 | Annual report on historical collections University of Virginia Library |  |
REPORT ON HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS
WHY ARE so many of "our Virginia manuscripts" in North
Carolina and California? Why is Princeton University publishing
the Jefferson papers? These two questions are partly concerned
with history, and the answers are in part a concern of this
library. They recur with a certain monotony, and for this reason
I have prefaced this guide to our new accessions not only with the
usual report on our projects and development, but also with
several comments on, if not complete answers to, these two questions
and some library policies which relate to them.
Transmigration of Virginia Manuscripts
Recent widespread controversy over the "transmigration of
Virginia manuscripts" to other states has involved criticism in some
quarters of the collecting policies of out-of-state institutions. It is
indeed true that among the half dozen regional collections in the
South of more than local significance, there are some which appear
in the past to have concentrated on the collecting of Virginiana to
the apparent relative neglect of their own states. To Virginians,
however, such interest should not appear altogether unreasonable.
At the University of Virginia Library, oldest and largest manuscripts
repository in the Southern states, we have found the out-of-state
competition for Virginia material both stimulating and helpful in
several ways to our own collecting.
For the reassurance of those who have been worried unduly
by the belated agitation, it is certainly safe to say that for at least
a decade the annual accessions of Virginia manuscripts to this
Virginia library alone have greatly exceeded in quantity the total
acquisitions of such Virginia material by all out-of-state agencies
combined. Even so, not enough collecting has been done by public
institutions either inside or outside of Virginia, and too often
also truly monumental manuscripts, the inheritance of all our
people, emerge for a moment from obscurity, only to pass from the
auction block again into what is sometimes complete inaccessibility
in private hands. The competition, however, which we do fear is
that of destructive elements, not the constructive competition of institutions,
located beyond the boundaries of this Commonwealth. Research
libraries, such as the University's, are the logical depository of
all manner of manuscripts, as well as of printed works. Here, protected
from fire, rats, and decay; from wind, rain, dust, and heat;
from industrious housemaids and careless stamp collectors, the
neglected family letters that tell the story of times past are safely
kept and made available for research.
Our General Policies
Receptivity and cooperation, therefore, have continued to be
our watchwords. With such institutions, for example, as Duke
University or the Library of Congress, (which happen to be our
two most formidable rivals for Virginia manuscripts) cooperation
is an easy and mutually profitable matter. Their manuscripts are
not only well housed and catalogued, but are generously made
available by photo-duplication to us and to individual students. A
similar cordial relationship obtains with scores of other institutions.
A happy example this year has been our exchange with the Regional
Collection of History at Cornell University of a group of New York
manuscripts and broadsides for a collection of Virginia Revolutionary
documents. Private owners who wish to retain ownership and
control of their papers are encouraged to place them here for safekeeping
and historical reference free of obligation. Such private depositors
are nearly always content to retain publication rights to
deposited material; and rare indeed is the depositor who withdraws
his deposit, or who refuses either access to manuscripts or publication
privileges to properly qualified researchers recommended by us.
Passive receptivity is not enough, however, and our potential donors
and depositors need to be kept informed of our interest by a vigorous
and continuous program of correspondence and travel. The current
results of this policy of cooperation and receptivity will, it is
hoped, be apparent in the report which follows this brief introduction.
Manuscripts—Two Years of Rapid Growth
The introduction to our last report (for the years 1945-1947)
was said by some to be too brief. It was indeed shorter than the introductions
to previous reports, but perhaps we may be pardoned
description of new acquisitions was of necessity much longer than
in past years. That report listed 426 newly acquired collections comprising
more than half a million manuscripts. The present report
describes as adequately as available space permits the million and a
quarter manuscripts contained in the 541 new collections acquired
between July 1947 and June 1949.
