the Coming of the American State.”

Brian Leigh Dunnigan Fellowship in the History of Cartography

• Nicole Sintetos, Brown University. “Reclamation: Race, Labor and the Mapping of Settler States.”

Non-Resident Fellowship

Jacob M. Price Digital Fellowship

• James Rick, College of William & Mary.  “Cultivating Machines:  Capitalism and Technology in Midwestern Agriculture, 1840-1900.” 

When I first heard about childhood as a Quarto topic, my long forgotten love of the Childhood of Famous Americans series came to mind. I remember going to the school library and finding their orange and green covers and enjoying the old smell of the books. As I read them, I thought I, too, could grow up to make a difference in the world like Clara Barton, George Washington Carver, and Benjamin Franklin had.

As I pondered this memory, I realized that even in biographies, we typically prefer a story arc in a protagonist’s life where they overcome an obstacle and emerge successful, victorious, revered, etc. That is all fine and dandy for entertainment purposes, but is that how we want to study history?

On the June episode of our virtual program “The Clements Bookworm,” we hosted Dr. Crystal Lynn Webster for a discussion about her book Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North (2021). Her work shines light on the enslavement of Black children which continued as part of the process of gradual emancipation following the Civil War. This is a difficult topic. It is not the sudden happy ending of freedom that might be written as part of a feel good movie script. Instead, Dr. Webster explores the lives of real children and families caught up in complicated bureaucratic systems that denied them freedom until adulthood and often separated them from their families.

The work of combing through the archives and looking for the various clues about how children were treated is time consuming, but is important for a well-rounded study of history. Through our fellowship program, we can provide support for scholars to travel to Ann Arbor to expand the areas of scholarship explored here at the Clements. All of our fellowships are funded through gifts. If you are interested in making an impact in this ongoing work, please consider adding to one of our fellowship funds or setting up a new fund.

During the pandemic, the staff has been considering the future work of the Clements Library. We all agree that visiting researchers are integral to our mission and funding for the aforementioned fellowships is key in building a robust program. However, we have also seen how we can expand the audiences we serve through digitization and online transcription. We discussed these learnings in our last issue of The Quarto. After all, as George Washington Carver said, “I know of nothing more inspiring than that of making discoveries for ones self.”

Now, with a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize one of our largest and most utilized Revolutionary War collections, the Thomas Gage Papers, we are poised to usher in a new era of access. This can be just the beginning. With your help, we can build upon this momentum. Donors are already making a difference by sponsoring the purchase of equipment through our “Adopt a Piece of History” program and through the Clements Technology Fund. Volunteers are signing up to assist in transcribing handwritten materials to make them fully searchable and easier to study. I invite you to consider getting involved as we embark upon these ambitious projects.

With technology opening up access to our collections and our ongoing support for innovative scholarship, the Clements enables a deeper understanding of childhood and other nuanced topics that can enrich and transform how we understand the past. Perhaps your own connection to the Clements is rooted in the stories you heard as a child. I hope that we can inspire children to learn history, and that as new heroes emerge more books are written. Let’s work together to continue to explore and learn from the archives.

—Angela Oonk
Director of Development

***

Terese Austin (TA): The Clements’ audience has traditionally been college students, faculty, and doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. What interested you in reaching out to school-age children?

Julie Fremuth (JF): At the time, I had my own children, and volunteered in the schools. I always want to share the world with children. The process of making art has been my way to connect with my own thoughts and the world. I wanted to connect to children that way and open up things to them that maybe they weren’t exposed to.

TA: How do you feel your projects connect schoolchildren to themselves and to the past?

JF: What happened 150 years ago we can relate to today, human being to human being. For instance, kids love interactive devices. They love to push buttons and turn flaps and flip open things. The scroll project we did was based on a Milton Bradley item and is made from a shoe box, two paper towel holders, and a long sheet of paper. Who wouldn’t like it? It’s almost like magic, “Wow, I can make this thing move.” They use their hands, but it’s more than using your hands. They learn to measure, problem solve, follow a procedure, and things start to make sense.

Each child got a very basic kit. I would supply the long scroll of paper or poster board but they would have to do the measuring, the scoring, the folding, and then the trimming. It’s really fun to see kids sitting in their groupings, talking while they’re measuring. When somebody says, “I don’t get this,” or, “I need help,” you don’t do it for them, you just ask them, “What’s not working?” And they’ll tell you. “Well, let’s see if we can measure that again. Is that really five inches? Oh, nope, that’s four and a half, that’s why it’s not working, let’s go back and re-measure.” It’s really fun to help them on the journey. To me it’s full of energy and life and connection.

But before all of that, I would sit down with the teacher and say, do you have some kind of curriculum that you need to fulfill. We would talk about different types of content that could be applied to these various structures in a sensible way, and then pair the two. You almost camouflage the writing assignment from the students because they are having so much fun making something. Teachers have always told me that the kids really work hard on the writing piece of the assignment because they made this cool three-dimensional thing that they are proud of and want to keep.

TA: How much do you talk about the collection items that are models for the objects that you bring in – the connection between what the kids are making and the items in our collection or the history of this format?

JF: I had pictures of the items from the collections, and I explained to the students that there were kids 150 years ago that played with that Milton Bradley game. They’re intrigued by the same things, they’re intrigued by the flaps. I said, the same structures were as stimulating to the kids in 1909 as they are now, and some of these things were very colorful. They used fantastic printing, illustration, and ingenious designs.

The Milton Bradley model was for a writing assignment—this was just a format we grabbed from an item which was stimulating. These concepts don’t necessarily have to be used by history students, they can be re-adapted, used by somebody else in areas we couldn’t even anticipate.

TA: What do you feel are the main takeaways from your work in the classroom?

JF: One is exposing the kids to making things with their hands and making deeper connections with their minds, hand-eye coordination, dexterity, learning to follow steps. I realized some kids don’t do any of this at home. It is really about spending time with yourself, your ideas, getting a break from the world, reflecting, and trying to relax. Art work for me became my companion, and I needed it at various points in my life. I hoped kids could give themselves that through this process, and I wanted to help break down some barriers they didn’t know they had about it.

Second, it was a way to share things about history or about any topic, and the stimulation and the inspiration came from items in the collection that I think are beautiful and fanciful and so cool and so simple. All the great ideas come from really simple concepts. They are timeless.

TA: If you had unlimited time and resources, what kind of programming would you like to do with kids?

JF: I would like to do some outreach with community centers where there might be a need. I would love to either invite people to the Library, or go to a place, to connect kids with a history lesson or a little something they would be interested in with a little takeaway project. They take it home and remember, oh yeah, that was a really fun day, we went to that place or they came to us and we did this project and they showed us some stuff they had and I didn’t even realize that stuff was around!

Going back to your question about history, sometimes kids look at old stuff and they think it is not relatable because it’s not modern and button-pushing. But when they realize, “Wow, I can move this or I’ve got a slide-y thing or a flip book or a flap book that folds into something, that’s kind of cool.” I think it does still appeal even though it’s not “modern.” There has been this joyfulness in childhood that goes on forever and helps you connect with these younger people.

Under normal circumstances, when you are simply living your life in all its chaotic glory, trying to find time to make dinner and fold laundry, it can be easy to forget that you’re a historical actor. This past year, however, as we grappled with a global pandemic, racial injustice, and political turmoil, it was clearer than usual that we were, in fact, in the midst of history. But more than all the dramatic headlines and late night fretting over foreboding public health charts, it was my four-year-old son that made me stop in my tracks and realize the weight of the moment. Walking down our street, he was tiptoeing over the cracks in the road and turned to me to exclaim, “Don’t step on the cracks! They’re full of virus!” And my breath caught, not just because I viscerally saw how his young mind was using play to process the anxiety and fear of this time, but because I knew if I didn’t write that down, it would be lost to history. He’s too young to document his own life, so I share my historical record with him.

Looking at archival collections with a careful eye, pausing to notice how children enter into the documentary record produced by the adults around them, you find evidence of their lives and their impact woven through all different kinds of sources. Which makes sense! In the present, children are everywhere, filling parents’ days with their chatter and imaginative play, challenging their teachers and making them laugh, shining light for all of us to follow. But when they can’t write for themselves or save their own history yet, you have to look to others to help tell their stories. Thinking of my son jumping over “virus cracks” or building a Lego facemask as a way of telling me how he was living in our own historical moment, I was reminded of a letter in our Continental, Confederation, and United States Congress Collection. “I was just informed that the Shot and Kentledge [slabs of iron] which were cast by Messr. Faesh and Company and deposited at Elizabeth Town are wasting daily by Children and others throwing them in the Creek and burying them in the Mud,” an exasperated James McHenry wrote in 1797. As Secretary of War he had been turning his attention to the military supply system, but he may not have been expecting to have to deal with the threat of playful youth who turned to his stores for entertainment. Military and political collections are full of these moments that give glimpses of children, reminding us that histories of pivotal moments or grand strategies can skim over the fact that kids were likely nearby, active in the same spaces, being impacted by these events, and sometimes causing trouble.

[Daughter of Thomas Hughes?], carte de visite, 1862.

Even when children were not physically present during tumultuous events, we can still catch sight of them through the records of those who loved and missed them. Thomas Hughes served with the 28th Iowa Infantry Regiment during the Civil War, leaving his wife and at least five children back home. His 11 surviving letters tell of his wartime experience, but most only contain passing references to his children, sending prayers for their safekeeping, kisses, and assurances of his love. His commitment to his family is clear, but the depth and texture of his longing for them is obscured by the limitations of language. How much heartache lies behind the platitude, “Kiss all the dear children for me”? A photograph contained in the collection helps us better understand how Thomas Hughes’ Civil War service was colored by his role as a father. A well-worn carte de visite of a child, possibly his daughter Anna who would have been about 10 when this photograph was taken in 1862, bears the inscription on the back, “Carried by Father thru the War.” Missing his daughter, Thomas Hughes kept this small talisman of home close to him as he served in the Vicksburg and Red River campaigns. Anna Hughes was nowhere near the front lines, but her father carried her with him as he waged war, and this photograph hints at the profound ways parental love and longing shaped soldiers’ wartime experiences. Even in their absence, children were shaping the world around them.

Indeed, visual sources provide powerful glimpses into children’s encounters with the historical drama of the day. Military artist Richard Short produced two sets of views while stationed in Canada in 1759, which were later engraved in London. One set depicted Québec on the heels of the English siege of the city during the French and Indian War. While we can certainly wonder at the artistic liberties Short may have taken, his work suggests a high level of destruction and disruption in Québec during an already turbulent time. Looking closely at the figures populating the scene, you’ll notice a number of children playing amongst the ruins, seemingly using a beam like a seesaw. Short’s view hints at the resilience of the city’s youth during war and uses their everyday playfulness to contrast with the devastation around them. We can’t know for sure whether Short actually witnessed kids cavorting amongst the crumbling buildings, but it’s suggestive about how children have turned to play across the centuries as they confront and live through trauma.

Sometimes, though, the weight can be too much, and they can’t bring themselves to play. In 1946, 90-year-old Clara E. Paulding wrote about when she learned about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Just nine years old at the time, she recalled seeing her friend’s mother “sobbing bitterly in a rocking chair” before telling them of the tragedy. “[A]fter a while we went to the barn where we had meant to play house. We couldn’t. The sorrow of our nation was ours too.” A powerful reminder to make space in our histories and in our hearts to attend to the emotional impact events have on the youngest among us, Clara Paulding’s remembrance in the John E. Boos Collection sits extra heavily with me. The sorrow, joy, or fear we read about when we learn of grand events belongs not just to the leaders of nations or the adult citizens, but to all of us. Attending to that fact often means looking for children’s voices nestled within other people’s records, and it requires that we tell their stories, not as asides or comic relief or as a way to humanize their parents, but in their own right. In some ways, there are parallels between parenting and doing responsible research. Respecting the children in our own lives often means trying to hear what they’re saying from their perspective, not disregarding something as silly or small because that’s how it may appear to us, but instead trusting it’s important and big to the child experiencing it. That same tenet holds true for how we approach the historical record. And so, I look to accounts of children playing as a profound way to understand historical disruption and trauma, just like how I’m careful to step over the cracks in the sidewalk while I walk alongside my son.

—Jayne Ptolemy
Assistant Curator of Manuscripts

Our time at school as young children typically has enormous influence on who we are as adults. Education was formalized in the 19th century in small school houses and large urban institutions. In the second half of the century, class pictures became an annual tradition. Examples of class photos are rare prior to 1870, but by the turn of the century quite commonplace. The Clements has several hundred examples scattered across the photograph collections, with the critical mass residing in the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography. These views into educational settings can reveal how much a community has invested, how much has changed over time, what remains the same, who is included or absent, and how we celebrate achievement. These pictures are also a great instructional opportunity for close reading of visual images. One can learn to spot the difference between the unusual and the ordinary, as well as identifying the teacher’s pet, class clown, or someone having a very bad day.

Photo Div D.4.1.1.

One of our earliest examples of a class picture is a Daguerreotype dating from circa 1850-55. At this time, the taking of an annual class picture was a new ritual, still in the making. This image was taken at an unknown location, posed outside where there was ample light for the photographer—critically important in early photography. Although they are a modestly dressed group—girls in simple calico dresses, boys in shirts, some without shoes—they may be wearing their best. The carefully combed hair indicates some preparation took place. The subjects all must hold still for five or ten seconds for the exposure. A broad range in ages is represented, which is very typical of rural schools in areas of low population density. In the back are three young women, presumably one or all of them are teachers. Their hands rest on the four girls in front, perhaps holding them still for the camera. As the daguerreotype was a unique image, it is unlikely this was a souvenir possessed by a student—it more likely stayed with the school or the teacher.

It is often difficult to identify teachers because they may not be the oldest people in the group, and may not always be present in the picture. More likely than not, they were female. Single female teachers often boarded with a local family in accordance with social norms. In this case, the instructor may be the woman in the center back in front of the door on the right. She may have assistance from the young woman on the left in the dark dress, or the man on the right wearing a hat.

Taken circa 1880 by “view artist” L. Horric of Leslie, Michigan, this modest schoolhouse lacks the porch, belfry, and double doors of the previous example. The three women in the back left, two with a hand on the shoulder of the next, may be in charge of this group. The carefully aligned students are mostly barefoot. It is likely that some traveled several miles by carriage, mule, or on foot. The schoolyard often served as a pasture for animals during the day. By the 1860s, it became possible that paper photographs like this example could be produced in abundance such that each student could have one as a souvenir.

So what is up with all the hats tossed on the ground? My guess is that after carefully setting up the camera and posing this group in neat orderly rows, the photographer noticed that their hats were casting shadows across their faces and that wouldn’t do. So, dispense with your hats but don’t you dare move!

“I never before saw children so eager to learn,” Forten wrote in her diary, excerpts of which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. “Although I had had several years’ experience in New England schools. Coming to school is a constant delight and recreation to them. They come here as other children go to play.”

Forced assimilation programs were central to Native American boarding schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Practical trades and service work were emphasized along with Christian teachings. Removed from everything familiar to them and placed into a harsh, militaristic environment, most children experienced trauma. The emotional and physical toll of Native American boarding schools continues in indigenous communities. This photograph was taken by John N. Choate circa 1880 at the first of these programs, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Run by Civil War veteran Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt, it became the model for most others that followed.

Photographic plate sensitivity increased in the late 19th century allowing for class pictures to be taken indoors. This example, taken by Samuel E. Miller of Oxford, Michigan, around 1898 shows an artfully draped flag and hopeful “try, try again” motto, partially hidden by a stovepipe. I suspect this class saw a new teacher arrive shortly after this photo was taken as her image is pasted over the person who was present at the time. If at first you don’t succeed . . .

This evocative photograph appears in an album of images that may have been assembled by a Civil War veteran revisiting sites of combat in Virginia. We don’t know the exact location. By the time this image was taken in the 1890s, the schools established across the former Confederate states by the Freedmen’s Bureau were gone. The simple furnishings here include a pulpit and two candleholders—clues that this school doubles as a rural church.

Ah! The good old days when students were allowed to discover the laws of physical science through firsthand experience. This impressive facility in Capac, Michigan, was clearly run by a far more relaxed administration than I ever experienced. I am amazed that this was allowed to happen, and that photographic evidence was provided for the school’s insurers.

It isn’t surprising that a class in Allegan County, Michigan, would be studying Dutch culture and heritage considering the region is known for its significant Dutch population. The girls in this circa 1920 photograph are wearing Dutch bonnets, the artwork on the walls is a combination of children’s creations and commercial prints, most showing rural Low Country scenes with canals, windmills, cows, etc. The iron and wooden lift-top desks are bolted to the floor. The students are having a milk break, drinking from small glass bottles with paper straws. Most are looking at the camera with seriousness, except for a couple of crack-ups in the very back. No wooden shoes visible.

There are a surprising number of photos of racially integrated classes in the David V. Tinder Collection. Mostly these are photographs from Southern Michigan urban areas taken in the first half of the 20th century. One has to wonder about the demographics of these same schools in the era of white flight in the 1960s. This picture was taken in 1913 by a photographer in Lenawee County, Michigan, an area that began experiencing Black migration prior to the Civil War. Many school group photographers had contracts to photograph all classes in a given district or county. A child in the front row is holding the photographer’s chalk slate, handy for connecting the image with the correct class. “Rives District No. 8” may refer to Rives Junction. Looks like they all have shoes. Several girls in front are holding hands.

The Great Depression depleted resources for new infrastructure across the country. Many unused railway cars were converted into storage sheds, chicken coops, and roadside diners. This happy looking school is temporarily established in a converted interurban railcar from the Detroit United Railway. The car still has its headlight intact, along with its DUR number, 7522. This photo was taken in Oakland County, Michigan.

Public education always comes with a cost, as does ignorance. Thomas Jefferson frequently linked the freedoms of democracy to education. In anticipation of objections to the financial burden placed on society he wrote that “the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.” “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” I find reassurance in these photographs that through education, our country can continue to be free.

—Clayton Lewis
Curator of Graphics Material

Anyone who has observed small children at play with each other or even alone will be struck by their sense of space and place. The concepts of “here” and “there” emerge early in their vocabulary, and movement between the two becomes an important component in the simplest of childhood games, whether tossing a ball back and forth or hide and seek or a running game of tag. All involve getting self or something from here to there.

The same concept of “here” and “there” applies in its most essential way to maps. Thus, maps often occupy the space of board games, where the combination of movement from one place to another and the restrictions imposed by chance (the roll of the dice or spin of the teetotum/counter) are major components in playing the game.

One of the simplest and earliest of printed board games is the Game of the Goose, which originated in France as Le Jeu de l’Oie, and became known in English as Snakes and Ladders. A player moves a counter along a circuitous route of outlined and numbered spaces (usually circles or squares). The number of spaces traversed is determined by the roll of a pair of dice or a spin of a simple counter (often called a teetotum). By adding a map or maps to each square, the Jeu du Monde (game of the world), as found in the Clements collection, is born.

In the Jeu du Monde, the player starts at the remotest areas of the world—the North and South Poles (Terres arctiques and Terres antarctiques)—and then moves circle by circle through the lands of the Americas, the regions of Asia, the countries of Africa, and the nations of Europe to reach the goal of circle number 63: La France. The first player to reach France wins.

So far, so simple, and not particularly interesting, except for the youngest players, until we read the rules. Although the Clements copy of this game lacks the printed instructions, the broadsheet entitled Pour l’intelligence du Jeu du Monde (For the understanding of the Game of the World), may be found in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The players are advised that the game will become more interesting if there is a pool of money, comprising an agreed upon amount contributed by each player, deposited in the center of the board, to which players will add or subtract, depending upon which space he or she might land on. The rules provide for certain fines, fees, ransoms, and rewards levied or awarded to players depending on the specific circles. For example, on the Barbary coast (circle 16) one must pay a ransom to move forward; in Peru (circle 10) the player receives a bonus from the mines of Potosí; in Zaara or Libie (Circle 19), the player must wait for another player to reach the circle and pay for the “ride” on the caravan to continue. Thus, the pot of money in the middle of the board expands and contracts with play, heightening player interest. To further increase the tension, a potential winner must reach circle 63, La France, by an exact roll of the dice or spin, or else has to back track by the number of spaces in excess of the number required. In the meantime, all the players are learning a bit of geography and a bit of cultural history while money acts as the medium of reward or punishment.

What worked in 17th-century France—dice and spinners, advancing and retreating along a pre-set geographical path—also worked in the 19th-century United States. The Traveller’s Tour Through the United States, published in New York City by F&R Lockwood in 1822, employs the same basic rules as the Jeu du Monde, using dice or a teetotum to determine the number of spaces traversed along a predetermined route. The playing board displays a map of the young United States, with a route outlined like a zig-zag road network, starting in Washington, D.C., and ending in New Orleans, number 139, at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Each number notes a place, usually a town, which is not named on the map. Players may consult the attached reference guide for information about the place, and as they become more proficient, a more advanced form of the game requires a player to name the place and its population or distinguishing feature without consulting the guide in order to move on. By basing the game on memory as well as chance for movement, the game emphasizes basic geography of the United States and its towns and adds some cultural geography (populations, historical landmarks) and physical landforms (Niagara Falls, Michilimackinac), thereby rewarding knowledge rather than luck.

The Traveller’s Tour (New York, 1822) is the earliest known map game featuring the United States. Possibly because of the identification of dice with gambling, a spinner, or teetotum, was provided for gameplay.

Both Duval’s Jeu du Monde and Lockwood’s Traveller’s Tour use maps as simple game boards; they require no special equipment that would not be readily available or easily made at home: counters, dice, and spinners. A more sophisticated game in its shape and equipment is Norris’ Cyclopaedic Map of the United States of America, (excepting Alaska) Together with Adjacent Portions of the Dominion of Canada and of the United States of Mexico, published in New York by W.R. Norris in 1885. The gameboard is a map of the United States printed on an articulated wooden roll, neatly housed in a wooden box. Also in the box are 96 small wooden pegs, each representing a city or place visited in the game, and an array of pink and black tally tokens. The pegs fit into the square holes on the gameboard map, but the holes are not marked with place names. One simple aspect of the game is that the players must know sufficient geography to place each peg into the correct hole.

Clements staffers tested their geographic knowledge by matching wooden pegs containing details of commerce and population with locations on the board of the Cyclopaedic Map (New York, 1885), and found it a challenge.

No instructions are included with the Clements copy of this game, but the Rules for Playing Games of the Zylo-karta (i.e., wooden map) accompany the game in the copy in the David Rumsey Collection. Norris presents his game as “Prepared for use in schools and in the home circle” and explains that it is called a “cyclopaedic map” because it “is derived from the combination of the map proper with its descriptive blocks representing capital and business centres, and which always accompany it.” The Rules offer four different games that may be played with the board and pieces: Contention, Zykah, Selection, and Siste. All four games are based on knowledge and not on chance (no dice or teetotum are included); each game involves teams or partners and the correct placement of the city/place pegs in the right holes; correct placement is recorded by the red tally counters, wrong answers by the black. The most complex of the four is Siste, which pits two-partner teams against each other: one team attempts to block the route from the other team’s city peg at one end of the country to reach a city peg at the other end of the country, by filling in the intervening places. This has the effect of creating a strategy game rather than a game of chance, as some sense of the opponents’ choice of places and routes must be divined. This form of the game returns us to the “here” to “there” principle that the early Jeu du Monde played upon, but further adds strategy and knowledge to the mix.

The Clements has several other map games and puzzles, all of which could be played by children. But were these games designed primarily for children? Probably not. As with most games, the appeal of play reaches across all generations and the added allure of gambling always adds to the competition. What these board games do for children is provide the experience of movement when outside or inside movement is not possible; they create a geographic world that can be travelled and learned from a board; they encourage sociability and norms of taking one’s turn and following a set of rules. And of course, it’s all about winning.

