Virtual Business Meeting, Sharon Ritenour Stevens Prize Session, and America 250 Sessions

In this 1809 rough draft letter, Thomas Pinckney discusses the state of national politics with a fellow Southern Federalist. He laments the stubborn popularity of the Democratic-Republican Party despite their supposed lack of civic virtue and the economic hardship caused by the Embargo and Non-Importation Acts. He goes on to accurately speculate that Jefferson and Madison’s foreign policy will lead to war with Great Britain. In addition to providing an insightful snapshot of national politics at the end of the First Party Era, the letter is interesting from an editor’s perspective as its extremely rough condition exemplifies the challenges of transcribing and publishing draft letters.

President Monroe’s nationwide goodwill tour after his election was so successful that a newspaper in Boston, home of some of the loudest dissent from Federalists during the recent War of 1812, went so far as to proclaim a new “Era of Good Feelings.” Whether from relief over the end of the war or desire to get close to the new administration, Bostonians did indeed treat the President to an array of dinners, parades, and celebratory meetings of all kinds.

Not everyone shared the joy, however. A diary kept by John Gallison, a young moderate Federalist, shows that, however literally future generations might have taken that phrase, not everyone held good feelings toward the new president and his supporters.

Gallison’s diaries amounted to thirteen volumes written between his senior year at Harvard in 1807 and his death in 1820. Ten survive today, and they provide a uniquely valuable perspective on Federal period politics and society. Gallison was well-connected to Boston’s social and political elite. Because he had no political ambitions for himself, however, the record he left in these journals was explicitly for his own self-improvement, and often quite detailed. We can see for ourselves the clarity of writing in his journals. His law tutor Justice Story had thought well enough of his skill to hire him as a court reporter for cases heard by the First Circuit.

The journal entry from July 6, 1817, focuses on a sermon given by William Ellery Channing in his Federal Street Church. Channing was the brightest light of the increasingly prominent Unitarian clergy, and his services would have been an obvious stop for a politician looking to generate good press coverage. Gallison’s analysis of the sermon, however, records sentiment not picked up by the newspapers of the day.

On this day, Channing suggested that Unitarian virtue of moderation did support the Republicans’ choice of war with Britain in 1812. Gallison wrote with approval of his mentor’s sentiments, later recording his own reluctance to meet with the President when he paid a call to John Hancock’s widow.

The Ruth Henshaw Bascom Diary 1789-1846, held at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, MA is a remarkable 6,000-page record that spans 57 years (with 8 years missing). Ruth Henshaw Bascom ((RHB) (1772-1848) was a prolific and original self-taught artist creating more than 1,700 cut-paper, bust length, pastel and paint profile portraits of children and adults in nearly forty towns in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine primarily from 1828-1846. Of these 94 are held in 30 museums, historical societies and libraries with another 138 in private collections.

In January 1789 Ruthy Henshaw, began to keep a diary at age 16 and continued until a year and a half before her death at age 74. The diaries contain a wealth of information on her day-to-day life in central Massachusetts as a member of a large and busy household, on the verge of the industrial revolution–spinning, weaving, sewing and quilting, setting cards for Pliny Earl’s factory, and attending Leicester Academy. She chronicles her father, Colonel William Henshaw’s activities as a justice of the peace and prominent community leader. Colonel Henshaw was a member of the Provincial Congress in 1774, and is credited with the term “Minutemen” referring to “companies of men ready to march on a minute’s notice.” He served under General Artemas Ward during the Revolutionary War.

Besides providing insight into her career as an artist in the 19^th century, the diaries contain her observations on weather, natural disasters and major historical events; teaching and piece work; manufacturing; transportation; family and friend networks; illness and accidents; medicine, death and dying; minister exchanges; church singing; sermons; musters; weddings and fashion; and notes inventions of gas lighting, railroads, daguerreotypes, and other technological wonders; as well as artists she met, exhibitions she attended, and subscription libraries she was part of. She was well-read, mentioning newspapers and books she consumed, and expressed opinions on a diverse number of topics including women’s education and rights.