To the 447 generous friends (listed in an appendix to this
report) who have given manuscripts, or funds for their acquisition,
we can only say, as we did to the 320 donors listed in our last
report, that their talent is not being buried. Every collection received
during these two years (all gifts and every deposit except two
or three temporarily restricted by the depositor) has been processed
and made available to investigators within a few weeks of its
reception. The handling of such a flood of materials has taxed our
small staff, and detailed immediate indexing is impossible for most
collections, though all are catalogued upon reception, with as many
index tracings furnished as time permits. Careful arrangement
makes up in part for cataloguing shortcomings. Each new donation
or deposit is sacredly preserved as a separate collection, and the
collections are being used by an ever increasing number of local
and visiting researchers.
In the World Almanac, in which this Library appeared for the
first time in 1947 (in the distinguished company of Texas and
Duke) as one of the three Southern libraries among the two dozen
principal libraries in America, our manuscript collection is described
as particularly strong in the papers of Virginia's public men. Papers
of recent public men (Carter Glass, for example, and Claude Swanson,
Miles Poindexter, and Edward R. Stettinius) have been actively
sought by the University. Since these recent collections are often
voluminous, the suspicion might well arise that emphasis has been
put on twentieth century quantity to the neglect of the rarer materials
of earlier periods. An analysis of the pages that follow should
provide a sufficient answer to this question. Of the 541 new collections
reported, 12 fall in the years before 1699, 114 between 1700
and 1799, 339 between 1800 and 1899, 193 between 1900 and 1949.
Many of the larger collections (about a third of the total), it will be
noted, fall in two or more of these periods.
A word as to geographical spread and subject matter. Like
Mr. T. S. Eliot's patriotism, our interests and, we feel, our responsibility
extend outwards in concentric circles. Hence the continuing
emphasis in this year's collecting on the University, on Charlottesville
and Albemarle County, and on Virginia. Beyond Virginia (and
indeed within the State) we are inclined to steer regional materials
to the most appropriate depository, but we also welcome for preservation
here manuscripts and other source materials of broad
general interest—political, institutional, social, literary, religious,
economic, educational and bibliographical—with emphasis on
American history, especially of the southeastern states. Among such
European materials as have been obtained, chief interest has been
in British manuscripts related to our colonial beginnings and to our
own later history, or in literary manuscripts of general interest to
the inheritors of Anglo-American culture.
Other Materials and Special Collections
Printed books, pamphlets, and serials are ignored in this report,
regardless of whether or not they are housed in the Division of Rare
Books and Manuscripts and even though they absorb most of our
funds available for purchases. The significant items among them are
recorded in the union catalogues and bibliographies. Our holdings
of public documents of Jefferson's administration, particularly valuable
for researchers in the manuscripts of that period, have been
increased this year through extensive purchases by the McGregor
Library and by a generous gift from Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach.
The annual reports of the Curator of the McGregor Library
(the most important of the special libraries constituting the Division
of Rare Books and Manuscripts) are not printed, a fact which
I personally regret, though they are sometimes mimeographed.
Readers who find this introduction too brief are urged to turn
from the paragraphs below this one to the following headings for
general and specific comment (similar to that in the last report) on
special materials of great importance to our collections: Broadsides,
page 117; Jefferson Papers, page 158; Maps, page 178, Microfilm,
page 182; Newspapers, page 190; Prints and Pictures, page 205; and
University of Virginia Archives, page 222.
Newspapers and Microfilm
Our newspaper collection has been increased during the two-year
period of this report by the rather astonishing number of 2,235
issues of newspapers so rare that they have never before existed in a
library. All of these but one happen to be Virginia newspapers,
and some are privately owned deposits; all of them are listed on
pages 192-197 as a supplement to the standard bibliographies by
Clarence S. Brigham and Lester J. Cappon. A few (not so many,
however, as in our last report) are listed as previously unknown
titles. On the same pages and on the final page of this report will
be found statements of what we have done during these two years
to see to it that the titles and substance of the newspapers being
published in Virginia today shall not in future vanish utterly from
the memory of man. A survey just initiated by the Richmond Area
University Center will, it is hoped, lead to better coordination of
this state-wide cooperative project of Virginia libraries and newspaper
publishers.