—Mary Pedley
Assistant Curator of Maps

History—meaning the totality of actual events that happened in the past—does not change. But another definition of history—the study and understanding of our past—is a conversation that is constantly in flux. Scholars, librarians, and archivists discover new sources. Interpretative approaches rise in influence and then are superseded. Researchers reveal hitherto unknown connections between people and places. And, most importantly, who and what historians study and write about changes over time.

The Book of Trades (London?, 1806) was published in multiple editions to provide children and their parents with information about future employment options. The Clements Library copy (1806) contains the inscription, “Mary R. Tatnall painted this picture in the ninth year of her age.” It is impossible to know if Mary’s artistic attention to detail translated into success in a future job.

To take just one historiographical example, early histories of the Civil War focused on the political leaders of the United States and the Confederacy and the military strategies their respective generals enacted. This initial focus on political and military elites was augmented by new scholarship that dealt primarily with the everyday experiences of enlisted soldiers. Subsequent historical scholarship addressed the ways that African Americans—both enslaved and free—played a role in and were affected by the war. Other historians focused on women’s experience of the war, whether on the home front, maintaining farms and businesses in the absence of sons, fathers, and husbands, or in theaters of conflict. But what do we know about the experiences of children during the Civil War? (Spoiler alert: not much.) We know that children, along with adults, experienced enslavement and violence and disease and economic uncertainty and political unrest in the early 1860s. How did the exigencies of wartime shape their lives?

Or, to pose the question more broadly, how do we write the history of children in the United States? Children are challenging subjects for historians. Many children in the American past didn’t live very long (close to 50% of children born in the U.S. in 1800 died before the age of five). As was the case for African Americans, Native Americans, and women throughout much of American history, children left fewer legal and historical records that places like the Clements Library would collect than white adult men. And while children were the object of a great deal of print production in early America—from primers to picture books to religious tracts—there are very few sources that were produced by children that reflect their own experiences.

As a result of these evidentiary challenges, the history of childhood as a field has emerged more slowly than other areas of scholarship. One of the best ways to measure the emergence of fields of study is to look at when they become institutionalized in academic life. When do scholarly organizations, journals, and degree-granting departments dedicated to specific disciplines develop?

While countless universities had schools of education and departments of early childhood development throughout the 20th century, the interdisciplinary study of childhood took longer to evolve. The American Sociological Association created a Section on the “Sociology of Children” to focus on contemporary childhood in 1992. But the Society for the History of Children and Youth only formed in 2001, and did not launch a journal until 2008. The United States’ first graduate program in Childhood Studies (at Rutgers University-Camden) admitted its first cohort of students in 2007.

Children’s appearance in the historical record often leaves us with more questions than answers. Thanks to the David V. Tinder Directory of Early Michigan Photographers, we have biographical information on the producers of these late 19th-century photographs, but not on the subjects.

Although the institutional embodiment of childhood has been slow to emerge, in recent years some of the most exciting Americanist scholarship to be published has dealt with the history of childhood. Steven Mintz’s Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, published in 2004, was the first synthetic overview of American childhood as a distinct phase of life. Mintz wrote that instead of “regarding children simply as passive creatures, who are the objects of socialization and schooling, and consumers of . . . products produced by grownups,” he sought to view “children as active agents in the evolution of their society” and to show that “children have been creators as well as consumers of culture.” A group of scholars working in a range of disciplines have responded to this call, and in particular have worked to highlight the ways in which “childhood” has never been a static category in U.S. history, nor has it ever been a period of idyllic innocence. Rather, this scholarship shows how childhood has been experienced differently at different moments by different groups of children.

Perhaps the most important body of recent Americanist scholarship in childhood studies has focused on the experiences of Black children. Nazera Sadiq Wright’s Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (2016) uses written records left by Black girls to outline the ways in which race and gender shaped the experience of childhood. Anna Mae Duane has contributed several books that outline our understanding of race and childhood, from Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (2010) to Child Slavery Before and After Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies (edited volume, 2017) to Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew Up to Change a Nation (2020). Robin Bernstein’s award-winning 2011 book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights uses a range of artifacts—books, toys, theatrical props, domestic knickknacks—to show how the notion of childhood “innocence” changed and became racialized over the course of the 19th century. Richard Bell (Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home) and U-M’s own Jonathan Wells (The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War) both have recent books (2019) that focus on the experiences of free Black children in the North who were kidnapped into slavery. And most recently, Crystal Lynn Webster’s Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North (2021) details how Black children navigated the unpredictable forms of Northern unfreedom that were not slavery but were also not liberty.

The Clements is lucky to hold items by children whose personalities continue to shine through in the archive, charming us centuries later. In these two notes by Margaret June Alexander (Alexander Family Papers) and Willys Peck Kent (Evarts Kent Family Papers), their love for family members is clear, even as the identity of “Spizer” remains a mystery.

Another recent body of scholarship focuses on the experience of children as laborers in the American past. These include Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America (ed. Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray, 2009), Sharon Braslaw Sundue’s Industrious in Their Stations: Young People at Work in Urban America, 1720-1810 (2009); and Vincent DiGirolamo’s Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (2019). Children in the American past performed agricultural, domestic, and industrial labor, but they also worked as soldiers, experiences that have been uncovered by scholars such as Allan Stover in Underage and Under Fire: Accounts of the Youngest Americans in Military Service (2014) and Caroline Cox in Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution (2016). Jon Grinspan has outlined how young people in the 19th century U.S. became actively involved in partisan politics, even before they were old enough to vote, in The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century (2016).

This brief list of scholarship only covers work published in book form. Far more scholarship has emerged in the past 20 years in journal articles, exhibition catalogues, and other formats that combine to push against the notion of childhood as a uniform condition that was experienced in the same way by all children across American history. One other thing that much of this scholarship has in common is that very little of it was researched at the Clements Library. We hope that this issue of The Quarto will help reveal the wealth of material that the Clements holds that is waiting to be examined by students, research fellows, and faculty interested in the history of childhood in America. We’re ready when you are.

—Paul Erickson
Randolph G. Adams Director of the Clements Library

David P. Harris (1925-2019)

Longtime friend and donor to the Clements Library David P. Harris passed away peacefully on August 19, 2019, in Washington, D.C. For over a decade, Dr. Harris shared with us his kindness, conversation, knowledge, wit, and extraordinary manuscript projects. He compiled groups of handwritten letters, documents, logbooks, and other items; meticulously transcribed and annotated them; wrote well-researched introductory essays; and gave them to the Clements. The hundreds of manuscripts comprising the David P. Harris Collection largely focus on the Navy and Army in the early Republic, everyday sailors, and the War of 1812.

Robert N. Gordon (1953-2019)

On December 14, 2019, Clements Library Associates Board Member Robert N. Gordon of New York City passed away. From 2010-2016, Gordon served on the Clements’ Committee of Management and he remained on the Board until his death. Bob enjoyed the special capacity to channel his prodigious memory and gift for financial detail from one rarified world ‒ that of the finance of arbitrage ‒ to the even more rarified world of scientific instruments and maps. His enthusiastic support of the collecting, preserving, and making accessible the scientific contributions of earlier times made him a friend not only of the Clements but of our sister library, the John Carter Brown, where he served as a Trustee, and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, whose valuable collection he also helped to enrich.

Margaret Winkelman (1924-2019)

Margaret “Peggy” Winkelman of West Bloomfield, Michigan, passed away on May 14, 2019, at the age of 95. She served on the Clements Library Associates Board from 1996-2014 and was part of the Honorary Board of Governors until her death. Peggy and her late husband, Stanley J. Winkelman, were collectors of art and supporters of racial integration and equality. They were leaders in the Jewish community and in efforts to improve race relations in Detroit. In addition to her years of service and support, the Clements Library will continue to treasure a 1920s Isfahan rug donated by Winkelman in memory of her late husband and her longtime companion, the late Robert A. Krause.

Exhibitions

The Best of the West: Western Americana at the Clements Library – Exhibition open Fridays at the William L. Clements Library, 10:00am to 4:00pm, through April 24, 2020.

Inspired by the work of scholar and antiquarian book dealer William S. Reese (1955-2018), this exhibition of 45 printed rarities highlights western Americana in the Clements Library collections. Featuring narratives of travel, settlement, and Native American relations, and including works in Spanish, German, and French, the selections represent some of the rarest and most significant 18th- and 19th-century sources on the American West.

Americana Sampler: Selections from the U-M William L. Clements Library – Exhibition open at the Rogel Cancer Center-Gifts of Art Gallery (Connector Alcove, Level 2, 1500 E. Medical Center Drive, Ann Arbor) Monday-Friday 8:00am to 5:00pm, through December 31, 2020. 

Collection highlights in facsimile include handsome original artwork, compelling manuscripts, and printed resources with geographical connections spanning from the Caribbean to the Great Lakes.

As a new year begins, we congratulate our first Randolph G. Adams Director J. Kevin Graffagnino as he embarks on retirement. During his tenure, Graffagnino oversaw a comprehensive renovation and expansion of our 1923 building, shepherded major new collections acquisitions, and more than tripled the endowment funds. Kevin’s leadership and dedication have produced a lasting legacy at the Clements. On Tuesday, December 10, 2019, colleagues, board members, and friends gathered for Kevin’s Valedictory Lecture and Reception at Blau Colloquium in the U-M Ross School of Business.

Kevin Graffagnino and his wife Leslie Hasker are pictured with the reception cake ‒ a custom creation that replicated actual rare books dating 1493-1685 from the Clements collections.

Above: Kevin is pictured with co-editors Terese Austin and Sara Quashnie, and designer Mike Savitski, who together produced the Clements’ latest publication Americana is a Creed: Notable Twentieth-Century Collectors, Dealers, and Curators (2019). Guests at the Valedictory Lecture were treated to complimentary copies of the new book.

J. Kevin Graffagnino Clements Library Endowed Fund – Contributors to date

Virginia Adams
John Adler
Nick Aretakis
Charles & Shelley Baker
Anne Bennington-Helber
Robert Hunt Berry
John Blew
Judith & Howard Christie
Arthur Cohn
Shneen & Brad Coldiron
Barbara Comai
Joseph Constance
Richard & Deanna Dorner
Brian & Candi Dunnigan
Charles Eisendrath
Steve Finer
David Graffagnino
Margaret Harrington
Dorothy Hurt
Sally Kennedy
Raymond & Cynthia Kepner
Kenneth Kramer
David Lesser
Bruce Lisman
Richard & Mary Jo Marsh
Charlotte Maxson
Robert Mello
Donald Mott
Cindy & Peter Motzenbecker
H. Nicholas Muller
Janet L. Parker
William Parkinson
James & Judy Pizzagalli
Wally & Barbara Prince
Lin & Tucker Repess
Robert Rubin
Irina & Michael Thompson
Ira Unschuld
Michael Vinson
W. Bradley Willard, Jr.
Doug Aikenhead & Tracy Gallup
J. Kevin Graffagnino & Leslie Hasker
Benjamin & Bonnie Upton
Frederick S. Upton Foundation

Other Gifts Made in Kevin’s Honor

William & Cassandra Earle
Martha Jones & Jean Hebrand
Bradley & Karen Thompson
Leonard & Jean Walle

With Kevin Graffagnino’s retirement, long-time Clements Library Associates Board member Clarence Wolf has commented that it is, “the end of the era of the bookman.” It is fitting then that for his final exhibit and Quarto, Kevin focused on books. In fact, many Clements Library Associates have enjoyed calling Kevin over the years just to share in the “mad-dog” spirit of collecting.

For many of us, the title “Best of the West” may evoke an image of the classic western movies of the 20th century. Our collective socialization toward these stereotypes actually illustrates how important the Clements Library is for telling the stories of all people. My father, a member of the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe, once told me that as a child he loved playing “cowboys and indians.” When I asked him which role he played, he said, “the cowboy ‒ because he is the hero.”

White Swan, one of six Crow scouts who served the United States under General Custer during the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Note the shadow of photographer Fred E. Miller and his camera in the foreground.

One big project the staff is working on is an ambitious set of new digitization goals. Our ability to present all the heroes, villains, and everyday people to a broader audience enhances the possibilities for new insights and better connections. A first step towards expanding our digital resources was a complete overhaul of the Clements Library website. Please check out the new offerings at clements.umich.edu.

We are delighted to have Director Paul Erickson on board. He and I will be traveling the country during the next few months, because we can’t wait to include you in our plans for the future of the Clements Library and to hear your ideas. If you would be willing to host a small gathering, please contact me at angmo@umich.edu.

—Angela Oonk
Director of Development

A photograph by Elias A. Bonine of an unidentified Yuma man with a traditional breechcloth and hairstyle, holding bow and arrows, ca. 1880s. Photos by Scott Soderberg/Michigan Photography.

On June 14, 1864, after a week’s journey amid miles of prickly pear and vast plains, Nathaniel P. Hill (1832-1900) sat down and wrote a letter to his wife. Hill was a former Brown University chemistry professor hoping to make his fortune smelting precious metals in the Colorado Territory while his wife, Alice Hale Hill (1840-1908), remained in Providence, Rhode Island, with their two young children, Crawford and Isabel.       

The Hill family’s experience of “going West” was not the narrative typically associated with American western expansion. They did not pack their worldly goods into a covered wagon bound for a homestead claim. Nathaniel Hill was not a miner or railroad worker laboring to forge a fortune from the dirt. Instead, the Hills were an affluent middle-class family from Providence who transplanted their lifestyle from Rhode Island to Colorado following several years of Nathaniel Hill’s business ventures there. Despite the misgivings of his wife, Alice, Hill’s East Coast capital was key to establishing a comfortable standard of living for himself and his family, one that far exceeded his wife’s initial fears. With his scientific education, business connections, and stable financial backing, Nathaniel Hill was in an optimal position to invest in land and innovative technical processes to turn a profit in an industry that destroyed so many dreams. He ultimately succeeded in founding a highly lucrative smelting company and held various public offices in the territory and later state.     

While Nathaniel Hill’s early time in Colorado was far from luxurious ‒ reliable travel within the territory was often only by horseback, diet was comprised of meat and eggs, and accommodations were rustic whether in a building or camping in the open with the mosquitos’ “best representatives” ‒ these were temporary inconveniences. Descriptions in his letters back home of his experiences and the people he met reflected the perspective of a well-off outsider. Hill traveled via railroad, stagecoach, and horseback on his initial journey. During the Nebraska leg of the trip, he and his travel companions encountered several of the vast wagon trains streaming across the territory. As he noted in a letter to Alice, many of the emigrants were fleeing Civil War- inspired guerilla actions in states such as Arkansas for destinations to be decided upon reaching the mountain passes. 

William Keeler’s 1867 National Map of the Territory of the United States included a compilation of data from many governmental sources and was color coded to show the locations of gold, silver, copper, quicksilver, iron, and coal. The yellow markings on this detail of Colorado indicate gold deposits. Keeler’s map has been described as the largest and finest map of the West as it was then known, particularly for its depiction of the post-Civil War railroad system. The map was also issued in a folding pocket-sized edition in 1868. The Clements copy of the smaller map was carried West by a railway contractor and was present in his pocket at the driving of the Golden Spike establishing the transcontinental railroad.

It was stories such as these that fueled the public’s imagination of the “frontier.” Such accounts made their way into newspapers and magazines and subsequently shaped the perceptions of Alice Hill. Separated from her husband by a vast distance, Alice’s knowledge of Colorado was based on published reports and Nathaniel’s firsthand observations. Her mind was preoccupied by the dangers of Native American attacks as touted in newsprint and Nathaniel’s “wild way of living” (though by the time the letter was written where she lamented this fact, Nathaniel had employed a servant). His early letters and information passed on by other acquaintances had a strong influence on her perceptions of life out West. In an October 13, 1867, letter Alice wrote to Nathaniel of the preparations she planned for the family’s eventual move to reunite with him. Much of the letter was devoted to her supply lists and conjecturing about what items would be unavailable in Colorado and how to transport their possessions. Of her everyday purchases, she made particular note of sewing supplies (buttons, elastic, and whalebones) and nonperishable food (corn starch, tapioca, hops, and foreign pickles) to purchase before they left as they would store well and alleviate the need to purchase at exorbitant prices out West. While many families stocked up before moving cross-country, the fact that Alice Hill confidently recommended purchasing multi-year quantities of a variety of food stuffs and dry goods along with her envisioned means of transportation (renting a car, likely a railroad car?) indicated that the Hill family sought as little disruption from their previous mode of life as possible and had the means to make it so.

These logistical details were only part of Alice’s concerns about moving. Leaving family, friends, and the city she had lived in for most of her life would have been extremely difficult in any scenario. The fact that the family was not only completely uprooting but that they were doing so to a remote and largely unsettled region presented a considerable challenge. “I dread it more than tongue can tell,” Alice wrote to her husband, “Of course, only for your sake is the sacrifice possible. To think of exiling ourselves for a long time is dreadful to me. In five years we shall be forgotten by most of our friends here, who are now so dear to me. I don’t think I shall like the people in Col. & I am sure of being a domestic drudge.” This letter in particular, written as the time for the family to join Nathaniel grew ever closer, expressed a litany of Alice’s apprehensions. The correspondence from this period does not include Nathaniel’s replies which Alice referenced. It appears though that his information regarding the living situation in Colorado was inadequate at best. “I am about discouraged by the lack of any real information in any of your letters” she wrote as she pressed for word of their future home, “You can surely tell me as much as this ‒ Is there a house of six or eight rooms where we can live, or shall it be in two?” It seems that Alice Hill was unsure which scenario would be her fate ‒ a smaller scale version of her current home or a frontier hovel more akin to those of the public imagination.

Denver sprang up in the late 1850s in response to the discovery of gold at the base of the Rocky Mountains. The supply of gold proved limited, but the determination and ambition of early settlers ensured that Denver would avoid the fate of many a boomtown when the mines ran out. Downtown Denver was largely destroyed by fire in 1863, but had been re-built by the time this photograph was taken ca. 1869.

Uncertainty did not sit well with her, especially as she attempted to reconcile her current way of life to the anticipated one in Colorado. As she was unable to find someone in Providence to provide housekeeping in Colorado, she feared her days out West would be filled with menial housework. “All the hardship of housekeeping comes on the woman.  She is responsible ‒ I know the husband furnishes money, but that is an easy matter compared to washing, ironing, cooking, washing dishes, pots & pans all smoked up by pine wood, sweeping, dusting, sewing, mending & yet all the time look neat.” Alice was keenly aware of the often underappreciated labor required to keep a household running efficiently. As the acting head of household in Nathaniel’s absence, she managed a home (with staff assistance), parented their two children, and handled business affairs for Nathaniel in his stead. The autonomy with which Alice acted on household and financial matters was indicative of a deep trust between the two partners. She kept him apprised of her actions and at times sought advice, but it is evident she made decisions with a fair degree of independence and the candor in her letters to Nathaniel further evidenced a close partnership.  

In contrast with many less affluent families, this close relationship combined with sufficient resources gave the Hills the option to remain separated with Alice and the children remaining in Providence and Nathaniel running the Colorado business. Alice may well have chosen to continue such an arrangement if it were not for her deep love for her husband. Time and again, Nathaniel and Alice noted the pain of the other’s absence and their yearning to be reunited. While Alice voiced her many reservations about moving West, she was willing to pay the price. “I am most heartily tired & sick of living away from you, & will pleasantly agree to most anything which will bring us again constantly with each other.” She parted with everything she knew and loved in order to be with him.

Nathaniel Peter Hill was president of the Boston and Colorado Smelting Company from which he derived much of his fortune. Besides the Clements’ holdings, many of the Hill family’s papers are held at History Colorado.

As it turned out, Alice and Nathaniel Hill did not face the amount of hardship that Alice so feared. Three years after moving West, the Hills resided in a comfortable $30,000 home with Mary Halpin, an Irish woman, working as live-in domestic help. Nathaniel spent his days working in the company offices and Alice managed the family sphere. Although she did at times battle with the dust creeping into the house, there was still time for social calls and visits from friends. They attended dinner parties and partook of a varied diet which included dishes such as oysters, sandwiches, ice cream, and champagne. Strawberries even made an appearance though Alice noted that they were rare. The arrival of the railroad certainly helped increase the availability and variety of goods while it also allowed the Hills to maintain close relationships with loved ones back in Rhode Island. Alice’s sister Bell visited several times, and Crawford and Isabel returned to Providence for schooling, with their parents making regular trips to visit.

In the end, the move to Colorado proved a fruitful one for the Hill family. Nathaniel Hill’s Boston and Colorado Smelting Company attained great financial success after his introduction of Welsh smelting practices to Colorado mining operations. The family lived comfortably in Black Hawk and later Denver with live-in household staff, though the children (a third child, Gertrude, was born in 1869) were sent back East for schooling. Following Hill’s term as mayor of Black Hawk, he continued his political career with a term as United States Senator for Colorado from 1879 to 1885. Alice became a leading figure of Colorado society in her own right, earning a place in Representative Women of Colorado (1911) alongside her two daughters. She continued in charitable work, serving as president of the Denver Free Kindergarten Association and of the YWCA. They regularly traveled back East to see family and friends, made extended trips to Europe, and lived in Washington, D.C., during Nathaniel’s senatorial term. The story of the Hill family and their move West is not that of a “wild way of living” feared by Alice, but rather an extension of their previous life back East and the security and privileges it afforded.

—Sara Quashnie
Library Assistant

On the great plains of the American West amidst the tension between settlers and decimated tribal communities, one remarkable family represented a range of perspectives on the Native American experience. Connected both to old stock from New England and tribal chiefs from west of the Mississippi, the family included a U.S. Army artist and engineer enforcing Indian removal policies; an author both sympathetic and condescending as she recorded Native lore; and a Native American physician, who endorsed assimilation only to return to Native homelands just as the violence of the Indian Wars exploded in a horrendous final bloodbath. Each sought to record, reflect, educate, advocate, and understand on both a public and a deeply personal level what it meant to be Native American. The Clements Library is lucky to house photographs, original art, and published works relating to the Eastman family.

Seth Eastman (1808-1875) was a skilled artist and topographical engineer from Maine, educated at West Point. His legacy as an artist includes paintings of U.S. military sites on display at the United States Capitol as well as hundreds of illustrations for government publications and books by his second wife, Mary. Seth frequently sketched Native American subjects, scenes, and artifacts while stationed at Fort Snelling near what is now Minneapolis, Minnesota. At the time of his first arrival there in 1830, the region was the home of the Santee Dakota Sioux people. 

Shortly after he arrived at Fort Snelling, Seth married a fifteen-year-old Native woman, Wakinajinwin (Stands Sacred, b. ca. 1815). She was the daughter of Mdewakanton Santee chief, Mahpiya Wicasta (Cloud Man, b. 1780), who was among the first of his people to shift towards an agricultural lifestyle and convert to Christianity. In the same year as her marriage to Eastman, Stands Sacred gave birth to a daughter named Winona (First Born Daughter, 1830-58). Winona also became known as Mary Nancy Eastman, and later as Wakantankawin (Holy, or Sacred Woman) following the Sioux tradition of changing and adapting names to reflect life’s events. 

After three years, the U.S. Army reassigned Seth to West Point. He then declared his marriage ended, abandoning his young wife and child, although possibly leaving behind some means for their support. They could not have known that their paths would cross again.     

In 1835, while stationed back at West Point, Seth Eastman married a second time, to Mary Henderson (1818-1887), daughter of a military surgeon. In 1841 Eastman was again assigned to Fort Snelling, this time for an extended tour of duty as commander. He thus returned to the haunts of his first family, bringing his new white wife. Together, Mary Henderson Eastman and Seth would have seven children, some of whom were born during their time in the West.