Her diary gives voice to an observant woman who describes leisure and social activities, teaching summer session schools, working in her cousin’s store, making hats, taking a trip on horseback to Connecticut, and a longer one by coach and ship to Norfolk, Virginia. She notes receiving payment for teaching school, selling her millinery creations and for her portraits. Science fascinated her and she never missed an opportunity to peer into a microscope or telescope and tour the newest factories.

As the wife of a minister, she describes her many duties including tending to the sick, attending church services and singing school, and listing the scriptures and hymns each week. Starting in 1816 she included her household’s monthly expenses, letters sent and received, and meals served to numerous ministers and visitors. In other words, she took note of most everything. Her diaries are a rich, as yet underutilized resource. The transcripts will be published online by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts later this year making them easily accessible to all.

In 1831, Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867), the most eminent woman author of the early Republic, visited Washington, DC with her brother Robert Sedgwick, a prominent  attorney who practiced law in New York City. Catharine and Robert’s trip was likely inspired, in part, to pay tribute to the legacy of their late father, Theodore Sedgwick, who had played an instrumental role in the founding of the United States as delegate to the Continental Congress, a U.S. representative, and a senator from Massachusetts. She wrote three letters from Washington to family members on February 5th, including this one, to her eleven-year-old niece and namesake, Katharine Maria Sedgwick. The letter provides lively descriptions of what she saw in the Capital (including “Indian pictures,” international treaties, the original Declaration of Independence, lavish gifts from foreign nations, and a portrait of George Washington rescued by Dolley Madison during the War of 1812) and also who she met (family friend Martin Van Buren, President Andrew Jackson, member of the Cherokee delegation John Ridge, and Caroline Leroy Webster, the second wife of statesman Daniel Webster, among others). She shares her excitement about witnessing significant political artifacts, engaging with politicians and their wives, and hearing stories about the workings of American democracy (such as a diplomat who was unfamiliar with the Constitution’s Emoluments Clauses, which prevent federal officials from accepting gifts from foreign or domestic governments without congressional consent). She also reflects, indirectly, on the discrepancy between democratic ideals and practices by mentioning the enslaved African population in the nation’s capital and nearby prisons.

The letter provides a glimpse of Sedgwick’s lifelong interest in US history and politics, subjects about which she wrote extensively in her novels (especially Hope Leslie, 1827, and The Linwoods, 1835), and short fiction (such as “A Reminiscence of Federalism,” 1833 and “Slavery in New-England,” 1853).  It also reveals her understanding of her role as an elite woman, an intimate family member, an author, and what we might now call an “influencer” in educating Americans, especially young women and others without direct access to power, about the ideals and duties of republican citizenship.

A Summary History of New-England, by Hannah Adams, was published in Dedham, Massachusetts in 1799. The full title of the work provides a sense of its scope, running “from the first settlement at Plymouth, to the acceptance of the Federal Constitution” and including a “a general sketch of the American War.” Adams’s address to the reader expresses her hopes that she will not incur the “charge of arrogance” since she restricts her aims to providing mere “outlines” of New England’s history and since she has largely synthesized work from previous histories. Adams here performs the modesty that was expected in such readerly addresses, but the audacity of her scholarship is nevertheless quite evident. Far from a paltry sketch, the Summary History is more than 500 pages long, and even Adams’s careful deference to the histories on which her work draws reveals the breadth of her research. And, of course, as a very early professional woman writer in the United States, Adams herself was keenly aware of how her gender would impact the reception of a work that spoke of war and the newly-formed American state, asserting that, “though a female cannot be supposed to be accurate in describing, and must shrink with horror in relating the calamities of war, yet she may be allowed to feel a lively interest in the great cause, for which the sword was drawn in America.”