Microfilming of manuscripts has not been particularly extensive
in recent months, a total of approximately 120,000 pages of
manuscript having been filmed during the year for our collections
as detailed later in this report under the Microfilm entry. Filming
of newspapers (including current subscriptions) and other printed
materials, for which microfilm is in general more satisfactory than
for manuscripts, has proceeded at a greater rate. The use of microfilm
has been considerably facilitated this year by the acquisition of
an additional projector and of cabinets for the storage of the several
thousand reels of film in our collections. We have not found
microfilm to be the cheap expedient which it is sometimes reported
to be. The film and the necessary equipment are costly, and use and
cataloguing of the film are time-consuming. It does save storage
space, and it brings to our researchers source materials from remote
libraries as well as from private owners, in whose hands in many
instances unique materials are not only inaccessible for study, but
also subject to many hazards. Our own photographic laboratory has
turned out the largest volume of work in its history. The microfilming
last year of the major portion of our Miles Poindexter
Papers for the University of Washington and the State College of
Washington was a project of some magnitude, costing those two
so great this year that we have been obliged occasionally to establish
waiting lists of researchers desiring to use the projectors.
Jefferson's Papers
Thomas Jefferson was not discovered in 1943. That was merely
his bicentennial year. The many persons from whom we have had
somewhat anxious inquiries may be assured that in this biennium
the University has continued to be the principal institutional collector
of Jefferson's papers, acquiring in this period 127 original
manuscripts of our Founder. Our collection of 2,500 autograph
manuscripts is small compared with the great one in the Library
of Congress, but it has many unique features of peculiar interest.
Mrs. Thurlow and I will have ready for publication early in 1950
an indexed calendar of every manuscript in the collection.
We may as well confess that our most valuable "find" of Jefferson
papers during the past year was the discovery of fifty-eight letters
from Jefferson to Arthur S. Brockenbrough, first Proctor of the
University, tied in a neat bundle and lying where they had lain
for 125 years in the office in which Brockenbrough received them,
less than 300 yards from my desk. Rarely has a 300-mile journey
yielded comparable treasure!
Mr. Jefferson, who selected and purchased our original library,
died before he could see personally to the moving of the books
from Pavilion VII to the central building he had erected for them.
He lived long enough, though, to beg for us in 1825 our first manuscript
collection. During the past year he has assisted us in our
collecting work. He was aided in this by various alumni chapters.
Following a timely suggestion by Mr. Harrison Mann of Washington,
D. C., Jefferson's witty letter of 9 September 1817, to Joseph
Cabell, was issued in facsimile in a handsome leaflet entitled Mr.
Jefferson on Lawyers' Language. The leaflet, containing also brief
notes on our collecting interests and an appeal on our behalf by
President Darden, was printed and distributed in several thousand
copies by the alumni chapters in Washington, D. C.; Louisville,
Kentucky; Charleston, West Virginia; New York City; and by a
Richmond alumnus. These helpful friends of the library have the
satisfaction of knowing that their work has assisted materially in
strengthening our collections.
The Jefferson publications sponsored or assisted by the University
in recent years are too well known to need mention here. Two
more will be published in coming months by the McGregor Library
(which has issued since the appearance of our last report Hugh T.
Lefler's A Plea for Federal Union: North Carolina, 1788). Letters
to a Bookseller, edited by Professor Elizabeth Cometti of Marshall
College, will concern Jefferson's work in establishing the University
Library (to a man of affairs, not a bookseller, Jefferson wrote that
the building of the library was much more important than the
remission of the University's debt). Professor Luther P. Jackson,
of Virginia State College, is editing the memoirs of Isaac Jefferson,
a household servant at Monticello, as dictated in old age a century
ago to the historian Charles Campbell.