Fort Pembina, Dakota Territory, circa 1858. This evocative small watercolor by Seth Eastman shows the virtuosity that ranks him with the greatest artists of the American West. Situated on the northern border with Canada, Fort Pembina was a trading post going back into the 18th century. Eastman was in this vicinity in 1857-58, having been sent back to Fort Snelling to close down operations there.

At Fort Snelling, Mary and Seth Eastman found plenty of opportunities to deepen their fascination with Dakota culture and lore. Their first-hand experiences with the indigenous people of the West, along with Seth Eastman’s advanced artistic skills, would in later years situate him for the editing and illustrating of Henry Schoolcraft’s landmark government report Historical and Statistical Information respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1851).

Mary, an assertive and inquisitive woman, drew the attention of tribal elders around Fort Snelling, who eventually began to share their stories and legends. These became the basis of several publications by Mary, among them Dahcotah, or Life And Legends Of The Sioux Around Fort Snelling (1849); and Romance of Indian Life: With Other Tales, Selections from the Iris, An Illuminated Souvenir (1853); both of which featured color lithograph illustrations based on her husband’s artwork.

The Iris, a Binghamton, New York, newspaper, was an occasional publisher of Mary Eastman’s stories. Eastman’s own copy of this souvenir edition of selections from the Iris (1852) has been re-bound in leather, hand-painted, and inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

Ohyiesa’s father, Many Lightnings, embraced assimilation, converted to Christianity, and changed his name to Jacob Eastman. He determined to steer Ohiyesa on a path away from confrontation and toward assimilation. This achieved, Ohiyesa chose the name Charles Alexander Eastman and began an academic career through numerous missionary programs, Indian boarding schools, and colleges, eventually graduating from Dartmouth in 1887. He then entered Boston University, earning a medical degree.

By November 1890, Dr. Charles Eastman had returned to the West as a medical officer at the Pine Ridge Indian Agency in present day South Dakota. At Pine Ridge tensions between the U.S. Army and desperate Lakota followers of the Ghost Dance movement were reaching the point of violence. On December 29, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry (the unit formerly led by George Armstrong Custer) massacred a Miniconjou band of men, women, children, and the infirm at Wounded Knee Creek. Eastman was on the scene, scrambling to provide care for the wounded and traumatized survivors scattered across the frozen prairie.

Seth Eastman’s artwork, including “Itasca Lake” (circa 1851), illustrated the publications of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft as well as those of Mary Eastman. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow drew heavily on Schoolcraft’s, and likely Eastman’s, work in imagining scenes for another Native American Romance, The Song of Hiawatha (1855).

Disillusionment and revulsion pushed Dr. Charles Eastman to New York, where he married New England educator Elaine Goodale (1863-1953) in 1891. For the next 20 years Eastman held various positions with the federal government, the Carlisle Indian Boarding School, and numerous other organizations that advanced understanding of Indian cultures. He promoted the YMCA and Boy Scouts of America on western reservations, collected artifacts for the University of Pennsylvania, and wrote and lectured on Native American conditions, becoming one of the most prolific authors and speakers on Sioux ethno-history and American Indian affairs.

Frustration followed achievement throughout Dr. Charles Eastman’s career. His descriptions of the aftermath of Wounded Knee and the effect it had on him made clear that he was questioning “the Christian love and lofty ideals of the white man.” He found that he was an outsider in both worlds ‒ not militant enough for many Native Americans angered by harsh assimilation programs, but far too “Indian” for many of his white colleagues. He endured dismissive criticism. The Springfield Republican commented that his personal experiences offered “little social or educational value.” His efforts to establish a medical career in Minneapolis were frustrated by expectations that he could also prescribe a magical “Indian medicine.” 

As he sought ways to reconnect to the values of his indigenous upbringing, he found his way north, back to the traditional Santee homelands of Minnesota and into Ojibwe and Odawa territories. In the 1920s and 1930s Eastman was frequently back and forth between the Lake Huron shore and the Detroit area, where his son Ohiyesa II lived. In From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916) a revitalized Eastman commented that “Every day it became harder for me to leave the woods.”

Ohiyesa, Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, died in 1939 of complications from smoke inhalation from a tepee fire. He is buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Detroit. He had witnessed the peak of violence between Native American peoples and the United States, experienced both the timeless traditional lifestyle of Plains Indians, and assimilated into 20th century white society. His perspective across two worlds remains relevant in our current multi-cultural society, challenged by issues of race and sustainability.

Although Charles probably never crossed paths with his grandfather, Seth Eastman, the combined experiences and historical record left by Charles, Mary, and Seth Eastman cover a remarkable portion of the complicated and fraught relations between indigenous Americans and others.

—Clayton Lewis
Curator of Graphics

One such dreamer, Alexander Parker Crittenden, hailed from a beleaguered family in Kentucky. As he worked to extract his widowed mother from debt in 1837, he fell hard for the strong-willed Clara Churchill Jones. The Clements Library’s Crittenden Family Papers document their early courtship, when he wrote frequently to Clara, cross-hatching his letters to double the amount of starry-eyed remembrances he could fit into one mailing. “You must, indeed you must,” he implored, “keep that wandering spirit of yours at rest, else I shall be forced to find some charm to quiet it. A kiss every night would be effectual, but how is this to be accomplished when there is such a distance between us. There is but one course  ̶  to appeal to yourself not to appear to me in my dreams. ’Tis such a disappointment when awakening to find it all but a dream.” A young man of 21, Alexander found his mind occupied with love and desperate attempts to secure his financial footing to assure the Churchill family that he could support a wife. His dreams for the future were entangled with his dreams of Clara. He sheepishly admitted that in his pursuit of success, “I must lead an unsettled life, and in all probability soon be compelled to go south or West.”

Californian cities grew at a bewildering pace. Bayard Taylor, sent by Horace Greeley of the New-York Tribune to report on the Gold Rush, noted in his book Eldorado (1850) that “People who have been absent six weeks came back and could scarcely recognize the place.”

In one of his early courtship letters to Clara, Alexander enclosed couplets of love, altering one to include her name.

Human connection was closely prized by those in the western city. When a great fire rushed through San Francisco in May 1851, Alexander described how he went about trying to save his possessions. “I had not much to lose,” he admitted. “The most highly prized of all my goods & chattels were your portraits. They were the first things I thought of. I did not know how to secure them. I tried to put them in my pockets  ̶  but reflecting that they would be injured, perhaps destroyed by the fire and water to which I must be exposed  ̶  I concluded that the trunk was the safest place for them until the moment came when we should be compelled to retreat.” Surrounded by a city engulfed in flame, “a perfect sea of fire roaring and rushing around us with a sound louder than the breaking of the waves on the shore,” Crittenden held on tightest to the daguerreotypes of his family, his connection to those he left behind as he chased visions of success. He was thoughtful about sending Clara pictures of himself as well. One he sent in October 1850 after his plans to visit her were dashed once again by a financial setback, “a blow almost too heavy to bear.” “If I cannot come in person I will send my image. It is the best I can do, but it is a poor substitute. It is deficient in the warm heart beating only for you. It cannot open its lips and tell you how dearly you are loved.” Alexander’s dreams had shifted from earning a great fortune to finding a way to be together again. “I wish we could live upon affection and that that most hateful of all words  ̶  money  ̶  might never be mentioned again.”

This photograph of Alexander’s eldest daughters Laura and Nannie Crittenden was likely taken sometime around 1851, posing the alluring possibility that it could have been one of the daguerreotypes he guarded so carefully during his early years in San Francisco.

Laura D. Fair (1837-1919), ca. 1871

In 1851 British sailor William Shaw published Golden Dreams and Waking Realities: Being the Adventures of a Gold-Seeker in California and the Pacific Islands. Lured by the promise of Californian wealth, Shaw set out for the mines. After a grueling attempt, he abandoned the dream, packing his belongings to seek better prospects. “The wind was blowing hard and the rain pelted heavily down, as giving a last long look at the diggings, I thought of the golden dreams and buoyant hopes which had lured us to them; and turned my back upon a spot where these had been so rudely dispelled by the waking realities of privation and suffering.” Many fortune-seekers were drawn to the promise of California by stories of successful mines, of gold dust blowing in the streets, of cities erupting into being and bustling with newcomers and opportunities. But mining proved difficult, unsteady work, requiring far more financing and luck than most had. And even those who were drawn to the coast not by gold but by the attendant boom it brought to the region, found that life in the new West could be risky. The speculative frenzy that undergirded San Francisco’s growth could tumble even the most optimistic of men. Alexander Crittenden struggled alongside them. Working for years to secure a strong enough footing to bring his family with him to California, his dreams of financial freedom waned in the face of homesickness and separation. And in turn, when his family was reunited, happiness again failed to follow. Love and stability, like his dreams of fortune, were always a step or two ahead of him. San Francisco may have sprouted from Americans’ dreams, but that doesn’t mean they always came true.

—Jayne Ptolemy
Assistant Curator of Manuscripts

According to Welsh legend, a royal prince by the name of Madoc supposedly took to the high seas and departed from Wales for new pastures in 1170 after the death of his father led to a bloody power struggle. The tale of Madoc, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, evolved to incorporate the idea that he had actually navigated his way to America and established Welsh colonies, thus conveniently providing a British presence in the New World that predated any and all Spanish claims. In all likelihood, Elizabeth I and her advisors initially deployed the Madoc story strictly as propaganda in order to trump their Spanish rivals. However, the modified Madoc legend ended up taking on a life of its own, especially amongst Welshmen and Welsh-Americans who were exceedingly proud that one of their own might have been the true “discoverer” of the New World.

Over the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, countless rumors were circulated regarding the existence of so-called “Welsh Indians,” descendants of Madoc’s colonists who were believed to have mixed with local Native populations and yet still clung to vestiges of Christian traditions, established fortified European-style towns, and spoke the Welsh language fluently. At first, attention focused on tribes of the Eastern seaboard near locations where Madoc’s colonists were thought to have landed, such as Newfoundland, New England, the Carolinas, and Florida. In John William’s Farther Observations on the Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd (1791), the famous accounts of Reverend Morgan Jones and Captain Isaac Stewart feature prominently. Jones had claimed to have been captured in 1660 by Indians in Tuscarora country while visiting South Carolina. His imminent execution was prevented only after the Indians heard him praying in the Welsh tongue, which they miraculously understood. Stewart likewise claimed that he was captured around 1766 before being rescued by a Spaniard and a Welshman named John David. During their subsequent adventures, the company crossed “the Mississipi near Rouge or Red River, up which we travelled 700 Miles, when we came to a Nation of Indians remarkably White, and whose Hair was of a reddish Colour.” John David was reportedly astounded to find that these people were also able to speak Welsh.

Photographer Stanley J. Morrow (1943-1921), active in the Dakota Territory region during the late 1860s and 1870s, alluded to the Welsh-Mandan theory in a caption on the back of this image, which reads, “1st and 2nd Chiefs of the Mandans, descendants of a colony of Welch.” This caption indicates that enough people were familiar with this idea to warrant Morrow using it as a marketing point.

Reverend Bowen also referenced a letter published in the Kentucky Palladium in 1804 by a Mississippi judge, which stated that “No circumstance relating to the history of the Western country probably has excited, at different times, more general attention and anxious curiosity than the opinion that a nation of white men speaking the Welsh language reside high up the Missouri.” In fact, many early explorers of the American West, such as Lewis and Clark (who were instructed by Thomas Jefferson, himself of partial Welsh descent, to be on the lookout for Welsh Indians), considered the discovery of Madoc’s descendants a bonus subplot of their missions.

The works produced by Swiss-French artist Karl Bodmer (1809-1893) during the Weid Expedition of the early 1830s are considered to be some of the most important and accurate visual depictions of indigenous peoples and natural landscapes from the early days of exploration in the American West. In this detail of a rendering of a Mandan settlement called “Mih-Tutta-Hangkusch,” villagers can be seen operating the fishing boats that George Catlin and others so strongly believed to be derived from the Welsh coracle.

Needless to say, all theories regarding the existence of Indian tribes descended from a renegade 12th-century Welsh prince have long proven to be false. English skeptic Thomas Stephens vigorously disputed many of the popular narratives of his day and age that were associated with Madoc and the Welsh Indians in his Madoc; An Essay on the Discovery of America by Madoc ab Owen Gwynedd in the Twelfth Century (1893). Reverend Morgan Jones’ captivity story was shown likely to be nothing more than an elaborate hoax, while Catlin’s comparative linguistic analysis of Welsh and Mandan was demonstrated to be a laughable misrepresentation of the facts. However, Stephens found his efforts at undermining the Madoc legend’s legitimacy surprisingly difficult, particularly with regards to individuals of Welsh extraction who continued to defend it. According to Stephens, “The tales told respecting the Welsh Indians found favour with many persons . . . but in Wales itself they produced a profound and enduring impression.”

—Jakob Dopp
Cataloger, Graphics Division

Elizabeth Benton Frémont, known as Lily, became an intrepid traveler from a young age. She was born in Washington, D.C., on November 15, 1842, just days after her father, the explorer John C. Frémont, had returned from his first expedition to the American West. 

Lily’s mother, Jessie Benton Frémont, was the daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Jessie had been well-educated by a series of tutors and served as her father’s secretary during her teens. Following John Frémont’s three expeditions west in the 1840s, John and Jessie together wrote the expedition reports which followed his trips, sharing his enthusiasm for western exploration with lively prose and useful information for potential emigrants to the Oregon Territory. 

In 1847, John Frémont purchased a large tract of land called Rancho Las Mariposas (renamed Bear Valley), in the southern Sierra Nevada foothills. Although initially regarded as worthless land due to its isolated location, it quickly became highly valuable after the discovery of gold in California in 1848. The Frémonts traveled to California to oversee mining operations and manage his new ranch. 

Lily was six years old when she embarked upon her first voyage in 1849, a difficult cross-country journey from Washington to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama. Before the creation of the Panama Canal, crossing the Isthmus was a wearisome trek lasting six days. To Lily, this was a trip to be remembered fondly, in which “each hour was filled with thrilling interest and novelty.” Throughout her life, Lily was drawn to flowers, often describing them in her writings. In her first crossing of the Isthmus of Panama, she vividly recalled her first sighting of “the white and scarlet varieties of the passion-flower, as well as other flowers both brilliant and fragrant, for which I know no name.”

For an adventurous young girl, pressing flowers memorialized in a lasting way the beauty of the landscapes through which she traveled. Writing of her recovery from a dangerous fever, Lily mused, “When life is young . . . and the warm blood courses through the veins, it is not so easy to die. The world was waiting with its arms filled with roses . . . and I was not averse to staying yet a little while, to gather a few of the flowers of life and living.”

Her mother Jessie remembered the voyage differently. As a young, sheltered woman leaving home for the first time, crossing the continent alone with her young daughter presented many challenges. In A Year of American Travel (1878), she wrote: “I had never been obliged to think for or take care of myself, and now I was to be launched literally on an unknown sea, travel towards an unknown country, everything absolutely new and strange about me, and undefined for the future.” About six months after reuniting in California, the Frémonts returned to Washington because John had been elected a California senator. 

Lily soon became an international traveler as well. After John had served as Senator from September 1850 to March 1851, the Frémonts decided to travel abroad for a year. They visited England and then rented a house in Paris for over a year. In 1853, they returned to Washington, and soon after John embarked on his last western expedition. After John Frémont’s failed presidential bid in 1856, the Frémonts returned to Paris for a brief stay before journeying back to California in 1858 to settle on their property in Bear Valley. 

In Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Frémont (1912), Lily wrote: “Nowhere else did the wild flowers ever seem so beautiful as at Bear Valley, and I rode afar into the mountains in search of them. The Indian men often brought me long withes [willow branches] wound round with flowers, from places inaccessible to me, and the white men of the neighborhood were astounded at this attention of the Indians to a mere girl.”

It may have been these gifts of wildflowers that inspired Lily to create a pressed flower album, now housed at the Clements Library. She started the album in 1859 when she was sixteen years old. The first two pages of the album hold drawings depicting the Frémont home in Bear Valley and a small group of buildings and a smokestack, possibly one of the Frémont mines. The rest of the album contains about eighty pressed flowers and other plants, most of them numbered and annotated with descriptions. 

Lily shared her love of flowers with both parents. In published works by all three family members, flowers are often vividly described, even in John’s official expedition reports. In her album, Lily noted two specimens that were her father’s particular favorites, wild heliotrope and another unnamed bloom. Jessie likely taught her daughter how to press the flowers to include in the album. In Far-West Sketches (1890), Jessie recalled that she enclosed “rose-leaves and violets and such-like sweet vouchers” in her letters back home to Washington, which “in their own dear silent way carried messages of comforting and hope.”

Bear Valley, Lily Frémont’s beloved home during the 1850s, from the front of an album holding her pressed flower specimens from 1859.

Lily’s album of pressed flowers began with a buttercup found on January 20th, 1859, and continued through May of that year. Several following pages of specimens are undated, and the final date to appear in the album is January 29th, presumably 1860. The last annotations indicate specimens gathered in San Francisco near the family’s new home at Black Point, to which they moved in early 1860.

As Lily added specimens to her album, she usually noted the date and location, sometimes identified the name of the plant, and often observed its growing conditions, soil, and other notes. She rode far and wide with her father, visiting their mills and mines and gathering plants along the way. Her notes indicate that she gathered specimens in locations as varied as Bear Valley, the Burkhalter hills, Mt. Bullion, Mt. Oso, Lone Mountain, Hell’s Hollow, Mt. Ophir, and Black Point. For specimens she did not personally gather, she recorded whatever information was available. Specimen no. 56 “was given to me so I don’t know about it much. I think it is a bush flower & came from Hell’s Hollow.” No. 75 simply received this brief note: “I remember nothing about.”

A capable horsewoman, Lily favored two horses for these frequent trips with her father. Ayah was a mountain-bred horse; Chiquita was cream-colored with silver mane and tail. Another horse gifted to her by a cattle ranger, the aptly-named Becky Sharp, turned out to be a little too lively for safety and was swiftly retired after she attempted to buck Lily off three times and then stranded her two miles from home. After moving to San Francisco, Lily was unfortunately not able to gather as many flowers, partly due to her horse: “Chiquita was more restive than Ayah, so I did not care to dismount as I used to in Bear Valley, besides there were always herds of Spanish Cattle around. So I missed many lovely flowers.”

While traveling, Lily observed changes in the landscape caused by mining and other human activities. Wild jasmine grew in the “mining holes” and another unnamed plant in the “small stony hollows and washed out placer ditches.” She reported that wild clover had originally covered Bear Valley and far up the mountainsides, “but some teamsters set fire to it ‒ about two years before we came out ‒ & burned most of it so badly that it has only grown again in especially moist places.”

Lily Frémont on Chiquita.

Lily recorded second-hand information from her father regarding indigenous use of plants, including the “quinine vine” or wild cucumber (“Father says the Indians use its root as medicine in fevers”), the wild sunflower (“I am told that the Indians use the seed”), and an unidentified leaf “which the Indians use as a salad.”

Livestock interactions with native plants were also of interest, such as the wild larkspur, which was “poisonous to cattle, who do not like to eat even the grass near it.” There were large fields of wild larkspur along one road, and she noted “the cattle avoided these plains from the time it began to flower till it passed.” The wild pea-vine, by contrast, was favored by cattle and horses and “gives good nourishment.”

Lily sometimes commented on her own process of pressing and drying the plants. White mariposas blossoms were “rather hard to press well & almost impossible to glue, for the instant the glue touches them, they roll right up, & then it [is] very hard to unroll them.” She was particularly concerned with the effect of drying on the color of the flowers, which she was anxious to describe accurately. For a number of specimens, she noted the original color of a flower that had “faded in pressing.”

In addition to wildflowers, Lily was interested in the more domesticated plants growing around their house, including a live oak and wild clover inside their enclosure, and an unnamed specimen pulled from just outside the fence. Another “tame flower” came from the neighboring “Italian’s garden.”

After the Frémonts moved from Bear Valley to San Francisco in 1860, Lily’s specimen gathering seems to have slowed and then stopped entirely. On her last page of text, she wrote, “Though we had so many many beautiful flowers at Black Point I had never thought of pressing any, & these are only some I pressed ‒ or rather put in this book, for the geranium leaf had been my book mark for weeks ‒ the day before we left home. The mignonette had grown from seeds of my own planting.”

In 1861, following the outbreak of the Civil War, Jessie and her three children left San Francisco for St. Louis while John served in the Union Army. After the war, Lily remained single and continued to travel and live an adventurous life. She eventually settled in Long Beach in 1905, where she remained until her death in 1919.

—Emiko Hastings
Curator of Books

For nearly a century the Clements Library has been mounting exhibitions and issuing publications based on our collections. In the 1920s and ’30s, under first director Randolph G. Adams, we concentrated on publicizing our greatest area of collecting strength, manuscripts relating to the era of the American Revolution. Our scope gradually expanded to other concentrations in our holdings, with 1940s and ’50s exhibits and bulletins on Michigan history, religion in early America, Canadiana, Ohio rarities, maritime history, colonial Mexico, and early American law. During John C. Dann’s three decades as director we highlighted a broad array of subjects and material – Native Americans, women, culinary history, African American history, travel, caricature, Detroit’s tercentenary – while continuing to showcase our printed and manuscript American Revolution treasures. In recent years we’ve offered visitors and readers a varied menu of topics, from the War of 1812 to education, sports to “friends in fur and feathers,” the Civil War to the West Indies. The result, as our Clements Library predecessors and current staff have hoped, has been that friends and supporters of the Library have been able to sample the extraordinary range of primary sources available here on American history from 1492 to the end of the 19th century.

One major area of Americana collecting that we may have slighted in all this activity, despite it being an area of considerable strength here, has been western Americana. Looking back through my files on our exhibitions, issues of The Quarto, and our Occasional Bulletin series, I come away with the impression that we’ve neglected the trans-Mississippi West in telling the world about the Library. In 1946 we published Fifty Texas Rarities, a catalog of an exhibition of books and pamphlets from the remarkable collection of Everett D. Graff of Chicago, no doubt in an attempt to persuade Mr. Graff to donate his library to the Clements (the Graff Collection, alas, went to his hometown Newberry Library). Twenty years later young Clements staffers Albert T. Klyberg and Nathaniel N. Shipton created Frontier Pages and Pistols, an exhibit of Clements books and hand guns on “the beckoning West,” and published the results as Occasional Bulletin 72. Perhaps motivated by that initiative, in 1967 longtime Library supporter James Shearer II donated his western Americana collection to the Clements, and we showcased selections from that gift as a Beyond the Mississippi exhibit and accompanying catalog. Other than those projects, however, we seem to have been silent for the most part on our western holdings, despite ongoing and impressive acquisitions in all of our collecting divisions.

Thomas Moran (1827-1926) joined the Hayden survey expedition to the West in 1871 and produced iconic views of the dramatic landscapes they encountered, such as this lithograph of The Grand Cañon of the Colorado River, drawing Americans’ attention and imagination westward.

In the early days of 2019, when the Library’s senior managers group met to discuss our exhibitions schedule, my colleagues suggested that I organize a valedictory show before my retirement at the end of the year. Casting about for a good subject, I decided to concentrate on western Americana and to dedicate the exhibit to William S. Reese, who passed away in June 2018. I regard Bill – antiquarian book dealer, scholar, generous supporter of the Clements and other American history research institutions – as the outstanding Americanist of our time, and I knew I could use his 2017 book The Best of the West: 250 Classic Works of Western Americana as the basis for a Clements exhibit. I went through The Best of the West for information and inspiration, and was delighted to find that the Clements owns 90% of the pre-1900 titles in it. Selecting the 45 books and pamphlets our 16 exhibit cases could hold was a challenge, but one I embraced as considerably more enjoyable for a last year at the helm than the concentration on personnel, budgets, meetings, and institutional planning that otherwise fills my days in the office.