Adams is one of many early women writers who had the audacity to publish their works in print. For almost four decades, it has been the work of the Women Writers Project to make these authors and their work accessible for research and teaching. The Summary History is published with close to 500 other texts in the Women Writers Online (WWO) collection of pre-Victorian print works. WWO texts are encoded according to the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup language and published in an interface that foregrounds discovery and contextualization, not just among women’s works but also within the literary and historical cultures which these texts helped to form. This presentation will share some approaches that the WWP has adopted in our efforts to edit Adams and her contemporaries, modeling a range of informational phenomena that include named entities, rhetorical and linguistic features, document structures, the appearance and condition of the source texts, and many others. This detailed markup supports interfaces such as WWO that offer multiple entry points for exploring early women’s writing, that foreground connections between and among women writers, and that bring into focus the contexts in which these works first circulated.

This document illustrates an appeal from a county court to the highest colonial court in Massachusetts, in which the plaintiff (who lost the initial suit, being accused of defamation) was appealing to have the damages reduced that he would have to pay. In fact he both won and lost his appeal: the court decided to reduce the initial damages he was directed to pay, but the cost of bringing his appeal nearly doubled the amount of money he would have to part with! The suit illustrates a number of points: first, that court cases could cost parties a lot of money, such that many individuals pressed for lower costs and a simpler legal process, thinking that a simpler legal process would lower their total legal costs, and second, the suit was brought as a result of Tufts slandering the widow Tufts by accusing her of being a whore and mother to an interracial bastard child. Unlike many court records for this period, which use formulaic language and rarely reveal the true circumstances that started a lawsuit, this suit contains the actual words he is alleged to have spoken and records the distress they caused Phoebe Tufts. Such cases illustrate the importance of reputation and maintaining social standing within a local community.

In the 1760s and 1770s, the men who served on Boston’s watch (a form of local police) witnessed and participated in many of the well-known events that occurred as part of a larger contest for empire. The arrival of a military police force in October 1768 disrupted daily and civic life in Boston and made difficult the work of keeping order for the various local officials in the town. In November 1768, the constables of the Dock Square Watch Edward Ireland recorded in his monthly activity report an encounter with British regular soldiers and officers. Ireland reported that a British officer had cursed at the watch; threats of violence were made to the men and their authority to police was denied.

Writing as witnesses and participants, night constables produced records for administrative purposes that render an account of momentous change. The reports written by Boston’s night constables prompt us to ask how does our understanding of America’s 250 and the records we use to describe it change when consider such events through local-level policing? Ireland’s report is one of nearly one hundred reports written during the two occupations of Boston that preceded America’s Declaration of Independence and the onset of revolution. In this document (and the other complaints that followed) we see evidence of key questions of where authority rested, tensions between the center and the periphery, and quotidian expressions of rights to self-government.

“Edward Ireland’s Return, November 1768” is one example from my in-progress documentary edited project on the material world of early policing, The Reports of Boston’s Night Watch, 1763–1803. The project will culminate in an edited volume (published with the Colonial Society of Massachusetts) brings together for the first time the materials written by and about the night watch of colonial and early republic Boston. The volume will feature a selection of the nearly 1,200 monthly reports written by Boston’s night constables between 1763 and 1803; no known collection of watch reports exists for another British American city before the 1785.

“Guillermo Gernon, sobre impetrar matrimonio con doña Isabel MacEnery” (Guillermo Gernon seeking permission to marry Miss Isabel MacEnery”), dated December 17, 1788, in St. Augustine, forms part of the East Florida Papers, a collection of records from the Second Spanish Period (1783–1821) in Florida held today at the Library of Congress. Following the stipulations of a royal decree from 1776 regulating marriage, Guillermo (William) Gernon, an Irish immigrant, appeals to the governor of Spanish Florida, Vicente Manuel de Céspedes, for permission to wed Isabel MacEnery, also Irish. To meet the requirements of the 1776 degree, Gernon brings forth three witnesses to testify that he lacks family members in Florida who can grant permission for him to marry and that he is both white and a practicing catholic. Gernon appears in the East Florida Papers for the first time in this document, but in another from 1789 is mentioned as a captain in the Spanish army. He figures in at least 38 other items, including a legal case from 1791 in which he is prosecuted for smuggling. MacEnery figures only in this document, but her father, also a captain in the Spanish army, plays a role in numerous others, including an appeal for the release of a cow and calf that he claims were wrongly seized as rebel property following an uprising by Anglo immigrants in 1795. Gernon’s three witnesses are all Irish and figure prominently throughout the East Florida Papers: Miguel O’Reilly, a priest; Thomas Travers, a physician; and Bernardo O’Callaghan, a merchant. One of many cases resulting from the implementation of the 1776 decree in St. Augustine, this document reflects the complex demographic situation of Spanish Florida in the years prior to its annexation by the United States, a period in which Spanish authorities welcomed foreigners who might help defend the territory against its northern neighbor but whose presence also created new tensions and vulnerabilities.