This portrait of No-Way-Ke-Sug-Ga (possibly translated as “He Who Strikes Two at Once”) is one of a set included in the Thomas McKenney (1785-1859) and James Hall (1793-1868) publication History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1836-44). These lithographs, mostly the work of Charles Bird King (1785-1862), are among the most colorful portraits of Native Americans produced in the nineteenth or any century. Many of the original oil paintings on which the prints were based perished in the 1865 Smithsonian Institution fire.

Visitors to The Best of the West, which will run through April 2020, will appreciate that “the west” has evolved as a geographic descriptor over the years. At the same time that Spanish authors like Miguel Benegas, Francisco Palóu, and Josef Espinosa y Tello were writing about Spain’s settlements in California and Mexico, English and American observers were describing the Mississippi River Valley as the farthest extent of settlement and exploration from the East Coast. The exhibit includes Philip Pittman’s 1770 Present State of the European Settlements on the Mississippi, Zadock Cramer’s 1802 Ohio and Mississippi Navigator, and the 1814 first edition of the Lewis and Clark report on their expedition to the West Coast and back. The cases for the middle decades of the 19th century feature Hall J. Kelley, John B. Wyeth, Eugène Duflot du Mofras, and Henry James Warre on Oregon, the George Catlin and McKenney and Hall portfolios of Native American portraits, and rare overland narratives by James O. Pattie, Zenas Leonard, Joel Palmer, and Riley Root. The 1851 George W. Kendall and Carl Nebel folio on the Mexican War and Henry Lewis’ 1855-58 Das Illustrirte Mississippithal display in impressive fashion the chromolithographed images through which many Americans first viewed the West. After 1850 the focus of the exhibit shifts to mining, outlaws, encounters with Native Americans, and the settlement of new areas from Arizona to Idaho, with Nelson Lee’s Three Years Among the Camanches (1859), C. M. Clark’s A Trip to Pike’s Peak and Notes by the Way (1861), John L. Campbell’s Idaho: Six Months in the New Gold Diggings (1864), Thomas J. Dimsdale’s The Vigilantes of Montana (1866), and Thomas F. Dawson & F. J. V. Skiff’s The Ute War (1879) among the titles on display. Viewers will note that a majority of the items in the exhibit came to the Clements during the 1953-1977 directorship of Howard H. Peckham, and I am most appreciative of Howard’s acquisition of so many high points in western Americana that have subsequently soared to prices that would challenge our acquisitions endowments if we attempted to buy them today.

The Best of the West concentrates on printed books and pamphlets, but readers of this issue of The Quarto will learn that the Library has tremendous strength in western American manuscripts, prints, photographs, and maps as well. Our recent acquisition of some 1,100 Native American photographs in the Richard Pohrt Jr. Collection has vaulted the Clements to a high rank among American libraries in that important field. As Jayne Ptolemy outlines, the Crittenden Family Papers that Dr. Thomas Kingsley donated to the Library in 2006-07 are rich in source material on California and Nevada in the late 19th century. Clayton Lewis’ article on the Eastman family and their materials in our Norton Strange Townshend Collection hints at the considerable research potential those papers and daguerreotypes offer. Sara Quashnie, Emi Hastings, and Jakob Dopp contribute pieces on the Hill Family Papers, Lily Frémont, and the myth of Welsh Indians respectively. As these essays and the exhibit indicate, the upshot is that the Clements is a tremendous resource for students and scholars alike on the American West. If we are not yet UCal Berkeley’s Bancroft Library for depth and range of primary sources in western Americana, we unquestionably do hold a remarkable variety of materials on the western half of this country from the 17th through the 19th centuries. So if you like historical books, manuscripts, and images, and if you agree with my favorite 1950s-60s songwriter Tom Lehrer that “The wild west is where I wanna be,” you should come to 909 South University Avenue sometime soon and start discovering what we have here.

—J. Kevin Graffagnino
Director, 2008-2019

Clements Library Associates Board of Governors News

At the October 2020 meeting a resolution was passed naming Peter Heydon Honorary Member and Chair Emeritus.

In March 2020 Thomas Kingsley passed away. He served on the board for 30 years before retiring in 2011 and being named an Honorary Member. His wife Sally has made a gift in his memory for acquisitions.

Exhibitions

“No, not even for a picture”: Re-examining the Native Midwest and Tribes’ Relations to the History of Photography – Online Exhibition at clements.umich.edu/pohrt
This exhibition investigates the complex balance between violation of privacy and the quest for self-identification felt by Native peoples during the early era of photography. Photographic styles and practices are examined that recorded the people, activities, stereotypes, and myths of this important time, focusing on the Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes region and beyond.

Framing Identity: Representations of Empowerment and Resilience in the Black Experience – Online Exhibition at clements.umich.edu/framing-identity
Drawing inspiration from Frederick Douglass’ views on picture-making and representation, this exhibition examines how 19th- and 20th- century African American artists and intellectuals expressed identity through portraiture, photography, and literature. A curatorial project developed by 2019-21 Joyce Bonk Fellow Samantha Hill, images were selected from published works and original photographs at the Clements, particularly the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography.

Matthew Edney and Mary Pedley flank the completed manuscript of Volume Four of The History of Cartography in the spring of 2018, shortly before its delivery to the University of Chicago Press, where it underwent 18 months of copy-editing, indexing, and layout, prior to publication and printing. It was released in April 2020.

Virtual Programming

In March 2020, the Clements Library launched a webinar series in which panelists and featured guests discuss history topics. Join us continuing monthly in 2021, and access recordings of past episodes at clements.umich.edu/bookworm.

Our popular Discover Series has also gone virtual. In 2020, Clements staff presented fabulous sessions on the history of photography, women’s history in the archives, and the treasonous correspondence of Benedict Arnold. Access the recordings at clements.umich.edu/virtual-discover-series.

Staff News

Former Clements Library staff member Louis Miller has accepted a position as Cartography Reference and Teaching Librarian at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. Louie was a knowledgeable, diligent, creative, and enthusiastic member of the Graphics Division and Reference teams at the Clements. He was always eager to share his many talents and his cheerful energy—he is and will be greatly missed! We wish him well on his new adventure.

As I write this article 2020 has come to a close. This is likely a year that will be studied by many future generations as they try to untangle fact from fiction, trace cause and effect, and link the past to the present. This year we have also heard many negative critiques about various aspects of history being “rewritten.” I’ve been thinking a lot about this, because as Director of Development I have been raising money to expand our fellowship program. Our fellows come to the Clements Library to study the primary sources housed within its walls. They come to ask questions and take a critical look at American history. How might their work change our understanding of a well-known narrative?

If you watched our December Discover Series on Benedict Arnold, you heard Curator of Manuscripts Cheney Schopieray discuss how historians have used the Clinton Papers to uncover details about Benedict Arnold’s treason. If we had only relied on previous tellings of Arnold’s activities, we might still believe 19th-century accounts of his childhood. In books like The Life and Treason of Benedict Arnold (Boston, 1835), historian Jared Sparks used unsubstantiated tales to justify writing about Arnold’s pharmacist apprenticeship and his use of the broken glass vials: “. . . he would scatter in the path broken pieces of glass taken from the crates, by which the children would cut their feet in coming from the school.” Benedict Arnold had become a mythical, evil character and it wasn’t until William L. Clements purchased Henry Clinton’s papers during the 20th century that serious scholarship could be undertaken respecting his treasonous interactions with the British. In this sense, yes, we do need to rewrite history. Places like the Clements Library acquire and make available the primary sources that allow historians to carefully research and analyze the actions of even well-known figures in order to understand and even update the impact they have had on both the past and the present.

Another movement around the country this year has been the acknowledgement that unjust policies and institutionalized racism continue to affect the quality of life for many Americans. In June we released an anti-racism statement at the Clements provoking powerful and thoughtful discussions before and after its release.

These conversations have led me to think about and talk about my own family history. I have seen some writers speculate that anti-racist policies also seek to “rewrite history.” Using a segment of my ancestry, I hope to explain what it means to be “anti-racist” or “inclusive” in writing about and discussing our nation’s record. The facts, dates, and people that countless school children have memorized over the years have not changed. They still exist. What we can choose to do now is to fill in the gaps with the people, experiences, and events that were not previously mentioned.

For example, the fact that an Army officer named Richard Pratt founded the first U.S. Training and Industrial School in 1879 at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, has not changed. At the time, Pratt thought that he was doing something good. “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” Pratt said. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Many episodes in history have typically been told by people in positions of power, like Pratt.

So, how can we tell this account better? We can discuss that 150 schools opened all over the country and over the course of 125 years 180,000 children were taken from their families. We can acknowledge the experiences of people like my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Shay-Kaw, who was sent to the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School and endured the harsh lessons of assimilation. We can analyze the effects of these schools on the families and tribes.

It is not just scholars who shape how we write about and study American history. You can help by making a gift to the Clements Library to continue the critical work that is being done.

I hope you’ll also agree that historical narrative should include both Richard Pratt and Elizabeth Shay-Kaw. We can’t go back to change history and right the wrongs that happened, but we can choose to be part of a more just and inclusive society where we learn and tell stories about all the people who have walked this land we now call America.

—Angela Oonk
Director of Development

The concept that the human brain processes information differently when all our senses are engaged is fundamental to the mission of the Clements Library. Vintage leather bound books have a certain smell. Turning pages of old hand-made paper can make a crisp sound or a soft murmur. Books can be thick, thin, light or heavy. Historical documents have weight, texture, smells and sound that we respond to with more than our eyes alone. When in direct contact with rare materials, all of these elements stimulate our senses for a deep-dive immersion into the past that is impossible to replicate digitally. This has much to do with why we believe that the experience of working directly with original primary source materials brings out the best in scholars of history.

When studying historical photographs, there is a growing awareness that considerations of physicality contribute to meaning. It is easy to become so enraptured with the image itself that we can forget that it comes to us on a physical platform. A photo may be on paper, glass, metal, wood, ivory, perhaps in a protective case like a daguerreotype, or in a wooden frame for the wall. There is often a brittleness that commands cautious handling, and physical scale that can be surprising. Additionally, photographs are responsive to lighting conditions. The uniformity of computer screens can hide the fact that that photos can look different at different times of day, that daguerreotypes are highly reflective, but also carry deep contrasts.

The Richard Pohrt Jr. Collection of Native American Photography contains a wide variety of physical formats: card-mounted paper photographic prints, unmounted glossy photos, small cartes de visite, large framed panoramic views, tintypes, stereoviews, and photo albums. Some of these photos invite intimate and up-close viewing, others broadcast from across the room.

Experiencing all of this in a rich sensory experience is what we had in mind when we posted internships funded by the Upton Family Foundation in the fall of 2018. The plan was to hire talented students to work directly with the Pohrt Collection materials to produce a traveling poster exhibit. We were delighted to bring on board Dr. Andrew Rutledge, whose qualifications exceeded our expectations. Andrew considered as a theme the dynamic but often troubling role that photography played in Native American history. In the 19th century, there was plenty of hostility between indigenous populations and the incoming settlers, soldiers, and photographers. However the Pohrt Collection also shows us hundreds of images that could not have been taken without cooperation from the Native American subjects. To what extent did these dynamics shape the Pohrt Collection materials? Are there 19th-century examples of Native Americans using photography for themselves?

Andrew researched the material, immersed himself in the history, and proposed a detailed exploration focused on the Great Lakes region and the Anishinaabe people. However, Andrew’s destiny lay elsewhere and he took an irresistible full-time position at the Bentley Library across town where he continues to do exemplary work for the university.

This set-back was also an opportunity to take stock of where we were and to re-set. We reposted the internship position and quickly found ourselves in a pleasant dilemma stemming from a remarkably talented pool of applicants. Fortunately, financial support allowed us to hire two interns, Lindsey Willow Smith and Veronica Cook Williamson.

Lindsey Willow Smith is a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, majoring in History with a minor in Museum Studies. She is active within the Indigenous community on campus, serving as Chairman for the Native American Student Association. Lindsey is also researching the use of census data in describing Native populations with Arland Thornton and Linda Young-DeMarco at the Institute for Social Research at U-M.

Veronica Cook Williamson is a graduate student in the department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and in the program of Museum Studies. Her primary research focuses on racial(izing) processes in media and other cultural representations of newcomers in Germany. She graduated with a BA in German Cultural Studies and Film and Media Studies from Dartmouth College in 2017. She has Irish, British, and Choctaw ancestry and is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation — chickasha saya.

The new team of Lindsey, Veronica, Graphics Cataloger Jakob Dopp, Reference Librarian Louis Miller, and myself met in the Library on March 3, full of ambition and anticipation. We did not know that this would be our only in-person meeting. On March 11 the University of Michigan closed its campus and remote work began, for what we thought would be a few weeks or months.

As the new reality took hold, it became apparent that the demand for online access and support for remote teaching superseded any of our plans for an “in real life” traveling exhibit. Should the internships continue? Fortunately, Jakob had completed item-level cataloging of the Pohrt Collection and Andrew, Jakob, and Louie had uploaded an extensive and detailed online finding aid for the collection. We had scans of most of the materials, enough that we could shift the project to the creation of an online exhibit. The internships could continue, and had the potential to create a timely and supportive resource.

We met regularly (on Zoom of course). Lindsey and Veronica proposed a rewrite that examined the issues of colonialism, Native sovereignty, self-identification, and cultural appropriation in the photographic representations—ideas that were challenging, but well-grounded in history and frequently downplayed.

The editing of the online exhibit, “No, Not Even for a Picture,” required the removal of some outstanding and important images. They include those pictured here and below. “Taking the Census at Standing Rock, Dakota.” D. F. Barry, 1885, 20 x 25 cm.

Detail, “Taking the Census at Standing Rock, Dakota.” F. Barry, 1885.

The man with the cane standing by the desk of the census enumerator is likely Lakota Chief Gall, one of Sitting Bull’s most trusted lieutenants at Little Big Horn, later a converted Christian who mediated assimilation. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) recorded the census annually during this time.

“L. Troop Mon. [S]Couts” O.S. Goff, 1890, 20 x 25 cm.

Nine unidentified Crow Indian scouts of L. Troop, 1st U.S. Cavalry Regiment, pose with their troop flag and a large American flag, possibly taken at Fort Maginnis, Montana. Many of the Native Americans enlisted in the United States military services were not citizens of the United States. Until the Indian Citizen Act of 1924, becoming a U.S. citizen often required formally leaving your tribe.

The themes and resources of the project were refined with invaluable input from Eric Hemenway, Director of Repatriation, Archives and Records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians and Arland Thornton, Professor of Sociology, Population Studies, and Survey Research at the University of Michigan, as well as from Richard Pohrt.

None of this work came easily. We had disagreements about interpretation and what was appropriate. The early versions had enough content for three exhibits. We were all sick of the isolation. Lindsey later commented that “as a Chippewa woman, the balancing of my views and experiences with those of the Clements was a chore.” She stated that “the inequity of emotional investment” was both wearisome and energizing. But as Veronica stated, “the photographs carried this project forward; they were the life force fighting back against video call malaise and quarantine fatigue.”

“Squaws Guarding Corn from Black-Birds” Adrian Ebell, ca. 1872, 8.5 x 18 cm.

Possibly taken on the very morning that the 1862 Dakota War uprisings began, this stereograph depicts an unidentified Dakota woman and four children sitting on an elevated platform standing watch over crops. This 1872 print from the 1862 negative would have been produced sometime after Charles Zimmerman took over the Whitney Gallery.

Later in the summer, University policies allowed access to the Clements building and the collection. After many months of remote work, Lindsey and Veronica had their first opportunity to view the actual photos at the Library. The power of this materiality is discussed eloquently in Lindsey and Veronica’s blog post for the Clements Library Chronicles.

I am very proud of this project. I am particularly proud that issues were discussed and decided within the team, that the curation and interpretive concept were led by Lindsey and Veronica, and that their voices came to the fore in the final product. In spite of being thrust together as strangers forced to be partners, employed by an institution that neither knew, using unfamiliar work and communication methods, with a pandemic just outside the door, Lindsey and Veronica’s talents and visions meshed. They create a unified, thoughtful, and challenging look at photography and Native American history that will have lasting value as well as serving the immediate need to support remote education. The online exhibit, “No, Not Even For a Picture,” is a remarkable accomplishment under any circumstances. Given what the project team faced, it is all the more so. It is only one of many projects that are waiting to emerge from the Richard Pohrt Jr. Collection of Native American Photography.

—Clayton Lewis
Curator of Graphics Material

Lauren Davis

In 2019 the Clements introduced a new Digital Fellowship, where we scan a collection identified by our fellow for them to consult from their home institution. Imagined well before the public health challenges presented to us by the coronavirus, it now stands as a model for how we can still work to support researchers even if they can’t travel to our reading room. Our inaugural Digital Fellow, Lauren Davis, a doctoral candidate at the University of Rochester’s History Department, talked to us about her project and the power of remote historical research. The transcript of our conversation appears below, condensed and edited slightly.

—Jayne Ptolemy
Assistant Curator of Manuscripts

Jayne Ptolemy (JP): Tell us about your project and the types of sources you use to uncover your story.

Lauren Davis (LD): My dissertation is entitled “Beyond Institutions: Mental Disorders and the Family in New York, 1830-1900,” and it explores how families cared for relatives with mental illness in the 19th century. I found that nuclear and extended families were taking part in a lot of home caregiving, were helping to make healthcare decisions, and were negotiating patients’ treatment with physicians when they felt like institutionalization was necessary. Despite families directing every stage of mental health treatment, the history of mental health is dominated by a focus on institutions and prominent physicians. My dissertation restores families to the narrative of mental health care, establishes a lay perspective on diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, and contributes to the history of gender at the intersection of medicine. It challenges the existing interpretations of American asylums as the first and last resort for mental health care.

There’s a pretty wide variety in the sources that I’m using. I use a lot of family correspondence and diaries, which give me the most qualitative information about a particular caregiving situation. Families are seeking cures for their relatives, and if a cure or improvement doesn’t seem like it’s possible, then they want to provide the best long-range care that they can. Sometimes they choose an institution, but a lot of times they rely on home care. This isn’t necessarily a situation where someone is institutionalized and then stays there for the rest of their lives. A lot of times they’re institutionalized for a period, and then after a few years they determine that they’ve received the most benefit that can be achieved and they will be pulled back out of the institution. They return home and live with their family supporting their care.

(JP): Which Clements collection are you working with, and why did you select it?

(LD): I’m working with the King Family Papers. I’m interested in the declining mental health of William King and his brothers’ efforts to care for him. The King family correspondence includes discussions of his brothers’ direct interventions, consultations with physicians, and their commitment of William to a private insane asylum. I’m interested in seeing why the brothers decided to commit William, how they selected an institution, if they thought he was curable and if that changed over time, and how they negotiated his care with physicians when they thought it was appropriate to consult with them.

This July 31, 1870, letter details Edward King’s struggles to contend with his brother William’s declining mental health. The handwriting itself seems to reveal the agonizing emotional turmoil and the inadequacy of words to describe a family’s calamity.

(JP): How is working from digital surrogates different from researching in-person at a library? What challenges and benefits does it yield?

(LD): I thought about this in two different ways. First, when I’m researching in person, I’m able to browse across multiple collections, and I can see what might be relevant to my project. This is hard to replace without having digital options available for all the same materials. When I have digital images for a whole collection, though, it is an advantage for my research. When I’m working with family papers, the narrative threads run through many of the family letters. The dynamics of relationships within every family are unique, and the outlook a person has on caregiving is not isolated from the rest of these relationships. Having the time to explore the context of surrounding letters in a collection is vital for understanding this.

The other side that I thought about is in terms of reading the text. With high quality images, researchers now can manipulate the image by zooming in or adjusting the contrast. Those are things that make the text clearer in ways that’s not possible with a physical manuscript. It’s also a lot easier to ask about a particularly tricky word if you have a digital image you’re able to share with a colleague. My friends and I send screenshots, asking each other, “What do you think this word is?”

(JP): From a researcher’s perspective, what is the value of digital fellowships that don’t have a residency requirement, even without a global pandemic?

(LD): The pandemic definitely has changed the perspective and outlook on digital fellowships, but one of the largest benefits at any point is being able to process the collection at home, on my own timeline. A visit to an archive provides advantages, but it also requires resources to allow for travel and multiple days spent in a reading room. Any time I travel to an archive I try to be as efficient as I can, so I’m using my time to gather the most helpful information as quickly as possible. That means making a lot of judgments on what’s the most relevant and important. Sometimes these decisions are clear, but sometimes they’re more ambiguous, or new details alter my conclusions. In one case, after I read a few dozen letters, I discovered that a family friend often interacted with an institutionalized relative. By having images of that collection I was able to go back and consult the material again to follow the different paths and clarify points of ambiguity. Being able to consult the images as your research evolves is very helpful.

Sometimes it’s just one line about one person that helps piece together the narrative, and it may not come up until ten years after the specific time period of their care. With family letters, it’s key to have the surrounding context. It takes a long time to process them, so being able to do that digitally is a big benefit for me.

(JP): What main lessons has researching in the age of COVID taught you?

(LD): I think the biggest thing is having to be flexible to navigate the changes the pandemic has brought. I had plans to visit several archives in the spring of 2020. All the facilities closed to visitors, so that’s been impossible. I have had to adjust, use what I have, and be creative about what I’m able to access. Before the pandemic I’d actually never worked with microfilm. I had always had better alternatives, either using the manuscripts or better quality digital images. I had a particular set of volumes, where the reading room was closed and I couldn’t visit that archive. They had microfilm they could send via Interlibrary Loan, so I was able to process it at my university’s library and work my way through the sixteen volume series. It was a new experience for me, but it worked! Flexibility is the biggest thing, having to be creative and rethinking plans about how to get as much information as I can.

Much like Lauren, we’ve found that this challenging season has taught us the resounding power of being flexible and harnessing the resources at our disposal. Zoom conversations with fellows, high resolution scans, reference photos taken with cell phones—in ways big and small, we have been using technology and digital surrogates to support innovative research like Lauren’s from a distance. Until we’re once again able to crowd around the tea table with all our fellows to discuss their archival finds of the day, we’ll continue to look to the power of technology to keep us connected and moving forward.

Forrester (“Woody”) Lee of New Haven, Connecticut, spent an extraordinary amount of time carefully transcribing the phonetic spelling of the United Sons of Salem Benevolent Society Minute Book and helping make this important volume more accessible to readers.

While providing collection scans online is a tremendous help to researchers who are unable to visit the Clements Library either due to the pandemic or to time or financial constraints, providing true searchability of digitized material is the gold standard.

In March 2020, the Clements Library began experimenting with a group transcription process. FromThePage, a software platform, provided the interface for collaborative transcription of online documents. The Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society Papers, one of our richest collections related to the Underground Railroad, provided the source material.

Clements staff, recently exiled from in-person contact with collections, seized the opportunity to interact with these papers remotely and at the same time provide an invaluable service to our patrons. Each page of the collection was read, puzzled over, and ultimately transcribed. Staff checked each other’s work, asked for help with difficult words, and did online research to reveal the identities of difficult-to-decipher names of historic figures. The project provided a much-needed distraction and escape from the dislocation, anxiety, and uncertainty in the early days of the pandemic.

After the initial phase of trial-by-staff, the transcription project was opened up to volunteers. Individuals and groups of persons have contributed to the transcription project. The Sarah Caswell Angell Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR) transcribed the Revolutionary War papers of Colonel Jonathan Chase, of the 13th and 15th Regiments of the New Hampshire Militia. This semester, Andrea Smeeton’s 7th grade students at East Prairie School in Skokie, Illinois, successfully transcribed selections from the letters of 19th-century writer and activist Lydia Maria Child. Many highly dedicated individuals have contributed to the completion of transcriptions for the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society Papers, United Sons of Salem Benevolent Society Minute Book, Louise Gilman Papers, African American History Collection, Samuel Latham Mitchill Papers, and James Sterling Letter Book. Some of these transcriptions are already live and available to researchers and others are awaiting final review before releasing them to the world.

Our partners in U-M Library Digital Content & Collections have merged the transcriptions with the existing digital collections to make them fully text searchable. Now, a researcher utilizing one of our transcribed collections and looking for a specific mention of a particular subject—fugitive, freedmen— receives immediate search results with the corresponding scanned pages of the original document. Previously, the search could be undertaken only by laboriously scrutinizing each document for the appearance of the word in question.

The Clements Library plans to continue to provide new collections online via FromThePage for those who enjoy the challenge of puzzling out a variety of handwriting styles and taking a closer look at the content of these remarkable resources.

—Terese Austin
Head of Reader Services

The papers of Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880), a writer, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist, were among the digitized collections recently completed. In this letter from Mrs. Child to her friend Anna Loring, July 1, 1871, volunteers transcribed:

“You ask what I think concerning the political enfranchisement of women. I have for many years been decidedly in favor of it. I dont feel interested in it as a right to be claimed, but as the most efficient means of helping the human race onward to the highest and best state of society. A really harmonious structure of society requires complete, unqualified companionship between the sexes. Homes will be nobler, and capable of higher and fuller happiness, when the mothers, wives, and sisters, in families, have an understanding sympathy in the investigations of science, the designs of artists, the experiments of the agriculturist, the enterprises of the merchant, the inventions of the machinist, the labors of the mechanic, the theories of politicians, and the guidance of statesmen. And in order to have an understanding sympathy with these things, they must have part and portion in the performance of them.”

COVID-19, with its related State-wide shutdowns, has dramatically increased the need for digitized archival collections. For the Clements Library, reference requests, teaching opportunities, and other services have been limited to what we are able to provide remotely. This demand prompted us to dedicate significantly more staff time to digitizing materials, whether by creating high-resolution digital surrogates for long-term online access or speedier reference snapshots for immediate use. The increased speed with which we have been scanning materials led us to reaffirm and reevaluate our selection process for digitizing archival collections, in order to best serve our teaching activities, remote patrons, and long-term goals. The William L. Clements Library is pleased to report that in these troubling times, its digitization initiatives have amplified and increased, resulting in the scanning of 12 complete archival collections, a modicum of partial collections, and an extraordinary amount of materials for reference purposes.

For the digitization team, the pandemic closure caught us in the midst of a transition. We had just posted the position of digitization technician in January 2020 and completed the interview process a month later. Shortly after Christopher Ridgway accepted the position in early March, the Library closed and everyone shifted to work from home. Fortunately, we had completed the hiring process before a University-wide hiring freeze went into effect, so Chris’ new role with us was secure despite the changing situation. Chris started in April as a remote employee, a real challenge for someone whose work requires hands-on interactions with collections in the Library.

Chris Ridgway at long last working hands-on with the Library’s book scanner.

Our building re-entry plan called for one-third occupancy, with each staff member in a dedicated workspace using separate equipment. Focusing on key in-person roles such as conservation, cataloging, reference, and digitization, we agreed that our core tasks for the fall semester were to support remote reference and teaching. With relatively few collections fully digitized and online, most of our reference queries and instruction sessions would require new images, so ramping up digitization became a central part of the plan. Cheney J. Schopieray (Curator of Manuscripts) and Emiko Hastings (Curator of Books) both chose to join the first phase of staff returning to the Library in order to restart the digitization program and act as additional technicians during the first phase. We moved the scanners into separate rooms so that each person could have a dedicated space with their own queue of materials to scan.

With no new scans of material produced since December and many researchers who had to postpone their Library visits, we returned to a pent-up demand for digital access. We opted to split the requests into two queues, one for the reference team to answer with quick, low-resolution photographs and the other for the digitization team to fulfill with high-resolution scans suitable for inclusion in an online collection. In this way, we could more speedily address immediate needs, while balancing the long-term goal to sustainably grow our digital collections for enhanced remote access. Staff working from home completed the process by compiling PDFs for users, creating cover sheets and metadata, and responding to the email reference queue.

The high-resolution scanning workflow is a time-consuming process. It involves slower scanning speeds and the careful production of item-level metadata to help organize the images and facilitate searching and retrieval of items in the collection. Once the images and metadata are complete, the University of Michigan Library’s Digital Content & Collections (DCC) department hosts and maintains the collection, a service for which the Clements Library is deeply grateful.

The competing priorities of high-resolution scans versus low-resolution snapshots brings to mind the question of how the Library decides on which archival collections to assign to which workflow. For which collections do we create high-resolution digital surrogates? After all, the time required to digitize one collection is time we are not spending on another. Holding almost 2,800 manuscripts collections, the Clements Library must determine its digitization priorities carefully. When the Library began to scan archival materials in 2019, we selected collections based on a variety of criteria, with a particular eye toward testing the format and display of the digital versions. The selections therefore included examples of single and multi-series collections, oversize manuscripts, and mixtures of bound and loose-leaf items. Other necessary factors included the condition of the materials, the anticipated use of the collection, and a desire to make lesser-known items of importance available in order to increase their use. The German Auxiliaries Muster Rolls and the Samuel Latham Mitchill Papers we knew had immediate audiences waiting for them. The Humphry and Moses Marshall Papers and the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society Papers are multi-series collections with a selection of loose pages, bound items, and oversize materials. We also selected items that might serve as examples of particular subject matter, anticipating future grant proposals to digitize much larger collections pertaining to similar topics. We digitized, for example, the Elizabeth Camp Journals, thinking of potential funding opportunities to scan our individual women’s diaries, and the Henry James Family Correspondence, considering a future project to digitize our Civil War collections.

With the Avenir Foundation Reading Room closed, reference staff re-doubled their efforts to provide quick, reference-quality images to researchers unable to wait for the library to re-open, and not in need of the high-resolution images provided by the scanning team. At the request of a patron, PDF images were created of the Harry A. Simmons sketchbook including this depiction of a ship, composed entirely of mailing stamps. Simmons (b. ca. 1826) served in the Union Navy during the Civil War.

The COVID-19 workplace introduced additional factors for consideration, based on immediate needs associated with reference queries and teaching. The criteria is currently as follows:

Shown here scanning a manuscript collection, Samantha Hill, Joyce Bonk Fellow, contributes to the Clements’ online efforts by learning digitization methods and workflows, and participating in the creation of new digital collections and web-based resources.

Over the past nine months, we have created high-resolution scans of the following collections and they are either online or awaiting online deployment:

• Maria M. Churchill Journals, 1845-1848. Daily journal entries providing insights into the emotional and intellectual life of a middle-class woman in the mid-1800s.

• Loftus Cliffe Papers, 1769-1784. Personal letters largely dating from Cliffe’s service in the British Army during the American Revolution.

• Gardner Family Papers, 1776-1789. Documentation of the management of Joseph Gardner’s Jamaica plantation.

• Great Britain Indian Department Collection, 1753-1795. Documents, letters, and other manuscripts relating to interactions between government and military officials, Native Americans, and American residents.

• William Howe Orderly Book, 1776-1778. Copies of orders for a brigade under British Commander-in-Chief Sir William Howe.

• Jacob Aemilius Irving Letter Books, 1809-1816. Letters of a Jamaican sugar planter during the years following the cessation of the British slave trade.

• King Family Papers, 1844-1901. Documenting the business activities of the King brothers, three of whom worked as traders with Russell & Company in China in the mid-19th century, and the subsequent institutionalization of William King.

• Richard Pohrt Jr. Collection of Native American Photography, ca. 1855-1940. Approximately 1,420 photographs pertaining to Native American history from the 1850s into the 1920s.

• James Sterling Letter Book, 1761-1765. Outgoing letters of James Sterling, a fur trader at Fort Detroit.

• United Sons of Salem Benevolent Society Minute Book, 1839-1867. Business proceedings of a mid-19th-century African American organization, a hybrid of an insurance agency and charitable operation.

• Weld-Grimké Family Papers: Diaries, 1828-1836. Diaries of abolitionists and women’s rights activists Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Emily Grimké.

• Charles Winstone Letter Book, 1777-1786. Business correspondence of Winstone, attorney general and planter in Dominica during and after the American Revolution.

While the pandemic temporarily disrupted our digitization process, it also pushed us to increase the capacity and efficiency of our scanning program. Previously, we had relied upon physical access in the reading room as the primary means by which researchers could interact with the collections, with digitization something to be done in addition as time and other projects allowed. With in-person access now strictly limited, we have become more flexible and creative in finding ways to make materials available to researchers across the world, whether through quick reference snapshots, high-resolution scans, or even digitizing old microfilm reels. Many of these efforts will benefit researchers long after the pandemic is over, as we continue to improve our online presence and make collections more widely available outside the confines of the Library building.

—Emiko Hastings
Curator of Books and Digital Projects Librarian

—Cheney J. Schopieray
Curator of Manuscripts

The plan of Jean-Baptiste de La Porte-Lalanne’s Haiti plantation is the sort of document you have to walk around. Produced in 1753, its features demonstrate the organization and efficiency of 18th-century Atlantic trade, and the conditions of those enslaved at its expense. For teachers and students, the document exemplifies the texts and subtexts that can be found in primary sources and historical research.

Leaning in to view the plan, students might notice the vast uniformity of the sugar fields, the intricacy of the main garden, or the blockish imprecision of the slave quarters. Walking around the document, other names hug the borders of La Porte-Lalanne’s land, signs of the many other plantations that extracted lives and commodities at such scale. Perhaps even touching the paper, one might ponder on the many folds that have disrupted its surface, remnants of its past storage and transportation.

We will never see this plantation, so we must cling to every clue we can find. Yet in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, we have been distanced further. Our challenges as historians and teachers are not only temporal, but also material. In the absence of in-person interactions, archives and their documents must be met anew.

This was the challenge when arranging a collaborative session between the William L. Clements Library and the undergraduate students of Michigan’s early American history survey course, investigating the documents and history of the Atlantic slave trade. In past years, students met curators and documents in person, discussing and exploring sources in the Clements’ atmospheric reading room. As an instructor, those visits offered the opportunity to take my students somewhere new, outside of the classroom and beyond the realm of PDFs and laptop screens.

With the shift to online learning, these encounters had to be reimagined.

A cardinal rule for researching in person at the Clements Library is never to make marks on historical documents. The online setting allows students to highlight and comment on this passage from the Leyland Company records of a slave trade voyage.

Working with Jayne Ptolemy and Clayton Lewis from the Clements staff, we faced the challenge of bringing students to the Clements over Zoom. This meant factoring in the dynamics and difficulties of the digital environment: the default muting of microphones; the distractions of computers and home life; the dreaded lag and spotty wifi.

Our planning focused on maximizing discussion and minimizing the potentially overwhelming array of classroom technologies. We decided to focus on in-depth preparation and the discussion of just two sources: Jean-Baptiste de La Porte-Lalanne’s plantation and an account book of the Thomas Leyland Company, recording a single slave voyage from Liverpool to Angola, and finally Barbados.

With the variety of technologies on offer, we discovered new opportunities for student engagement and discussion. In advance of the session, students were asked to read through the Thomas Leyland account book. Using Perusall, a digital reading tool, students could discuss the source online, posing questions and responding to each other’s comments.

This meant that we were provided with an array of questions and overlapping interests that might otherwise have been missed with individual preparation. Students asked about the goods transported on the ship, and the various systems of measurement. They conversed about the various professional roles on board, and the fact that seamen could be paid in human beings as well as currency. They expressed their shock at the scale of this journey and its place in the trade as a whole: one of 45 such voyages arranged by Thomas Leyland, and a fraction of over 36,000 in the trade overall. Two hundred sixty-six anonymous lives, in a trade that displaced millions.

Armed with these questions and comments, the Clements curators could present the primary sources in a personalized way for each student. Over Zoom, we could explore students’ reactions to the document, without simply calling upon the most vocal. Digital tools, at least on this occasion, democratized involvement and encouraged broad participation. It was no surprise that Perusall was requested by students in subsequent weeks and will continue to be a valuable tool, even after the return to in-person teaching.

Using Perusall analytics, an online teaching tool, staff can use data—in this case, how long students spent looking at individual pages of the Thomas Leyland Company Account Books—to better understand student engagement with an eye toward improving remote instruction.

Next up was the plan of La Porte-Lalanne’s plantation. This time, without any prior preparation, we directed the students to its place on the Clements website and asked for their first impressions. With significant squinting and zooming in, the plan’s details began to come to light. Given the document’s size, and the restrictions of their computer screens, students were forced to slowly tour the plantation. They had to scroll methodically through its details, perambulating rather than surveying the document as a whole.

With this unique focus, students noticed the smallest features. The lack of trees and shade by the slave quarters, and their distance from almost every other building. The individual sugar canes, indicating the decorative, as well as practical purposes of the plan.

It is impossible to replace in-person encounters with documents, yet digital tools and discussion revealed elements that might otherwise have been missed by the naked eye. And thanks to the expertise of the Clements curators, each component observed by students could be expanded to the broader history of the slave trade and Atlantic history.

While I am undoubtedly excited by the prospect of bringing students back to the Clements Library, it is important that we do not forget the lessons learned in digital teaching. We must continue to consider the circumstances of our students, beyond computer and wifi access. We must work to incorporate ways of learning and participating that do not prioritize certain voices. We must reflect on new ways of viewing and discussing historical documents. We must lean in and take a closer look.

Alexander Clayton

—Alexander Clayton is a Ph.D Student and Graduate Instructor in the University of Michigan History Department. His research and teaching focus on Atlantic History and the History of Science.

It is perhaps an understatement to say that my first year as Director at the Clements Library has not gone precisely how I had expected. Since the library closed in mid-March, so many people have told me how hard it must be to have stepped into a new job, in a new city, under these circumstances. And it has been hard—for me, and for everyone else on the staff—to not be able to do what the library is set up to do. The Clements exists to provide opportunities for students, faculty, and researchers from around the world to have in-person encounters with physical artifacts from the nation’s past. That mission is what animates the talented staff of the Clements Library, and it is why generous supporters over the past 97 years have donated items to the Clements—so they would be used. Since March, we’ve had to work to find ways to replicate that experience remotely, over Zoom and through digital surrogates of collections materials.

But while these past 11 months have been hard, compared to so many others, I have had this year easy. The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated communities across the United States, and has killed over 500,000 of our fellow citizens. It has changed almost everything about how all of us work, and play, and worship, and mourn. Millions of Americans—myself included—have lost family members to COVID-19, and the endless upward progression of terrible numbers has made all of us wonder if 2020 would ever actually end. Even so, I have been reminded every day of how lucky I am, to be working with the marvelous collections of the Clements Library on the campus of a world-class university with a group of dedicated, deeply knowledgeable colleagues. Collaborating with them to build on the library’s great strengths and to discover new ways to introduce our collections to students and scholars under challenging circumstances has been a constant joy.

We do our work in different ways, from different places, and wearing different shoes (if any), but the core work of the Clements Library remains the same. And my colleagues at the Clements have been endlessly inventive and persistent in finding ways for the library to continue offering students and researchers the opportunity to study all aspects of American history and culture before 1900. Of course, the materials in the Clements collections can do more than just tell us about the history of a single nation. The questions that our collections help scholars answer are the great questions that have animated all humanistic inquiry: What constitutes a good life? How do we create meaning out of suffering? What is the right relationship of the individual to the state? What are the responsibilities of those with more power to those with less?

Despite unusual market constraints, the Clements has still been able to acquire exciting new materials, like this lithograph. Featuring the parade held in Baltimore in 1870 celebrating the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, the central image is surrounded by vignettes of African American life and portraits of proponents of emancipation and civil rights.

These questions have been given new salience by the events of the past year, events that have made even clearer how necessary institutions like the Clements Library are for the future of our country. None of the questions that scholars investigate using the library’s materials exist in a vacuum. All bear some relation to our current circumstances, from the terror inspired by the arrival of cholera in the 1830s—the United States’ first experience with a global pandemic—to the long and difficult tradition of state responses to urban protest, from the Boston Massacre to the Haymarket Riot. All of my colleagues at the Clements Library are more committed than ever to helping students and faculty shed light on these connections using the materials on our shelves.

This issue of The Quarto is a bit different than what you’re used to. In many cases, instead of receiving a handsome hard copy in your mailbox, this issue is being delivered to you electronically (although we’ll be glad to create a paper version of this issue if you prefer). And instead of addressing a particular historical topic or a specific set of materials in the collection, this issue will highlight how the Clements has adjusted its work when confronted by the COVID-19 pandemic. My colleagues have developed new ways of reaching out to our supporters—think of the online Clements Bookworm program—and have modified existing practices to suit new realities, as you will see with the discussion of our remote research fellowships.

Another crucial element of the Clements’ work that looks very different now than it did in March is acquisitions. My visit to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair in early March now feels like the last “normal” thing that I did—it was the last time I was in an airport, or in a museum; the last time I rode public transportation or ate in a restaurant; the last time I was indoors with a large group of strangers. The book dealers who are our crucial partners in continuing to build the Clements’ collections have been forced to pivot as well, distributing electronic catalogues and setting up virtual “booths” in online book fairs. And yet, under these altered conditions, we have been able to continue building on the great strengths of the Clements Library’s collections, and have added many exciting new items. I hope that when things are back to whatever will pass for “normal” in the future, you’ll be able to stop by to see some of them in person.

Additions to the James V. Mansfield Papers include portraits of James V. Mansfield (1817-1899) by George Freeman (1789-1868) and Mary Hopkinson Mansfield (1827-1883) by an unknown artist. Hand-colored photographic prints, reverse-mounted on glass, 1857.

We were fortunate in February 2020 to have been very successful at an auction featuring a wide range of materials related to the prominent mid-19th-century American Spiritualist James Valentine Mansfield (1817-1899). The lots we acquired multiplied our previous collection of Mansfield materials several-fold, and established Spiritualism as a great strength of our manuscript collections. We realized, however, that the Book Division was not as strong in the robust print culture of the Spiritualist movement as it should be in order to support research in Spiritualism across the Library. So we set out to address that gap. Among the many fascinating titles that we added, this one stands out: Andrew Jackson Davis’ The Diakka and their Earthly Victims (New York: Progressive Publishing House, 1873). Davis (1826-1910) was one of the most prominent clairvoyants and spiritualists of the 19th century, and he was a prolific author but The Diakka is one of his more obscure books. According to Davis, a “diakka” was the spirit of someone who in life was wicked or unprincipled. After death, the person’s spirit did not change, and these “diakkas” would return from the spirit realm to plague the living. Davis’ book offers a counterpoint to views of Spiritualism that focused on the benign nature of spirits, and will support research in the Mansfield papers and in other collections.

This single manuscript item was presented to the Corporation of New York City for the clean-up following the Astor Place Riot. For custodial services including “shaking carpets,” the $24 bill in 1849 translates to roughly $800 today.

One of the most exciting additions to our map collection is perhaps the smallest. Earlier this fall we were delighted to acquire this quite tiny (3.5 x 6 inches) manuscript map of Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien) in Haiti from 1793. This is one of the only surviving contemporary manuscript maps depicting the Great Fire of Cap-Français of 1793 that virtually destroyed the most important French city in the Americas during the early period of the Haitian Revolution. In June 1793, the French governor of Saint-Domingue tried to raise a revolt of the island’s white residents against the republican commissioners who had arrived in Haiti from France to administer the colony. The commissioners responded by promising freedom to any enslaved people who would fight with them. This pen, ink, and watercolor map shows the aftermath of the siege and burning of Cap-Français by the commissioners’ forces, which had reduced 80 percent of the city to ashes. The Clements holds two contemporary prints of the conflagration, as well as several manuscript accounts of the fire.

The Cap-Français map adds to the Clements’ strength in West Indies materials. The brown shaded squares indicate buildings destroyed in the 1793 blaze.

All of you are no doubt familiar with the marvelous Pohrt Collection of Native American Photography at the Clements, made possible by the generosity of the collector Richard Pohrt Jr. as well as Tyler J. and Megan L. Duncan. This collection of over 1000 photographs has been an invaluable addition to the Graphics Division, and photographs from the collection have already been used in a marvelous online exhibit on the Native Midwest and the history of photography. But we did not stop adding to the collection, nor did Richard’s generosity come to an end. With his support, we were able to purchase a set of five spectacular albumen print portraits of leaders from Plains tribes who took part in delegations to Washington, D.C., in the 1850s and ’60s and were photographed there. All of these prints were made by Antonion Zeno Shindler, although some of them were from negatives made by other photographers that he was given permission to reproduce. These delegation images were one of the few weak spots in the original collection, and the addition of these portraits helps highlight an important avenue for Native American political agency. The set includes an image of Tshe-ton-wa-ka-wa-ma-ni, or Little Crow, a Dakota chief who was one of the leaders of the Dakota Uprising in Minnesota in the early 1860s. But the most arresting image of the group, at least to me, is this portrait of Psicha Wakinyan, or Jumping Thunder, a Yankton warrior, made in 1858. These images were part of the first museum exhibition of photography in the United States, an 1869 show at the Smithsonian (following its disastrous 1865 fire) entirely of photographs of Native Americans.

As you will see from this issue, my colleagues at the Clements Library are doing marvelous work under trying conditions to help continue fulfilling the library’s mission of connecting students, faculty, and researchers with original source materials from America’s past. I look forward to seeing you in person at the Clements when the public health situation permits, but in the meantime I am eager to see all of you online under the Virtual Clements banner.

—Paul Erickson
Randolph G. Adams Director of the Clements Library

Supplementing the Clements’ collection of satires, these brightly colored cards were intended to entertain through mixing and matching, “by which different combinations of sentences may be made, representing ludicrous utterances of the figures,” according to the patent holder, Walter Strander. Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) and clergyman Thomas De Witt Talmage (1832-1902) are two of the six figures included in the set.

It is perhaps an understatement to say that my first year as Director at the Clements Library has not gone precisely how I had expected. Since the library closed in mid-March, so many people have told me how hard it must be to have stepped into a new job, in a new city, under these circumstances. And it has been hard—for me, and for everyone else on the staff—to not be able to do what the library is set up to do. The Clements exists to provide opportunities for students, faculty, and researchers from around the world to have in-person encounters with physical artifacts from the nation’s past. That mission is what animates the talented staff of the Clements Library, and it is why generous supporters over the past 97 years have donated items to the Clements—so they would be used. Since March, we’ve had to work to find ways to replicate that experience remotely, over Zoom and through digital surrogates of collections materials.

But while these past 11 months have been hard, compared to so many others, I have had this year easy. The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated communities across the United States, and has killed over 500,000 of our fellow citizens. It has changed almost everything about how all of us work, and play, and worship, and mourn. Millions of Americans—myself included—have lost family members to COVID-19, and the endless upward progression of terrible numbers has made all of us wonder if 2020 would ever actually end. Even so, I have been reminded every day of how lucky I am, to be working with the marvelous collections of the Clements Library on the campus of a world-class university with a group of dedicated, deeply knowledgeable colleagues. Collaborating with them to build on the library’s great strengths and to discover new ways to introduce our collections to students and scholars under challenging circumstances has been a constant joy.

We do our work in different ways, from different places, and wearing different shoes (if any), but the core work of the Clements Library remains the same. And my colleagues at the Clements have been endlessly inventive and persistent in finding ways for the library to continue offering students and researchers the opportunity to study all aspects of American history and culture before 1900. Of course, the materials in the Clements collections can do more than just tell us about the history of a single nation. The questions that our collections help scholars answer are the great questions that have animated all humanistic inquiry: What constitutes a good life? How do we create meaning out of suffering? What is the right relationship of the individual to the state? What are the responsibilities of those with more power to those with less?