Students at the University of North Florida transcribed the document and carried out initial XML encoding as part of a course on colonial and nineteenth-century Latin American letters. Clayton McCarl prepared the final version and English translation.

Thomas Jefferson and the Committee of Five edited the Declaration of Independence before presenting it to the Continental Congress. Congress further revised the document before finalizing it and sending it to John Dunlap for the first official printing on July 4, 1776. Reconstructing the early draft is a challenge, because Jefferson recorded layers of revisions on a single set of manuscript pages, which he labeled the “original Rough draught.” On top of the base text in his handwriting, which was already reworked from earlier notes and partial drafts, Jefferson layered in numerous changes. While some were likely his own early edits, made before he showed the draft to anyone else, others reflect the Committee’s feedback. Unfortunately, apart from those marked by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, the edits are in Jefferson’s handwriting, and he did not mark down who suggested them. Further complicating the drafting narrative, if Jefferson recopied the draft before the Committee presented it to Congress on June 28, that copy is no longer extant. He later returned to the same working manuscript pages to show the changes made by Congress, bracketing deleted text and inserting added text again on his “original Rough draught.”

While scholars have long investigated the drafting process, the disordered nature of the draft challenges editorial attempts to present it in traditional print volumes. In this presentation, I will introduce the “original Rough draught” and share the Jefferson Papers’ new digital exhibit. Utilizing modern digital tools, we can present that draft (and subsequent versions) in new, clearer ways to help not just scholars but students and the public to better understand the collaborative, uncertain, and contentious origin of the nation’s founding document.

Robert Mush (sometimes spelled Mursh) was a member of the Virginia Pamunkey Indian Tribe, who fought as a Patriot in the Revolutionary War. His 1820 pension application, part of the National Archives’ massive Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application collection, tells a story that spans the entire conflict. He enlisted in the Continental Army in 1776 and fought at the Battle of Brandywine and the Battle of Germantown. In 1778, he marched south to Charleston, South Carolina, for the siege of that city, where he was captured by the British and spent time as a prisoner of war before being exchanged. He remained in the army and served under General Anthony Wayne in Georgia until the war ended in 1783. After the war he served as a Pamunkey tribal leader before moving with his family to Catawba land in South Carolina.

The Indigenous perspective of the American Revolution has reemerged as an area of academic interest in the past few decades. Mush’s experience, as a member of a Virginia Indian tribe residing on a reservation near Williamsburg, who chose to enlist with the Continental Army, demonstrates some of the complicated choices Indigenous people faced at the time. By transcribing a selection of Mush’s pension application and linking to it within our entry, the editors at Encyclopedia Virginia hope to make an unusual and fascinating story easily available to the public.

At the turn of the 20th century, America was a new world power, having gained a colonial empire in the Spanish-American War. In this speech on patriotism—one of three speeches she delivered at the International Peace Conference, held in Boston October 3-8, 1904—Jane Addams challenged Americans to think carefully about their growing power. She argued that it was time to define patriotism not as an ethnocentric nationalism but rather as a devotion to the ideal of democracy itself and the idea that all peoples, no matter their color or creed or country, are worthy of peace and self-government. This early example of Addams’s ideas about peace links it to her insistence on a moral grounding for democracy, her opposition to colonialism, and her view that patriotism should serve a higher ideal than nationalism.