Despite unusual market constraints, the Clements has still been able to acquire exciting new materials, like this lithograph. Featuring the parade held in Baltimore in 1870 celebrating the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, the central image is surrounded by vignettes of African American life and portraits of proponents of emancipation and civil rights.

These questions have been given new salience by the events of the past year, events that have made even clearer how necessary institutions like the Clements Library are for the future of our country. None of the questions that scholars investigate using the library’s materials exist in a vacuum. All bear some relation to our current circumstances, from the terror inspired by the arrival of cholera in the 1830s—the United States’ first experience with a global pandemic—to the long and difficult tradition of state responses to urban protest, from the Boston Massacre to the Haymarket Riot. All of my colleagues at the Clements Library are more committed than ever to helping students and faculty shed light on these connections using the materials on our shelves.

This issue of The Quarto is a bit different than what you’re used to. In many cases, instead of receiving a handsome hard copy in your mailbox, this issue is being delivered to you electronically (although we’ll be glad to create a paper version of this issue if you prefer). And instead of addressing a particular historical topic or a specific set of materials in the collection, this issue will highlight how the Clements has adjusted its work when confronted by the COVID-19 pandemic. My colleagues have developed new ways of reaching out to our supporters—think of the online Clements Bookworm program—and have modified existing practices to suit new realities, as you will see with the discussion of our remote research fellowships.

Another crucial element of the Clements’ work that looks very different now than it did in March is acquisitions. My visit to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair in early March now feels like the last “normal” thing that I did—it was the last time I was in an airport, or in a museum; the last time I rode public transportation or ate in a restaurant; the last time I was indoors with a large group of strangers. The book dealers who are our crucial partners in continuing to build the Clements’ collections have been forced to pivot as well, distributing electronic catalogues and setting up virtual “booths” in online book fairs. And yet, under these altered conditions, we have been able to continue building on the great strengths of the Clements Library’s collections, and have added many exciting new items. I hope that when things are back to whatever will pass for “normal” in the future, you’ll be able to stop by to see some of them in person.

Additions to the James V. Mansfield Papers include portraits of James V. Mansfield (1817-1899) by George Freeman (1789-1868) and Mary Hopkinson Mansfield (1827-1883) by an unknown artist. Hand-colored photographic prints, reverse-mounted on glass, 1857.

We were fortunate in February 2020 to have been very successful at an auction featuring a wide range of materials related to the prominent mid-19th-century American Spiritualist James Valentine Mansfield (1817-1899). The lots we acquired multiplied our previous collection of Mansfield materials several-fold, and established Spiritualism as a great strength of our manuscript collections. We realized, however, that the Book Division was not as strong in the robust print culture of the Spiritualist movement as it should be in order to support research in Spiritualism across the Library. So we set out to address that gap. Among the many fascinating titles that we added, this one stands out: Andrew Jackson Davis’ The Diakka and their Earthly Victims (New York: Progressive Publishing House, 1873). Davis (1826-1910) was one of the most prominent clairvoyants and spiritualists of the 19th century, and he was a prolific author but The Diakka is one of his more obscure books. According to Davis, a “diakka” was the spirit of someone who in life was wicked or unprincipled. After death, the person’s spirit did not change, and these “diakkas” would return from the spirit realm to plague the living. Davis’ book offers a counterpoint to views of Spiritualism that focused on the benign nature of spirits, and will support research in the Mansfield papers and in other collections.

This single manuscript item was presented to the Corporation of New York City for the clean-up following the Astor Place Riot. For custodial services including “shaking carpets,” the $24 bill in 1849 translates to roughly $800 today.

One of the most exciting additions to our map collection is perhaps the smallest. Earlier this fall we were delighted to acquire this quite tiny (3.5 x 6 inches) manuscript map of Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien) in Haiti from 1793. This is one of the only surviving contemporary manuscript maps depicting the Great Fire of Cap-Français of 1793 that virtually destroyed the most important French city in the Americas during the early period of the Haitian Revolution. In June 1793, the French governor of Saint-Domingue tried to raise a revolt of the island’s white residents against the republican commissioners who had arrived in Haiti from France to administer the colony. The commissioners responded by promising freedom to any enslaved people who would fight with them. This pen, ink, and watercolor map shows the aftermath of the siege and burning of Cap-Français by the commissioners’ forces, which had reduced 80 percent of the city to ashes. The Clements holds two contemporary prints of the conflagration, as well as several manuscript accounts of the fire.

The Cap-Français map adds to the Clements’ strength in West Indies materials. The brown shaded squares indicate buildings destroyed in the 1793 blaze.

All of you are no doubt familiar with the marvelous Pohrt Collection of Native American Photography at the Clements, made possible by the generosity of the collector Richard Pohrt Jr. as well as Tyler J. and Megan L. Duncan. This collection of over 1000 photographs has been an invaluable addition to the Graphics Division, and photographs from the collection have already been used in a marvelous online exhibit on the Native Midwest and the history of photography. But we did not stop adding to the collection, nor did Richard’s generosity come to an end. With his support, we were able to purchase a set of five spectacular albumen print portraits of leaders from Plains tribes who took part in delegations to Washington, D.C., in the 1850s and ’60s and were photographed there. All of these prints were made by Antonion Zeno Shindler, although some of them were from negatives made by other photographers that he was given permission to reproduce. These delegation images were one of the few weak spots in the original collection, and the addition of these portraits helps highlight an important avenue for Native American political agency. The set includes an image of Tshe-ton-wa-ka-wa-ma-ni, or Little Crow, a Dakota chief who was one of the leaders of the Dakota Uprising in Minnesota in the early 1860s. But the most arresting image of the group, at least to me, is this portrait of Psicha Wakinyan, or Jumping Thunder, a Yankton warrior, made in 1858. These images were part of the first museum exhibition of photography in the United States, an 1869 show at the Smithsonian (following its disastrous 1865 fire) entirely of photographs of Native Americans.

As you will see from this issue, my colleagues at the Clements Library are doing marvelous work under trying conditions to help continue fulfilling the library’s mission of connecting students, faculty, and researchers with original source materials from America’s past. I look forward to seeing you in person at the Clements when the public health situation permits, but in the meantime I am eager to see all of you online under the Virtual Clements banner.

—Paul Erickson
Randolph G. Adams Director of the Clements Library

Supplementing the Clements’ collection of satires, these brightly colored cards were intended to entertain through mixing and matching, “by which different combinations of sentences may be made, representing ludicrous utterances of the figures,” according to the patent holder, Walter Strander. Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) and clergyman Thomas De Witt Talmage (1832-1902) are two of the six figures included in the set.

The plan of Jean-Baptiste de La Porte-Lalanne’s Haiti plantation is the sort of document you have to walk around. Produced in 1753, its features demonstrate the organization and efficiency of 18th-century Atlantic trade, and the conditions of those enslaved at its expense. For teachers and students, the document exemplifies the texts and subtexts that can be found in primary sources and historical research.

Leaning in to view the plan, students might notice the vast uniformity of the sugar fields, the intricacy of the main garden, or the blockish imprecision of the slave quarters. Walking around the document, other names hug the borders of La Porte-Lalanne’s land, signs of the many other plantations that extracted lives and commodities at such scale. Perhaps even touching the paper, one might ponder on the many folds that have disrupted its surface, remnants of its past storage and transportation.

We will never see this plantation, so we must cling to every clue we can find. Yet in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, we have been distanced further. Our challenges as historians and teachers are not only temporal, but also material. In the absence of in-person interactions, archives and their documents must be met anew.

This was the challenge when arranging a collaborative session between the William L. Clements Library and the undergraduate students of Michigan’s early American history survey course, investigating the documents and history of the Atlantic slave trade. In past years, students met curators and documents in person, discussing and exploring sources in the Clements’ atmospheric reading room. As an instructor, those visits offered the opportunity to take my students somewhere new, outside of the classroom and beyond the realm of PDFs and laptop screens.

With the shift to online learning, these encounters had to be reimagined.

A cardinal rule for researching in person at the Clements Library is never to make marks on historical documents. The online setting allows students to highlight and comment on this passage from the Leyland Company records of a slave trade voyage.

Working with Jayne Ptolemy and Clayton Lewis from the Clements staff, we faced the challenge of bringing students to the Clements over Zoom. This meant factoring in the dynamics and difficulties of the digital environment: the default muting of microphones; the distractions of computers and home life; the dreaded lag and spotty wifi.

Our planning focused on maximizing discussion and minimizing the potentially overwhelming array of classroom technologies. We decided to focus on in-depth preparation and the discussion of just two sources: Jean-Baptiste de La Porte-Lalanne’s plantation and an account book of the Thomas Leyland Company, recording a single slave voyage from Liverpool to Angola, and finally Barbados.

With the variety of technologies on offer, we discovered new opportunities for student engagement and discussion. In advance of the session, students were asked to read through the Thomas Leyland account book. Using Perusall, a digital reading tool, students could discuss the source online, posing questions and responding to each other’s comments.

This meant that we were provided with an array of questions and overlapping interests that might otherwise have been missed with individual preparation. Students asked about the goods transported on the ship, and the various systems of measurement. They conversed about the various professional roles on board, and the fact that seamen could be paid in human beings as well as currency. They expressed their shock at the scale of this journey and its place in the trade as a whole: one of 45 such voyages arranged by Thomas Leyland, and a fraction of over 36,000 in the trade overall. Two hundred sixty-six anonymous lives, in a trade that displaced millions.

Armed with these questions and comments, the Clements curators could present the primary sources in a personalized way for each student. Over Zoom, we could explore students’ reactions to the document, without simply calling upon the most vocal. Digital tools, at least on this occasion, democratized involvement and encouraged broad participation. It was no surprise that Perusall was requested by students in subsequent weeks and will continue to be a valuable tool, even after the return to in-person teaching.

Using Perusall analytics, an online teaching tool, staff can use data—in this case, how long students spent looking at individual pages of the Thomas Leyland Company Account Books—to better understand student engagement with an eye toward improving remote instruction.

Next up was the plan of La Porte-Lalanne’s plantation. This time, without any prior preparation, we directed the students to its place on the Clements website and asked for their first impressions. With significant squinting and zooming in, the plan’s details began to come to light. Given the document’s size, and the restrictions of their computer screens, students were forced to slowly tour the plantation. They had to scroll methodically through its details, perambulating rather than surveying the document as a whole.

With this unique focus, students noticed the smallest features. The lack of trees and shade by the slave quarters, and their distance from almost every other building. The individual sugar canes, indicating the decorative, as well as practical purposes of the plan.

It is impossible to replace in-person encounters with documents, yet digital tools and discussion revealed elements that might otherwise have been missed by the naked eye. And thanks to the expertise of the Clements curators, each component observed by students could be expanded to the broader history of the slave trade and Atlantic history.

While I am undoubtedly excited by the prospect of bringing students back to the Clements Library, it is important that we do not forget the lessons learned in digital teaching. We must continue to consider the circumstances of our students, beyond computer and wifi access. We must work to incorporate ways of learning and participating that do not prioritize certain voices. We must reflect on new ways of viewing and discussing historical documents. We must lean in and take a closer look.

Alexander Clayton

—Alexander Clayton is a Ph.D Student and Graduate Instructor in the University of Michigan History Department. His research and teaching focus on Atlantic History and the History of Science.

COVID-19, with its related State-wide shutdowns, has dramatically increased the need for digitized archival collections. For the Clements Library, reference requests, teaching opportunities, and other services have been limited to what we are able to provide remotely. This demand prompted us to dedicate significantly more staff time to digitizing materials, whether by creating high-resolution digital surrogates for long-term online access or speedier reference snapshots for immediate use. The increased speed with which we have been scanning materials led us to reaffirm and reevaluate our selection process for digitizing archival collections, in order to best serve our teaching activities, remote patrons, and long-term goals. The William L. Clements Library is pleased to report that in these troubling times, its digitization initiatives have amplified and increased, resulting in the scanning of 12 complete archival collections, a modicum of partial collections, and an extraordinary amount of materials for reference purposes.

For the digitization team, the pandemic closure caught us in the midst of a transition. We had just posted the position of digitization technician in January 2020 and completed the interview process a month later. Shortly after Christopher Ridgway accepted the position in early March, the Library closed and everyone shifted to work from home. Fortunately, we had completed the hiring process before a University-wide hiring freeze went into effect, so Chris’ new role with us was secure despite the changing situation. Chris started in April as a remote employee, a real challenge for someone whose work requires hands-on interactions with collections in the Library.

Chris Ridgway at long last working hands-on with the Library’s book scanner.

Our building re-entry plan called for one-third occupancy, with each staff member in a dedicated workspace using separate equipment. Focusing on key in-person roles such as conservation, cataloging, reference, and digitization, we agreed that our core tasks for the fall semester were to support remote reference and teaching. With relatively few collections fully digitized and online, most of our reference queries and instruction sessions would require new images, so ramping up digitization became a central part of the plan. Cheney J. Schopieray (Curator of Manuscripts) and Emiko Hastings (Curator of Books) both chose to join the first phase of staff returning to the Library in order to restart the digitization program and act as additional technicians during the first phase. We moved the scanners into separate rooms so that each person could have a dedicated space with their own queue of materials to scan.

With no new scans of material produced since December and many researchers who had to postpone their Library visits, we returned to a pent-up demand for digital access. We opted to split the requests into two queues, one for the reference team to answer with quick, low-resolution photographs and the other for the digitization team to fulfill with high-resolution scans suitable for inclusion in an online collection. In this way, we could more speedily address immediate needs, while balancing the long-term goal to sustainably grow our digital collections for enhanced remote access. Staff working from home completed the process by compiling PDFs for users, creating cover sheets and metadata, and responding to the email reference queue.

The high-resolution scanning workflow is a time-consuming process. It involves slower scanning speeds and the careful production of item-level metadata to help organize the images and facilitate searching and retrieval of items in the collection. Once the images and metadata are complete, the University of Michigan Library’s Digital Content & Collections (DCC) department hosts and maintains the collection, a service for which the Clements Library is deeply grateful.

The competing priorities of high-resolution scans versus low-resolution snapshots brings to mind the question of how the Library decides on which archival collections to assign to which workflow. For which collections do we create high-resolution digital surrogates? After all, the time required to digitize one collection is time we are not spending on another. Holding almost 2,800 manuscripts collections, the Clements Library must determine its digitization priorities carefully. When the Library began to scan archival materials in 2019, we selected collections based on a variety of criteria, with a particular eye toward testing the format and display of the digital versions. The selections therefore included examples of single and multi-series collections, oversize manuscripts, and mixtures of bound and loose-leaf items. Other necessary factors included the condition of the materials, the anticipated use of the collection, and a desire to make lesser-known items of importance available in order to increase their use. The German Auxiliaries Muster Rolls and the Samuel Latham Mitchill Papers we knew had immediate audiences waiting for them. The Humphry and Moses Marshall Papers and the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society Papers are multi-series collections with a selection of loose pages, bound items, and oversize materials. We also selected items that might serve as examples of particular subject matter, anticipating future grant proposals to digitize much larger collections pertaining to similar topics. We digitized, for example, the Elizabeth Camp Journals, thinking of potential funding opportunities to scan our individual women’s diaries, and the Henry James Family Correspondence, considering a future project to digitize our Civil War collections.

With the Avenir Foundation Reading Room closed, reference staff re-doubled their efforts to provide quick, reference-quality images to researchers unable to wait for the library to re-open, and not in need of the high-resolution images provided by the scanning team. At the request of a patron, PDF images were created of the Harry A. Simmons sketchbook including this depiction of a ship, composed entirely of mailing stamps. Simmons (b. ca. 1826) served in the Union Navy during the Civil War.

The COVID-19 workplace introduced additional factors for consideration, based on immediate needs associated with reference queries and teaching. The criteria is currently as follows:

Shown here scanning a manuscript collection, Samantha Hill, Joyce Bonk Fellow, contributes to the Clements’ online efforts by learning digitization methods and workflows, and participating in the creation of new digital collections and web-based resources.

Over the past nine months, we have created high-resolution scans of the following collections and they are either online or awaiting online deployment:

• Maria M. Churchill Journals, 1845-1848. Daily journal entries providing insights into the emotional and intellectual life of a middle-class woman in the mid-1800s.

• Loftus Cliffe Papers, 1769-1784. Personal letters largely dating from Cliffe’s service in the British Army during the American Revolution.

• Gardner Family Papers, 1776-1789. Documentation of the management of Joseph Gardner’s Jamaica plantation.

• Great Britain Indian Department Collection, 1753-1795. Documents, letters, and other manuscripts relating to interactions between government and military officials, Native Americans, and American residents.

• William Howe Orderly Book, 1776-1778. Copies of orders for a brigade under British Commander-in-Chief Sir William Howe.

• Jacob Aemilius Irving Letter Books, 1809-1816. Letters of a Jamaican sugar planter during the years following the cessation of the British slave trade.

• King Family Papers, 1844-1901. Documenting the business activities of the King brothers, three of whom worked as traders with Russell & Company in China in the mid-19th century, and the subsequent institutionalization of William King.

• Richard Pohrt Jr. Collection of Native American Photography, ca. 1855-1940. Approximately 1,420 photographs pertaining to Native American history from the 1850s into the 1920s.

• James Sterling Letter Book, 1761-1765. Outgoing letters of James Sterling, a fur trader at Fort Detroit.

• United Sons of Salem Benevolent Society Minute Book, 1839-1867. Business proceedings of a mid-19th-century African American organization, a hybrid of an insurance agency and charitable operation.

• Weld-Grimké Family Papers: Diaries, 1828-1836. Diaries of abolitionists and women’s rights activists Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Emily Grimké.

• Charles Winstone Letter Book, 1777-1786. Business correspondence of Winstone, attorney general and planter in Dominica during and after the American Revolution.

While the pandemic temporarily disrupted our digitization process, it also pushed us to increase the capacity and efficiency of our scanning program. Previously, we had relied upon physical access in the reading room as the primary means by which researchers could interact with the collections, with digitization something to be done in addition as time and other projects allowed. With in-person access now strictly limited, we have become more flexible and creative in finding ways to make materials available to researchers across the world, whether through quick reference snapshots, high-resolution scans, or even digitizing old microfilm reels. Many of these efforts will benefit researchers long after the pandemic is over, as we continue to improve our online presence and make collections more widely available outside the confines of the Library building.

—Emiko Hastings
Curator of Books and Digital Projects Librarian

—Cheney J. Schopieray
Curator of Manuscripts

Forrester (“Woody”) Lee of New Haven, Connecticut, spent an extraordinary amount of time carefully transcribing the phonetic spelling of the United Sons of Salem Benevolent Society Minute Book and helping make this important volume more accessible to readers.

While providing collection scans online is a tremendous help to researchers who are unable to visit the Clements Library either due to the pandemic or to time or financial constraints, providing true searchability of digitized material is the gold standard.

In March 2020, the Clements Library began experimenting with a group transcription process. FromThePage, a software platform, provided the interface for collaborative transcription of online documents. The Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society Papers, one of our richest collections related to the Underground Railroad, provided the source material.

Clements staff, recently exiled from in-person contact with collections, seized the opportunity to interact with these papers remotely and at the same time provide an invaluable service to our patrons. Each page of the collection was read, puzzled over, and ultimately transcribed. Staff checked each other’s work, asked for help with difficult words, and did online research to reveal the identities of difficult-to-decipher names of historic figures. The project provided a much-needed distraction and escape from the dislocation, anxiety, and uncertainty in the early days of the pandemic.

After the initial phase of trial-by-staff, the transcription project was opened up to volunteers. Individuals and groups of persons have contributed to the transcription project. The Sarah Caswell Angell Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR) transcribed the Revolutionary War papers of Colonel Jonathan Chase, of the 13th and 15th Regiments of the New Hampshire Militia. This semester, Andrea Smeeton’s 7th grade students at East Prairie School in Skokie, Illinois, successfully transcribed selections from the letters of 19th-century writer and activist Lydia Maria Child. Many highly dedicated individuals have contributed to the completion of transcriptions for the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society Papers, United Sons of Salem Benevolent Society Minute Book, Louise Gilman Papers, African American History Collection, Samuel Latham Mitchill Papers, and James Sterling Letter Book. Some of these transcriptions are already live and available to researchers and others are awaiting final review before releasing them to the world.

Our partners in U-M Library Digital Content & Collections have merged the transcriptions with the existing digital collections to make them fully text searchable. Now, a researcher utilizing one of our transcribed collections and looking for a specific mention of a particular subject—fugitive, freedmen— receives immediate search results with the corresponding scanned pages of the original document. Previously, the search could be undertaken only by laboriously scrutinizing each document for the appearance of the word in question.

The Clements Library plans to continue to provide new collections online via FromThePage for those who enjoy the challenge of puzzling out a variety of handwriting styles and taking a closer look at the content of these remarkable resources.

—Terese Austin
Head of Reader Services

The papers of Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880), a writer, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist, were among the digitized collections recently completed. In this letter from Mrs. Child to her friend Anna Loring, July 1, 1871, volunteers transcribed:

“You ask what I think concerning the political enfranchisement of women. I have for many years been decidedly in favor of it. I dont feel interested in it as a right to be claimed, but as the most efficient means of helping the human race onward to the highest and best state of society. A really harmonious structure of society requires complete, unqualified companionship between the sexes. Homes will be nobler, and capable of higher and fuller happiness, when the mothers, wives, and sisters, in families, have an understanding sympathy in the investigations of science, the designs of artists, the experiments of the agriculturist, the enterprises of the merchant, the inventions of the machinist, the labors of the mechanic, the theories of politicians, and the guidance of statesmen. And in order to have an understanding sympathy with these things, they must have part and portion in the performance of them.”

Lauren Davis

In 2019 the Clements introduced a new Digital Fellowship, where we scan a collection identified by our fellow for them to consult from their home institution. Imagined well before the public health challenges presented to us by the coronavirus, it now stands as a model for how we can still work to support researchers even if they can’t travel to our reading room. Our inaugural Digital Fellow, Lauren Davis, a doctoral candidate at the University of Rochester’s History Department, talked to us about her project and the power of remote historical research. The transcript of our conversation appears below, condensed and edited slightly.

—Jayne Ptolemy
Assistant Curator of Manuscripts

Jayne Ptolemy (JP): Tell us about your project and the types of sources you use to uncover your story.

Lauren Davis (LD): My dissertation is entitled “Beyond Institutions: Mental Disorders and the Family in New York, 1830-1900,” and it explores how families cared for relatives with mental illness in the 19th century. I found that nuclear and extended families were taking part in a lot of home caregiving, were helping to make healthcare decisions, and were negotiating patients’ treatment with physicians when they felt like institutionalization was necessary. Despite families directing every stage of mental health treatment, the history of mental health is dominated by a focus on institutions and prominent physicians. My dissertation restores families to the narrative of mental health care, establishes a lay perspective on diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, and contributes to the history of gender at the intersection of medicine. It challenges the existing interpretations of American asylums as the first and last resort for mental health care.

There’s a pretty wide variety in the sources that I’m using. I use a lot of family correspondence and diaries, which give me the most qualitative information about a particular caregiving situation. Families are seeking cures for their relatives, and if a cure or improvement doesn’t seem like it’s possible, then they want to provide the best long-range care that they can. Sometimes they choose an institution, but a lot of times they rely on home care. This isn’t necessarily a situation where someone is institutionalized and then stays there for the rest of their lives. A lot of times they’re institutionalized for a period, and then after a few years they determine that they’ve received the most benefit that can be achieved and they will be pulled back out of the institution. They return home and live with their family supporting their care.

(JP): Which Clements collection are you working with, and why did you select it?

(LD): I’m working with the King Family Papers. I’m interested in the declining mental health of William King and his brothers’ efforts to care for him. The King family correspondence includes discussions of his brothers’ direct interventions, consultations with physicians, and their commitment of William to a private insane asylum. I’m interested in seeing why the brothers decided to commit William, how they selected an institution, if they thought he was curable and if that changed over time, and how they negotiated his care with physicians when they thought it was appropriate to consult with them.

This July 31, 1870, letter details Edward King’s struggles to contend with his brother William’s declining mental health. The handwriting itself seems to reveal the agonizing emotional turmoil and the inadequacy of words to describe a family’s calamity.

(JP): How is working from digital surrogates different from researching in-person at a library? What challenges and benefits does it yield?

(LD): I thought about this in two different ways. First, when I’m researching in person, I’m able to browse across multiple collections, and I can see what might be relevant to my project. This is hard to replace without having digital options available for all the same materials. When I have digital images for a whole collection, though, it is an advantage for my research. When I’m working with family papers, the narrative threads run through many of the family letters. The dynamics of relationships within every family are unique, and the outlook a person has on caregiving is not isolated from the rest of these relationships. Having the time to explore the context of surrounding letters in a collection is vital for understanding this.

The other side that I thought about is in terms of reading the text. With high quality images, researchers now can manipulate the image by zooming in or adjusting the contrast. Those are things that make the text clearer in ways that’s not possible with a physical manuscript. It’s also a lot easier to ask about a particularly tricky word if you have a digital image you’re able to share with a colleague. My friends and I send screenshots, asking each other, “What do you think this word is?”

(JP): From a researcher’s perspective, what is the value of digital fellowships that don’t have a residency requirement, even without a global pandemic?

(LD): The pandemic definitely has changed the perspective and outlook on digital fellowships, but one of the largest benefits at any point is being able to process the collection at home, on my own timeline. A visit to an archive provides advantages, but it also requires resources to allow for travel and multiple days spent in a reading room. Any time I travel to an archive I try to be as efficient as I can, so I’m using my time to gather the most helpful information as quickly as possible. That means making a lot of judgments on what’s the most relevant and important. Sometimes these decisions are clear, but sometimes they’re more ambiguous, or new details alter my conclusions. In one case, after I read a few dozen letters, I discovered that a family friend often interacted with an institutionalized relative. By having images of that collection I was able to go back and consult the material again to follow the different paths and clarify points of ambiguity. Being able to consult the images as your research evolves is very helpful.

Sometimes it’s just one line about one person that helps piece together the narrative, and it may not come up until ten years after the specific time period of their care. With family letters, it’s key to have the surrounding context. It takes a long time to process them, so being able to do that digitally is a big benefit for me.

(JP): What main lessons has researching in the age of COVID taught you?

(LD): I think the biggest thing is having to be flexible to navigate the changes the pandemic has brought. I had plans to visit several archives in the spring of 2020. All the facilities closed to visitors, so that’s been impossible. I have had to adjust, use what I have, and be creative about what I’m able to access. Before the pandemic I’d actually never worked with microfilm. I had always had better alternatives, either using the manuscripts or better quality digital images. I had a particular set of volumes, where the reading room was closed and I couldn’t visit that archive. They had microfilm they could send via Interlibrary Loan, so I was able to process it at my university’s library and work my way through the sixteen volume series. It was a new experience for me, but it worked! Flexibility is the biggest thing, having to be creative and rethinking plans about how to get as much information as I can.

Much like Lauren, we’ve found that this challenging season has taught us the resounding power of being flexible and harnessing the resources at our disposal. Zoom conversations with fellows, high resolution scans, reference photos taken with cell phones—in ways big and small, we have been using technology and digital surrogates to support innovative research like Lauren’s from a distance. Until we’re once again able to crowd around the tea table with all our fellows to discuss their archival finds of the day, we’ll continue to look to the power of technology to keep us connected and moving forward.

The concept that the human brain processes information differently when all our senses are engaged is fundamental to the mission of the Clements Library. Vintage leather bound books have a certain smell. Turning pages of old hand-made paper can make a crisp sound or a soft murmur. Books can be thick, thin, light or heavy. Historical documents have weight, texture, smells and sound that we respond to with more than our eyes alone. When in direct contact with rare materials, all of these elements stimulate our senses for a deep-dive immersion into the past that is impossible to replicate digitally. This has much to do with why we believe that the experience of working directly with original primary source materials brings out the best in scholars of history.

When studying historical photographs, there is a growing awareness that considerations of physicality contribute to meaning. It is easy to become so enraptured with the image itself that we can forget that it comes to us on a physical platform. A photo may be on paper, glass, metal, wood, ivory, perhaps in a protective case like a daguerreotype, or in a wooden frame for the wall. There is often a brittleness that commands cautious handling, and physical scale that can be surprising. Additionally, photographs are responsive to lighting conditions. The uniformity of computer screens can hide the fact that that photos can look different at different times of day, that daguerreotypes are highly reflective, but also carry deep contrasts.

The Richard Pohrt Jr. Collection of Native American Photography contains a wide variety of physical formats: card-mounted paper photographic prints, unmounted glossy photos, small cartes de visite, large framed panoramic views, tintypes, stereoviews, and photo albums. Some of these photos invite intimate and up-close viewing, others broadcast from across the room.

Experiencing all of this in a rich sensory experience is what we had in mind when we posted internships funded by the Upton Family Foundation in the fall of 2018. The plan was to hire talented students to work directly with the Pohrt Collection materials to produce a traveling poster exhibit. We were delighted to bring on board Dr. Andrew Rutledge, whose qualifications exceeded our expectations. Andrew considered as a theme the dynamic but often troubling role that photography played in Native American history. In the 19th century, there was plenty of hostility between indigenous populations and the incoming settlers, soldiers, and photographers. However the Pohrt Collection also shows us hundreds of images that could not have been taken without cooperation from the Native American subjects. To what extent did these dynamics shape the Pohrt Collection materials? Are there 19th-century examples of Native Americans using photography for themselves?

Andrew researched the material, immersed himself in the history, and proposed a detailed exploration focused on the Great Lakes region and the Anishinaabe people. However, Andrew’s destiny lay elsewhere and he took an irresistible full-time position at the Bentley Library across town where he continues to do exemplary work for the university.

This set-back was also an opportunity to take stock of where we were and to re-set. We reposted the internship position and quickly found ourselves in a pleasant dilemma stemming from a remarkably talented pool of applicants. Fortunately, financial support allowed us to hire two interns, Lindsey Willow Smith and Veronica Cook Williamson.

Lindsey Willow Smith is a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, majoring in History with a minor in Museum Studies. She is active within the Indigenous community on campus, serving as Chairman for the Native American Student Association. Lindsey is also researching the use of census data in describing Native populations with Arland Thornton and Linda Young-DeMarco at the Institute for Social Research at U-M.

Veronica Cook Williamson is a graduate student in the department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and in the program of Museum Studies. Her primary research focuses on racial(izing) processes in media and other cultural representations of newcomers in Germany. She graduated with a BA in German Cultural Studies and Film and Media Studies from Dartmouth College in 2017. She has Irish, British, and Choctaw ancestry and is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation — chickasha saya.

The new team of Lindsey, Veronica, Graphics Cataloger Jakob Dopp, Reference Librarian Louis Miller, and myself met in the Library on March 3, full of ambition and anticipation. We did not know that this would be our only in-person meeting. On March 11 the University of Michigan closed its campus and remote work began, for what we thought would be a few weeks or months.

As the new reality took hold, it became apparent that the demand for online access and support for remote teaching superseded any of our plans for an “in real life” traveling exhibit. Should the internships continue? Fortunately, Jakob had completed item-level cataloging of the Pohrt Collection and Andrew, Jakob, and Louie had uploaded an extensive and detailed online finding aid for the collection. We had scans of most of the materials, enough that we could shift the project to the creation of an online exhibit. The internships could continue, and had the potential to create a timely and supportive resource.

We met regularly (on Zoom of course). Lindsey and Veronica proposed a rewrite that examined the issues of colonialism, Native sovereignty, self-identification, and cultural appropriation in the photographic representations—ideas that were challenging, but well-grounded in history and frequently downplayed.

The editing of the online exhibit, “No, Not Even for a Picture,” required the removal of some outstanding and important images. They include those pictured here and below. “Taking the Census at Standing Rock, Dakota.” D. F. Barry, 1885, 20 x 25 cm.

Detail, “Taking the Census at Standing Rock, Dakota.” F. Barry, 1885.

The man with the cane standing by the desk of the census enumerator is likely Lakota Chief Gall, one of Sitting Bull’s most trusted lieutenants at Little Big Horn, later a converted Christian who mediated assimilation. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) recorded the census annually during this time.

“L. Troop Mon. [S]Couts” O.S. Goff, 1890, 20 x 25 cm.

Nine unidentified Crow Indian scouts of L. Troop, 1st U.S. Cavalry Regiment, pose with their troop flag and a large American flag, possibly taken at Fort Maginnis, Montana. Many of the Native Americans enlisted in the United States military services were not citizens of the United States. Until the Indian Citizen Act of 1924, becoming a U.S. citizen often required formally leaving your tribe.

The themes and resources of the project were refined with invaluable input from Eric Hemenway, Director of Repatriation, Archives and Records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians and Arland Thornton, Professor of Sociology, Population Studies, and Survey Research at the University of Michigan, as well as from Richard Pohrt.

None of this work came easily. We had disagreements about interpretation and what was appropriate. The early versions had enough content for three exhibits. We were all sick of the isolation. Lindsey later commented that “as a Chippewa woman, the balancing of my views and experiences with those of the Clements was a chore.” She stated that “the inequity of emotional investment” was both wearisome and energizing. But as Veronica stated, “the photographs carried this project forward; they were the life force fighting back against video call malaise and quarantine fatigue.”

“Squaws Guarding Corn from Black-Birds” Adrian Ebell, ca. 1872, 8.5 x 18 cm.

Possibly taken on the very morning that the 1862 Dakota War uprisings began, this stereograph depicts an unidentified Dakota woman and four children sitting on an elevated platform standing watch over crops. This 1872 print from the 1862 negative would have been produced sometime after Charles Zimmerman took over the Whitney Gallery.

Later in the summer, University policies allowed access to the Clements building and the collection. After many months of remote work, Lindsey and Veronica had their first opportunity to view the actual photos at the Library. The power of this materiality is discussed eloquently in Lindsey and Veronica’s blog post for the Clements Library Chronicles.

I am very proud of this project. I am particularly proud that issues were discussed and decided within the team, that the curation and interpretive concept were led by Lindsey and Veronica, and that their voices came to the fore in the final product. In spite of being thrust together as strangers forced to be partners, employed by an institution that neither knew, using unfamiliar work and communication methods, with a pandemic just outside the door, Lindsey and Veronica’s talents and visions meshed. They create a unified, thoughtful, and challenging look at photography and Native American history that will have lasting value as well as serving the immediate need to support remote education. The online exhibit, “No, Not Even For a Picture,” is a remarkable accomplishment under any circumstances. Given what the project team faced, it is all the more so. It is only one of many projects that are waiting to emerge from the Richard Pohrt Jr. Collection of Native American Photography.

—Clayton Lewis
Curator of Graphics Material

As I write this article 2020 has come to a close. This is likely a year that will be studied by many future generations as they try to untangle fact from fiction, trace cause and effect, and link the past to the present. This year we have also heard many negative critiques about various aspects of history being “rewritten.” I’ve been thinking a lot about this, because as Director of Development I have been raising money to expand our fellowship program. Our fellows come to the Clements Library to study the primary sources housed within its walls. They come to ask questions and take a critical look at American history. How might their work change our understanding of a well-known narrative?

If you watched our December Discover Series on Benedict Arnold, you heard Curator of Manuscripts Cheney Schopieray discuss how historians have used the Clinton Papers to uncover details about Benedict Arnold’s treason. If we had only relied on previous tellings of Arnold’s activities, we might still believe 19th-century accounts of his childhood. In books like The Life and Treason of Benedict Arnold (Boston, 1835), historian Jared Sparks used unsubstantiated tales to justify writing about Arnold’s pharmacist apprenticeship and his use of the broken glass vials: “. . . he would scatter in the path broken pieces of glass taken from the crates, by which the children would cut their feet in coming from the school.” Benedict Arnold had become a mythical, evil character and it wasn’t until William L. Clements purchased Henry Clinton’s papers during the 20th century that serious scholarship could be undertaken respecting his treasonous interactions with the British. In this sense, yes, we do need to rewrite history. Places like the Clements Library acquire and make available the primary sources that allow historians to carefully research and analyze the actions of even well-known figures in order to understand and even update the impact they have had on both the past and the present.

Another movement around the country this year has been the acknowledgement that unjust policies and institutionalized racism continue to affect the quality of life for many Americans. In June we released an anti-racism statement at the Clements provoking powerful and thoughtful discussions before and after its release.

These conversations have led me to think about and talk about my own family history. I have seen some writers speculate that anti-racist policies also seek to “rewrite history.” Using a segment of my ancestry, I hope to explain what it means to be “anti-racist” or “inclusive” in writing about and discussing our nation’s record. The facts, dates, and people that countless school children have memorized over the years have not changed. They still exist. What we can choose to do now is to fill in the gaps with the people, experiences, and events that were not previously mentioned.

For example, the fact that an Army officer named Richard Pratt founded the first U.S. Training and Industrial School in 1879 at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, has not changed. At the time, Pratt thought that he was doing something good. “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” Pratt said. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Many episodes in history have typically been told by people in positions of power, like Pratt.

So, how can we tell this account better? We can discuss that 150 schools opened all over the country and over the course of 125 years 180,000 children were taken from their families. We can acknowledge the experiences of people like my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Shay-Kaw, who was sent to the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School and endured the harsh lessons of assimilation. We can analyze the effects of these schools on the families and tribes.

It is not just scholars who shape how we write about and study American history. You can help by making a gift to the Clements Library to continue the critical work that is being done.

I hope you’ll also agree that historical narrative should include both Richard Pratt and Elizabeth Shay-Kaw. We can’t go back to change history and right the wrongs that happened, but we can choose to be part of a more just and inclusive society where we learn and tell stories about all the people who have walked this land we now call America.

—Angela Oonk
Director of Development

Clements Library Associates Board of Governors News

At the October 2020 meeting a resolution was passed naming Peter Heydon Honorary Member and Chair Emeritus.

In March 2020 Thomas Kingsley passed away. He served on the board for 30 years before retiring in 2011 and being named an Honorary Member. His wife Sally has made a gift in his memory for acquisitions.

Exhibitions

“No, not even for a picture”: Re-examining the Native Midwest and Tribes’ Relations to the History of Photography – Online Exhibition at clements.umich.edu/pohrt
This exhibition investigates the complex balance between violation of privacy and the quest for self-identification felt by Native peoples during the early era of photography. Photographic styles and practices are examined that recorded the people, activities, stereotypes, and myths of this important time, focusing on the Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes region and beyond.

Framing Identity: Representations of Empowerment and Resilience in the Black Experience – Online Exhibition at clements.umich.edu/framing-identity
Drawing inspiration from Frederick Douglass’ views on picture-making and representation, this exhibition examines how 19th- and 20th- century African American artists and intellectuals expressed identity through portraiture, photography, and literature. A curatorial project developed by 2019-21 Joyce Bonk Fellow Samantha Hill, images were selected from published works and original photographs at the Clements, particularly the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography.

Matthew Edney and Mary Pedley flank the completed manuscript of Volume Four of The History of Cartography in the spring of 2018, shortly before its delivery to the University of Chicago Press, where it underwent 18 months of copy-editing, indexing, and layout, prior to publication and printing. It was released in April 2020.

Virtual Programming

In March 2020, the Clements Library launched a webinar series in which panelists and featured guests discuss history topics. Join us continuing monthly in 2021, and access recordings of past episodes at clements.umich.edu/bookworm.

Our popular Discover Series has also gone virtual. In 2020, Clements staff presented fabulous sessions on the history of photography, women’s history in the archives, and the treasonous correspondence of Benedict Arnold. Access the recordings at clements.umich.edu/virtual-discover-series.

Staff News

Former Clements Library staff member Louis Miller has accepted a position as Cartography Reference and Teaching Librarian at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. Louie was a knowledgeable, diligent, creative, and enthusiastic member of the Graphics Division and Reference teams at the Clements. He was always eager to share his many talents and his cheerful energy—he is and will be greatly missed! We wish him well on his new adventure.

For nearly a century the Clements Library has been mounting exhibitions and issuing publications based on our collections. In the 1920s and ’30s, under first director Randolph G. Adams, we concentrated on publicizing our greatest area of collecting strength, manuscripts relating to the era of the American Revolution. Our scope gradually expanded to other concentrations in our holdings, with 1940s and ’50s exhibits and bulletins on Michigan history, religion in early America, Canadiana, Ohio rarities, maritime history, colonial Mexico, and early American law. During John C. Dann’s three decades as director we highlighted a broad array of subjects and material – Native Americans, women, culinary history, African American history, travel, caricature, Detroit’s tercentenary – while continuing to showcase our printed and manuscript American Revolution treasures. In recent years we’ve offered visitors and readers a varied menu of topics, from the War of 1812 to education, sports to “friends in fur and feathers,” the Civil War to the West Indies. The result, as our Clements Library predecessors and current staff have hoped, has been that friends and supporters of the Library have been able to sample the extraordinary range of primary sources available here on American history from 1492 to the end of the 19th century.

One major area of Americana collecting that we may have slighted in all this activity, despite it being an area of considerable strength here, has been western Americana. Looking back through my files on our exhibitions, issues of The Quarto, and our Occasional Bulletin series, I come away with the impression that we’ve neglected the trans-Mississippi West in telling the world about the Library. In 1946 we published Fifty Texas Rarities, a catalog of an exhibition of books and pamphlets from the remarkable collection of Everett D. Graff of Chicago, no doubt in an attempt to persuade Mr. Graff to donate his library to the Clements (the Graff Collection, alas, went to his hometown Newberry Library). Twenty years later young Clements staffers Albert T. Klyberg and Nathaniel N. Shipton created Frontier Pages and Pistols, an exhibit of Clements books and hand guns on “the beckoning West,” and published the results as Occasional Bulletin 72. Perhaps motivated by that initiative, in 1967 longtime Library supporter James Shearer II donated his western Americana collection to the Clements, and we showcased selections from that gift as a Beyond the Mississippi exhibit and accompanying catalog. Other than those projects, however, we seem to have been silent for the most part on our western holdings, despite ongoing and impressive acquisitions in all of our collecting divisions.

Thomas Moran (1827-1926) joined the Hayden survey expedition to the West in 1871 and produced iconic views of the dramatic landscapes they encountered, such as this lithograph of The Grand Cañon of the Colorado River, drawing Americans’ attention and imagination westward.

In the early days of 2019, when the Library’s senior managers group met to discuss our exhibitions schedule, my colleagues suggested that I organize a valedictory show before my retirement at the end of the year. Casting about for a good subject, I decided to concentrate on western Americana and to dedicate the exhibit to William S. Reese, who passed away in June 2018. I regard Bill – antiquarian book dealer, scholar, generous supporter of the Clements and other American history research institutions – as the outstanding Americanist of our time, and I knew I could use his 2017 book The Best of the West: 250 Classic Works of Western Americana as the basis for a Clements exhibit. I went through The Best of the West for information and inspiration, and was delighted to find that the Clements owns 90% of the pre-1900 titles in it. Selecting the 45 books and pamphlets our 16 exhibit cases could hold was a challenge, but one I embraced as considerably more enjoyable for a last year at the helm than the concentration on personnel, budgets, meetings, and institutional planning that otherwise fills my days in the office.

This portrait of No-Way-Ke-Sug-Ga (possibly translated as “He Who Strikes Two at Once”) is one of a set included in the Thomas McKenney (1785-1859) and James Hall (1793-1868) publication History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1836-44). These lithographs, mostly the work of Charles Bird King (1785-1862), are among the most colorful portraits of Native Americans produced in the nineteenth or any century. Many of the original oil paintings on which the prints were based perished in the 1865 Smithsonian Institution fire.

Visitors to The Best of the West, which will run through April 2020, will appreciate that “the west” has evolved as a geographic descriptor over the years. At the same time that Spanish authors like Miguel Benegas, Francisco Palóu, and Josef Espinosa y Tello were writing about Spain’s settlements in California and Mexico, English and American observers were describing the Mississippi River Valley as the farthest extent of settlement and exploration from the East Coast. The exhibit includes Philip Pittman’s 1770 Present State of the European Settlements on the Mississippi, Zadock Cramer’s 1802 Ohio and Mississippi Navigator, and the 1814 first edition of the Lewis and Clark report on their expedition to the West Coast and back. The cases for the middle decades of the 19th century feature Hall J. Kelley, John B. Wyeth, Eugène Duflot du Mofras, and Henry James Warre on Oregon, the George Catlin and McKenney and Hall portfolios of Native American portraits, and rare overland narratives by James O. Pattie, Zenas Leonard, Joel Palmer, and Riley Root. The 1851 George W. Kendall and Carl Nebel folio on the Mexican War and Henry Lewis’ 1855-58 Das Illustrirte Mississippithal display in impressive fashion the chromolithographed images through which many Americans first viewed the West. After 1850 the focus of the exhibit shifts to mining, outlaws, encounters with Native Americans, and the settlement of new areas from Arizona to Idaho, with Nelson Lee’s Three Years Among the Camanches (1859), C. M. Clark’s A Trip to Pike’s Peak and Notes by the Way (1861), John L. Campbell’s Idaho: Six Months in the New Gold Diggings (1864), Thomas J. Dimsdale’s The Vigilantes of Montana (1866), and Thomas F. Dawson & F. J. V. Skiff’s The Ute War (1879) among the titles on display. Viewers will note that a majority of the items in the exhibit came to the Clements during the 1953-1977 directorship of Howard H. Peckham, and I am most appreciative of Howard’s acquisition of so many high points in western Americana that have subsequently soared to prices that would challenge our acquisitions endowments if we attempted to buy them today.

The Best of the West concentrates on printed books and pamphlets, but readers of this issue of The Quarto will learn that the Library has tremendous strength in western American manuscripts, prints, photographs, and maps as well. Our recent acquisition of some 1,100 Native American photographs in the Richard Pohrt Jr. Collection has vaulted the Clements to a high rank among American libraries in that important field. As Jayne Ptolemy outlines, the Crittenden Family Papers that Dr. Thomas Kingsley donated to the Library in 2006-07 are rich in source material on California and Nevada in the late 19th century. Clayton Lewis’ article on the Eastman family and their materials in our Norton Strange Townshend Collection hints at the considerable research potential those papers and daguerreotypes offer. Sara Quashnie, Emi Hastings, and Jakob Dopp contribute pieces on the Hill Family Papers, Lily Frémont, and the myth of Welsh Indians respectively. As these essays and the exhibit indicate, the upshot is that the Clements is a tremendous resource for students and scholars alike on the American West. If we are not yet UCal Berkeley’s Bancroft Library for depth and range of primary sources in western Americana, we unquestionably do hold a remarkable variety of materials on the western half of this country from the 17th through the 19th centuries. So if you like historical books, manuscripts, and images, and if you agree with my favorite 1950s-60s songwriter Tom Lehrer that “The wild west is where I wanna be,” you should come to 909 South University Avenue sometime soon and start discovering what we have here.

—J. Kevin Graffagnino
Director, 2008-2019

Elizabeth Benton Frémont, known as Lily, became an intrepid traveler from a young age. She was born in Washington, D.C., on November 15, 1842, just days after her father, the explorer John C. Frémont, had returned from his first expedition to the American West. 

Lily’s mother, Jessie Benton Frémont, was the daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Jessie had been well-educated by a series of tutors and served as her father’s secretary during her teens. Following John Frémont’s three expeditions west in the 1840s, John and Jessie together wrote the expedition reports which followed his trips, sharing his enthusiasm for western exploration with lively prose and useful information for potential emigrants to the Oregon Territory. 