We selected this document from a wide range of Addams’s ideas on democracy. Addams’s writing can be a challenge for modern readers—she tends towards complex arguments based in the philosophical ideas of her time. The Higher Patriotism is a shorter piece, but it covers a number of ideas that help us understand this moment in America’s history.

History doesn’t have to be dry—it can be immersive and engaging. We will develop this speech into a multimedia presentation that uses imagery and audio to present Addams’s words. We plan to use digital storytelling software to put the parts together. The challenge we face is to figure out an interactive way to annotate the speech by offering scholarly commentary while still allowing the reader to make their own interpretation.

On the 10th of June in 1863, twenty-seven-year-old Charlotte Forten (1837–1914), a free black woman teaching recently emancipated people in South Carolina, wrote to anti-slavery poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) in Massachusetts, her friend and mentor from her years in Salem, Massachusetts, as a student, published poet, teacher, and anti-slavery activist. As far as I know, this letter has never been transcribed much less published, though it has received some scholarly attention. While the finding aid for the Whittier Papers (held at the Peabody Essex Museum’s Phillips Library) mentions two letters written by Forten to Whittier in 1863, that folder contained only a single “double” letter.

This presentation will provide a brief introduction to Forten and her relationship with Whittier, and mention the few letters by Forten that have been transcribed and published digitally to date, including her 27 June 1877 letter to Frederick Douglass (available on both the LOC website and the Frederick Douglass Papers Project website), to illustrate different versions of a digital project and explain that my work on recovering Forten’s letters has just begun. Then we will discuss the letter and its contexts, considering how it both showcases an extraordinary individual life and illuminates an under-recognized organized effort to educate emancipated slaves even while the Civil War was still going on. Forten’s letter helpfully augments information that readers can access through her extensive journal (1988 Schomburg edition, edited by Brenda Stevenson) and plays a role in scholar Mollie Barnes’s new book, Paper Heroines: Women Writers in Conversation and Community Across the Sea Islands, 1838–1902 (2026): https://uscpress.com/Paper-Heroines.

Slavery collapsed unevenly in Kentucky. A loyal border slave state during the Civil War, Kentucky was exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation and the Federal government waited to enroll Black Kentuckians into the United States Colored Troops (USCT) until early 1864. Even so, legal slavery lingered in Kentucky until its destruction with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.

Despite the legality of slavery through the end of 1865, events on the ground were far murkier. A document connected to multiple African Americans from Lexington, Kentucky, highlights the complexity of slavery’s collapse in Kentucky. A letter from Captain Henry Hadley at Camp Nelson centers around Lennie and Amanda, two enslaved women who had made their way to the camp in April 1865. Lennie claimed freedom for herself and her children (including Amanda) as the wife of a soldier who had enlisted in a USCT regiment in 1864. Over ten thousand Black men enlisted to fight for the Federal Army at Camp Nelson, making it one of the largest recruitment centers for USCT units in the nation and the largest site of liberation in Kentucky, for Black men and their families.

The document also extended protection to David Ingles and his wife, both free African Americans who had sheltered Lennie and cared for Amanda when she was sick, as the family made their way south to Camp Nelson. This protection was necessary as white Kentuckians fought to preserve slavery through courts and violence in 1865. In Lexington, the city court charged David Ingles with harboring enslaved people without the consent of their owner, Parker Bryant.

The story grows more complicated when we learn more about Lennie and Amanda. As part of the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK), this story appears in digitized, transcribed documents on the project site. Lennie, Amanda, and David Ingles also appear as annotated subjects. These biographies offer a launching point for further discovery and restore the humanity of archivally silenced individuals. In reading through the silences, it seems more likely that Lennie and Amanda were sisters, not mother and daughter. This nuance adds complexity to Hadley’s letter, showcasing how enslaved individuals like Lennie and Amanda attempted to navigate the uncertainty of slavery’s collapse in Kentucky.

This presentation will focus on how CWGK staff uses its digital edition, research tools, and documents like Hadley’s letter to complicate the narrative of slavery’s aftermath in a divided, but loyal, border state.