In 1847, John Frémont purchased a large tract of land called Rancho Las Mariposas (renamed Bear Valley), in the southern Sierra Nevada foothills. Although initially regarded as worthless land due to its isolated location, it quickly became highly valuable after the discovery of gold in California in 1848. The Frémonts traveled to California to oversee mining operations and manage his new ranch. 

Lily was six years old when she embarked upon her first voyage in 1849, a difficult cross-country journey from Washington to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama. Before the creation of the Panama Canal, crossing the Isthmus was a wearisome trek lasting six days. To Lily, this was a trip to be remembered fondly, in which “each hour was filled with thrilling interest and novelty.” Throughout her life, Lily was drawn to flowers, often describing them in her writings. In her first crossing of the Isthmus of Panama, she vividly recalled her first sighting of “the white and scarlet varieties of the passion-flower, as well as other flowers both brilliant and fragrant, for which I know no name.”

For an adventurous young girl, pressing flowers memorialized in a lasting way the beauty of the landscapes through which she traveled. Writing of her recovery from a dangerous fever, Lily mused, “When life is young . . . and the warm blood courses through the veins, it is not so easy to die. The world was waiting with its arms filled with roses . . . and I was not averse to staying yet a little while, to gather a few of the flowers of life and living.”

Her mother Jessie remembered the voyage differently. As a young, sheltered woman leaving home for the first time, crossing the continent alone with her young daughter presented many challenges. In A Year of American Travel (1878), she wrote: “I had never been obliged to think for or take care of myself, and now I was to be launched literally on an unknown sea, travel towards an unknown country, everything absolutely new and strange about me, and undefined for the future.” About six months after reuniting in California, the Frémonts returned to Washington because John had been elected a California senator. 

Lily soon became an international traveler as well. After John had served as Senator from September 1850 to March 1851, the Frémonts decided to travel abroad for a year. They visited England and then rented a house in Paris for over a year. In 1853, they returned to Washington, and soon after John embarked on his last western expedition. After John Frémont’s failed presidential bid in 1856, the Frémonts returned to Paris for a brief stay before journeying back to California in 1858 to settle on their property in Bear Valley. 

In Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Frémont (1912), Lily wrote: “Nowhere else did the wild flowers ever seem so beautiful as at Bear Valley, and I rode afar into the mountains in search of them. The Indian men often brought me long withes [willow branches] wound round with flowers, from places inaccessible to me, and the white men of the neighborhood were astounded at this attention of the Indians to a mere girl.”

It may have been these gifts of wildflowers that inspired Lily to create a pressed flower album, now housed at the Clements Library. She started the album in 1859 when she was sixteen years old. The first two pages of the album hold drawings depicting the Frémont home in Bear Valley and a small group of buildings and a smokestack, possibly one of the Frémont mines. The rest of the album contains about eighty pressed flowers and other plants, most of them numbered and annotated with descriptions. 

Lily shared her love of flowers with both parents. In published works by all three family members, flowers are often vividly described, even in John’s official expedition reports. In her album, Lily noted two specimens that were her father’s particular favorites, wild heliotrope and another unnamed bloom. Jessie likely taught her daughter how to press the flowers to include in the album. In Far-West Sketches (1890), Jessie recalled that she enclosed “rose-leaves and violets and such-like sweet vouchers” in her letters back home to Washington, which “in their own dear silent way carried messages of comforting and hope.”

Bear Valley, Lily Frémont’s beloved home during the 1850s, from the front of an album holding her pressed flower specimens from 1859.

Lily’s album of pressed flowers began with a buttercup found on January 20th, 1859, and continued through May of that year. Several following pages of specimens are undated, and the final date to appear in the album is January 29th, presumably 1860. The last annotations indicate specimens gathered in San Francisco near the family’s new home at Black Point, to which they moved in early 1860.

As Lily added specimens to her album, she usually noted the date and location, sometimes identified the name of the plant, and often observed its growing conditions, soil, and other notes. She rode far and wide with her father, visiting their mills and mines and gathering plants along the way. Her notes indicate that she gathered specimens in locations as varied as Bear Valley, the Burkhalter hills, Mt. Bullion, Mt. Oso, Lone Mountain, Hell’s Hollow, Mt. Ophir, and Black Point. For specimens she did not personally gather, she recorded whatever information was available. Specimen no. 56 “was given to me so I don’t know about it much. I think it is a bush flower & came from Hell’s Hollow.” No. 75 simply received this brief note: “I remember nothing about.”

A capable horsewoman, Lily favored two horses for these frequent trips with her father. Ayah was a mountain-bred horse; Chiquita was cream-colored with silver mane and tail. Another horse gifted to her by a cattle ranger, the aptly-named Becky Sharp, turned out to be a little too lively for safety and was swiftly retired after she attempted to buck Lily off three times and then stranded her two miles from home. After moving to San Francisco, Lily was unfortunately not able to gather as many flowers, partly due to her horse: “Chiquita was more restive than Ayah, so I did not care to dismount as I used to in Bear Valley, besides there were always herds of Spanish Cattle around. So I missed many lovely flowers.”

While traveling, Lily observed changes in the landscape caused by mining and other human activities. Wild jasmine grew in the “mining holes” and another unnamed plant in the “small stony hollows and washed out placer ditches.” She reported that wild clover had originally covered Bear Valley and far up the mountainsides, “but some teamsters set fire to it ‒ about two years before we came out ‒ & burned most of it so badly that it has only grown again in especially moist places.”

Lily Frémont on Chiquita.

Lily recorded second-hand information from her father regarding indigenous use of plants, including the “quinine vine” or wild cucumber (“Father says the Indians use its root as medicine in fevers”), the wild sunflower (“I am told that the Indians use the seed”), and an unidentified leaf “which the Indians use as a salad.”

Livestock interactions with native plants were also of interest, such as the wild larkspur, which was “poisonous to cattle, who do not like to eat even the grass near it.” There were large fields of wild larkspur along one road, and she noted “the cattle avoided these plains from the time it began to flower till it passed.” The wild pea-vine, by contrast, was favored by cattle and horses and “gives good nourishment.”

Lily sometimes commented on her own process of pressing and drying the plants. White mariposas blossoms were “rather hard to press well & almost impossible to glue, for the instant the glue touches them, they roll right up, & then it [is] very hard to unroll them.” She was particularly concerned with the effect of drying on the color of the flowers, which she was anxious to describe accurately. For a number of specimens, she noted the original color of a flower that had “faded in pressing.”

In addition to wildflowers, Lily was interested in the more domesticated plants growing around their house, including a live oak and wild clover inside their enclosure, and an unnamed specimen pulled from just outside the fence. Another “tame flower” came from the neighboring “Italian’s garden.”

After the Frémonts moved from Bear Valley to San Francisco in 1860, Lily’s specimen gathering seems to have slowed and then stopped entirely. On her last page of text, she wrote, “Though we had so many many beautiful flowers at Black Point I had never thought of pressing any, & these are only some I pressed ‒ or rather put in this book, for the geranium leaf had been my book mark for weeks ‒ the day before we left home. The mignonette had grown from seeds of my own planting.”

In 1861, following the outbreak of the Civil War, Jessie and her three children left San Francisco for St. Louis while John served in the Union Army. After the war, Lily remained single and continued to travel and live an adventurous life. She eventually settled in Long Beach in 1905, where she remained until her death in 1919.

—Emiko Hastings
Curator of Books

According to Welsh legend, a royal prince by the name of Madoc supposedly took to the high seas and departed from Wales for new pastures in 1170 after the death of his father led to a bloody power struggle. The tale of Madoc, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, evolved to incorporate the idea that he had actually navigated his way to America and established Welsh colonies, thus conveniently providing a British presence in the New World that predated any and all Spanish claims. In all likelihood, Elizabeth I and her advisors initially deployed the Madoc story strictly as propaganda in order to trump their Spanish rivals. However, the modified Madoc legend ended up taking on a life of its own, especially amongst Welshmen and Welsh-Americans who were exceedingly proud that one of their own might have been the true “discoverer” of the New World.

Over the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, countless rumors were circulated regarding the existence of so-called “Welsh Indians,” descendants of Madoc’s colonists who were believed to have mixed with local Native populations and yet still clung to vestiges of Christian traditions, established fortified European-style towns, and spoke the Welsh language fluently. At first, attention focused on tribes of the Eastern seaboard near locations where Madoc’s colonists were thought to have landed, such as Newfoundland, New England, the Carolinas, and Florida. In John William’s Farther Observations on the Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd (1791), the famous accounts of Reverend Morgan Jones and Captain Isaac Stewart feature prominently. Jones had claimed to have been captured in 1660 by Indians in Tuscarora country while visiting South Carolina. His imminent execution was prevented only after the Indians heard him praying in the Welsh tongue, which they miraculously understood. Stewart likewise claimed that he was captured around 1766 before being rescued by a Spaniard and a Welshman named John David. During their subsequent adventures, the company crossed “the Mississipi near Rouge or Red River, up which we travelled 700 Miles, when we came to a Nation of Indians remarkably White, and whose Hair was of a reddish Colour.” John David was reportedly astounded to find that these people were also able to speak Welsh.

Photographer Stanley J. Morrow (1943-1921), active in the Dakota Territory region during the late 1860s and 1870s, alluded to the Welsh-Mandan theory in a caption on the back of this image, which reads, “1st and 2nd Chiefs of the Mandans, descendants of a colony of Welch.” This caption indicates that enough people were familiar with this idea to warrant Morrow using it as a marketing point.

Reverend Bowen also referenced a letter published in the Kentucky Palladium in 1804 by a Mississippi judge, which stated that “No circumstance relating to the history of the Western country probably has excited, at different times, more general attention and anxious curiosity than the opinion that a nation of white men speaking the Welsh language reside high up the Missouri.” In fact, many early explorers of the American West, such as Lewis and Clark (who were instructed by Thomas Jefferson, himself of partial Welsh descent, to be on the lookout for Welsh Indians), considered the discovery of Madoc’s descendants a bonus subplot of their missions.

The works produced by Swiss-French artist Karl Bodmer (1809-1893) during the Weid Expedition of the early 1830s are considered to be some of the most important and accurate visual depictions of indigenous peoples and natural landscapes from the early days of exploration in the American West. In this detail of a rendering of a Mandan settlement called “Mih-Tutta-Hangkusch,” villagers can be seen operating the fishing boats that George Catlin and others so strongly believed to be derived from the Welsh coracle.

Needless to say, all theories regarding the existence of Indian tribes descended from a renegade 12th-century Welsh prince have long proven to be false. English skeptic Thomas Stephens vigorously disputed many of the popular narratives of his day and age that were associated with Madoc and the Welsh Indians in his Madoc; An Essay on the Discovery of America by Madoc ab Owen Gwynedd in the Twelfth Century (1893). Reverend Morgan Jones’ captivity story was shown likely to be nothing more than an elaborate hoax, while Catlin’s comparative linguistic analysis of Welsh and Mandan was demonstrated to be a laughable misrepresentation of the facts. However, Stephens found his efforts at undermining the Madoc legend’s legitimacy surprisingly difficult, particularly with regards to individuals of Welsh extraction who continued to defend it. According to Stephens, “The tales told respecting the Welsh Indians found favour with many persons . . . but in Wales itself they produced a profound and enduring impression.”

—Jakob Dopp
Cataloger, Graphics Division

One such dreamer, Alexander Parker Crittenden, hailed from a beleaguered family in Kentucky. As he worked to extract his widowed mother from debt in 1837, he fell hard for the strong-willed Clara Churchill Jones. The Clements Library’s Crittenden Family Papers document their early courtship, when he wrote frequently to Clara, cross-hatching his letters to double the amount of starry-eyed remembrances he could fit into one mailing. “You must, indeed you must,” he implored, “keep that wandering spirit of yours at rest, else I shall be forced to find some charm to quiet it. A kiss every night would be effectual, but how is this to be accomplished when there is such a distance between us. There is but one course  ̶  to appeal to yourself not to appear to me in my dreams. ’Tis such a disappointment when awakening to find it all but a dream.” A young man of 21, Alexander found his mind occupied with love and desperate attempts to secure his financial footing to assure the Churchill family that he could support a wife. His dreams for the future were entangled with his dreams of Clara. He sheepishly admitted that in his pursuit of success, “I must lead an unsettled life, and in all probability soon be compelled to go south or West.”

Californian cities grew at a bewildering pace. Bayard Taylor, sent by Horace Greeley of the New-York Tribune to report on the Gold Rush, noted in his book Eldorado (1850) that “People who have been absent six weeks came back and could scarcely recognize the place.”

In one of his early courtship letters to Clara, Alexander enclosed couplets of love, altering one to include her name.

Human connection was closely prized by those in the western city. When a great fire rushed through San Francisco in May 1851, Alexander described how he went about trying to save his possessions. “I had not much to lose,” he admitted. “The most highly prized of all my goods & chattels were your portraits. They were the first things I thought of. I did not know how to secure them. I tried to put them in my pockets  ̶  but reflecting that they would be injured, perhaps destroyed by the fire and water to which I must be exposed  ̶  I concluded that the trunk was the safest place for them until the moment came when we should be compelled to retreat.” Surrounded by a city engulfed in flame, “a perfect sea of fire roaring and rushing around us with a sound louder than the breaking of the waves on the shore,” Crittenden held on tightest to the daguerreotypes of his family, his connection to those he left behind as he chased visions of success. He was thoughtful about sending Clara pictures of himself as well. One he sent in October 1850 after his plans to visit her were dashed once again by a financial setback, “a blow almost too heavy to bear.” “If I cannot come in person I will send my image. It is the best I can do, but it is a poor substitute. It is deficient in the warm heart beating only for you. It cannot open its lips and tell you how dearly you are loved.” Alexander’s dreams had shifted from earning a great fortune to finding a way to be together again. “I wish we could live upon affection and that that most hateful of all words  ̶  money  ̶  might never be mentioned again.”

This photograph of Alexander’s eldest daughters Laura and Nannie Crittenden was likely taken sometime around 1851, posing the alluring possibility that it could have been one of the daguerreotypes he guarded so carefully during his early years in San Francisco.

Laura D. Fair (1837-1919), ca. 1871

In 1851 British sailor William Shaw published Golden Dreams and Waking Realities: Being the Adventures of a Gold-Seeker in California and the Pacific Islands. Lured by the promise of Californian wealth, Shaw set out for the mines. After a grueling attempt, he abandoned the dream, packing his belongings to seek better prospects. “The wind was blowing hard and the rain pelted heavily down, as giving a last long look at the diggings, I thought of the golden dreams and buoyant hopes which had lured us to them; and turned my back upon a spot where these had been so rudely dispelled by the waking realities of privation and suffering.” Many fortune-seekers were drawn to the promise of California by stories of successful mines, of gold dust blowing in the streets, of cities erupting into being and bustling with newcomers and opportunities. But mining proved difficult, unsteady work, requiring far more financing and luck than most had. And even those who were drawn to the coast not by gold but by the attendant boom it brought to the region, found that life in the new West could be risky. The speculative frenzy that undergirded San Francisco’s growth could tumble even the most optimistic of men. Alexander Crittenden struggled alongside them. Working for years to secure a strong enough footing to bring his family with him to California, his dreams of financial freedom waned in the face of homesickness and separation. And in turn, when his family was reunited, happiness again failed to follow. Love and stability, like his dreams of fortune, were always a step or two ahead of him. San Francisco may have sprouted from Americans’ dreams, but that doesn’t mean they always came true.

—Jayne Ptolemy
Assistant Curator of Manuscripts

On the great plains of the American West amidst the tension between settlers and decimated tribal communities, one remarkable family represented a range of perspectives on the Native American experience. Connected both to old stock from New England and tribal chiefs from west of the Mississippi, the family included a U.S. Army artist and engineer enforcing Indian removal policies; an author both sympathetic and condescending as she recorded Native lore; and a Native American physician, who endorsed assimilation only to return to Native homelands just as the violence of the Indian Wars exploded in a horrendous final bloodbath. Each sought to record, reflect, educate, advocate, and understand on both a public and a deeply personal level what it meant to be Native American. The Clements Library is lucky to house photographs, original art, and published works relating to the Eastman family.

Seth Eastman (1808-1875) was a skilled artist and topographical engineer from Maine, educated at West Point. His legacy as an artist includes paintings of U.S. military sites on display at the United States Capitol as well as hundreds of illustrations for government publications and books by his second wife, Mary. Seth frequently sketched Native American subjects, scenes, and artifacts while stationed at Fort Snelling near what is now Minneapolis, Minnesota. At the time of his first arrival there in 1830, the region was the home of the Santee Dakota Sioux people. 

Shortly after he arrived at Fort Snelling, Seth married a fifteen-year-old Native woman, Wakinajinwin (Stands Sacred, b. ca. 1815). She was the daughter of Mdewakanton Santee chief, Mahpiya Wicasta (Cloud Man, b. 1780), who was among the first of his people to shift towards an agricultural lifestyle and convert to Christianity. In the same year as her marriage to Eastman, Stands Sacred gave birth to a daughter named Winona (First Born Daughter, 1830-58). Winona also became known as Mary Nancy Eastman, and later as Wakantankawin (Holy, or Sacred Woman) following the Sioux tradition of changing and adapting names to reflect life’s events. 

After three years, the U.S. Army reassigned Seth to West Point. He then declared his marriage ended, abandoning his young wife and child, although possibly leaving behind some means for their support. They could not have known that their paths would cross again.     

In 1835, while stationed back at West Point, Seth Eastman married a second time, to Mary Henderson (1818-1887), daughter of a military surgeon. In 1841 Eastman was again assigned to Fort Snelling, this time for an extended tour of duty as commander. He thus returned to the haunts of his first family, bringing his new white wife. Together, Mary Henderson Eastman and Seth would have seven children, some of whom were born during their time in the West.

Fort Pembina, Dakota Territory, circa 1858. This evocative small watercolor by Seth Eastman shows the virtuosity that ranks him with the greatest artists of the American West. Situated on the northern border with Canada, Fort Pembina was a trading post going back into the 18th century. Eastman was in this vicinity in 1857-58, having been sent back to Fort Snelling to close down operations there.

At Fort Snelling, Mary and Seth Eastman found plenty of opportunities to deepen their fascination with Dakota culture and lore. Their first-hand experiences with the indigenous people of the West, along with Seth Eastman’s advanced artistic skills, would in later years situate him for the editing and illustrating of Henry Schoolcraft’s landmark government report Historical and Statistical Information respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1851).

Mary, an assertive and inquisitive woman, drew the attention of tribal elders around Fort Snelling, who eventually began to share their stories and legends. These became the basis of several publications by Mary, among them Dahcotah, or Life And Legends Of The Sioux Around Fort Snelling (1849); and Romance of Indian Life: With Other Tales, Selections from the Iris, An Illuminated Souvenir (1853); both of which featured color lithograph illustrations based on her husband’s artwork.

The Iris, a Binghamton, New York, newspaper, was an occasional publisher of Mary Eastman’s stories. Eastman’s own copy of this souvenir edition of selections from the Iris (1852) has been re-bound in leather, hand-painted, and inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

Ohyiesa’s father, Many Lightnings, embraced assimilation, converted to Christianity, and changed his name to Jacob Eastman. He determined to steer Ohiyesa on a path away from confrontation and toward assimilation. This achieved, Ohiyesa chose the name Charles Alexander Eastman and began an academic career through numerous missionary programs, Indian boarding schools, and colleges, eventually graduating from Dartmouth in 1887. He then entered Boston University, earning a medical degree.

By November 1890, Dr. Charles Eastman had returned to the West as a medical officer at the Pine Ridge Indian Agency in present day South Dakota. At Pine Ridge tensions between the U.S. Army and desperate Lakota followers of the Ghost Dance movement were reaching the point of violence. On December 29, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry (the unit formerly led by George Armstrong Custer) massacred a Miniconjou band of men, women, children, and the infirm at Wounded Knee Creek. Eastman was on the scene, scrambling to provide care for the wounded and traumatized survivors scattered across the frozen prairie.

Seth Eastman’s artwork, including “Itasca Lake” (circa 1851), illustrated the publications of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft as well as those of Mary Eastman. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow drew heavily on Schoolcraft’s, and likely Eastman’s, work in imagining scenes for another Native American Romance, The Song of Hiawatha (1855).

Disillusionment and revulsion pushed Dr. Charles Eastman to New York, where he married New England educator Elaine Goodale (1863-1953) in 1891. For the next 20 years Eastman held various positions with the federal government, the Carlisle Indian Boarding School, and numerous other organizations that advanced understanding of Indian cultures. He promoted the YMCA and Boy Scouts of America on western reservations, collected artifacts for the University of Pennsylvania, and wrote and lectured on Native American conditions, becoming one of the most prolific authors and speakers on Sioux ethno-history and American Indian affairs.

Frustration followed achievement throughout Dr. Charles Eastman’s career. His descriptions of the aftermath of Wounded Knee and the effect it had on him made clear that he was questioning “the Christian love and lofty ideals of the white man.” He found that he was an outsider in both worlds ‒ not militant enough for many Native Americans angered by harsh assimilation programs, but far too “Indian” for many of his white colleagues. He endured dismissive criticism. The Springfield Republican commented that his personal experiences offered “little social or educational value.” His efforts to establish a medical career in Minneapolis were frustrated by expectations that he could also prescribe a magical “Indian medicine.” 

As he sought ways to reconnect to the values of his indigenous upbringing, he found his way north, back to the traditional Santee homelands of Minnesota and into Ojibwe and Odawa territories. In the 1920s and 1930s Eastman was frequently back and forth between the Lake Huron shore and the Detroit area, where his son Ohiyesa II lived. In From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916) a revitalized Eastman commented that “Every day it became harder for me to leave the woods.”

Ohiyesa, Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, died in 1939 of complications from smoke inhalation from a tepee fire. He is buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Detroit. He had witnessed the peak of violence between Native American peoples and the United States, experienced both the timeless traditional lifestyle of Plains Indians, and assimilated into 20th century white society. His perspective across two worlds remains relevant in our current multi-cultural society, challenged by issues of race and sustainability.

Although Charles probably never crossed paths with his grandfather, Seth Eastman, the combined experiences and historical record left by Charles, Mary, and Seth Eastman cover a remarkable portion of the complicated and fraught relations between indigenous Americans and others.

—Clayton Lewis
Curator of Graphics

On June 14, 1864, after a week’s journey amid miles of prickly pear and vast plains, Nathaniel P. Hill (1832-1900) sat down and wrote a letter to his wife. Hill was a former Brown University chemistry professor hoping to make his fortune smelting precious metals in the Colorado Territory while his wife, Alice Hale Hill (1840-1908), remained in Providence, Rhode Island, with their two young children, Crawford and Isabel.       

The Hill family’s experience of “going West” was not the narrative typically associated with American western expansion. They did not pack their worldly goods into a covered wagon bound for a homestead claim. Nathaniel Hill was not a miner or railroad worker laboring to forge a fortune from the dirt. Instead, the Hills were an affluent middle-class family from Providence who transplanted their lifestyle from Rhode Island to Colorado following several years of Nathaniel Hill’s business ventures there. Despite the misgivings of his wife, Alice, Hill’s East Coast capital was key to establishing a comfortable standard of living for himself and his family, one that far exceeded his wife’s initial fears. With his scientific education, business connections, and stable financial backing, Nathaniel Hill was in an optimal position to invest in land and innovative technical processes to turn a profit in an industry that destroyed so many dreams. He ultimately succeeded in founding a highly lucrative smelting company and held various public offices in the territory and later state.     

While Nathaniel Hill’s early time in Colorado was far from luxurious ‒ reliable travel within the territory was often only by horseback, diet was comprised of meat and eggs, and accommodations were rustic whether in a build