Princeton's Jefferson and Ours
But if Jefferson himself was not discovered in Charlottesville
in 1943, our long-time project for dealing with the editorial challenge
he presents was discovered in that year by new and powerful
friends elsewhere, who have assumed responsibility for its execution
on a scale which promises to exceed our brightest hopes. I
refer of course to the Princeton Jefferson publication mentioned
later in this report. And it is a presumption on my part to use the
plural form of the possessive pronoun in reference to the ten
years of editorial preparation at the University of Virginia which
preceded the inception of the Princeton project in 1943. For it was
a one-man task, to which the rest of us made largely mechanical
contributions, though it had the full support of the University's
Librarian, who always gave it as much assistance as the Library's
circumstances permitted.
I shall incur the certain indignation of my colleague, John
Cook Wyllie, in mentioning as his the far-seeing plan and laborious
task which was brought so nearly to completion before his departure
from our staff to join the British Army in northeast Africa in 1941.
For Mr. Wyllie's feeling for anonymity goes somewhat beyond
the anonymity of the normal librarian as an assistant to research.
I shall incur no censure, however, from Julian P. Boyd. To us he
has given ample evidence of his gratitude for assistance to his work—
suggesting that his daring and enterprise do not preclude the humility
of the great scholar. He is not to blame if others, carried away
character of its planning, have incorrectly ascribed to him credit
for being the first to see the need for surveying and re-editing
Jefferson's writings, or the first to take effective action towards that
end.
Mr. Wyllie's self-imposed task was a survey of all existing
Jefferson texts in print or in manuscript in their hundreds of
well known and obscure locations. This union catalogue (or "Checklist")
now contains 77,000 chronologically arranged cards listing
some 50,000 manuscripts. Viewing it as a sine qua non in the further
search for Jefferson papers, and a basic tool for the hoped-for
bicentennial Congressional edition of Jefferson's writings, the Library
of Congress proposed in 1941 to publish and distribute our
Checklist under a joint imprint. The intervention of Pearl Harbor
made it my unpleasant duty to veto this generous proposal. (Our
entire staff, including finally my stenographer and me, promptly
entered the armed forces, making it impracticable to prepare the
enormous list for the printer.) I hope I may be excused, therefore,
for making this allusion to Mr. Wyllie's personal project. For the
Checklist did not "just happen." It had a purpose, and there was
no accident in the fact that the Historian of the Bicenntial Commission
found ready here for the extensive use that he made of it
then and later a nearly-completed survey which revealed astounding
statistics about the unpublished condition of Jefferson's writings
and has served ever since as a basic tool in Jefferson scholarship.
In emphasizing the usefulness of Mr. Wyllie's project, I detract
not a whit from the brilliant work now going forward at Princeton.
For there we are having revealed to us the wonderful potentialities
in the teamwork of an able group of scholars working in close
cooperation with a university press of the first order of talent,
equipment, and courage. Many of us at the University of Virginia
regret that we do not have a university press, such as Princeton's,
but no one at this University, as far as I know, regrets what has
developed since 1943 to make possible the full publication of Jefferson's
papers, towards which so much effort was expended here in
the preceding years.
Let Virginians and alumni remember that a university publishing
house, capable of committing itself to a million-dollar venture
over a period of years, is not always to be had for the asking.
our Librarian offered to Princeton in 1943 our full cooperation, he
spoke for all our staff. We have initiated Madison and Monroe
checklists, which grow very slowly at present. If we are successful in
carrying them to a point beyond which a library staff cannot go,
we shall be very happy indeed if another university and another
university press should step forward to complete the work. And if
our friends do not hear a great deal more about Princeton's
Jefferson in forthcoming years, we of this Library shall be much
disappointed.
Founder's Day at the University in 1948 turned out to be the
most satisfying Jeffersonian occasion of recent years. Following Julian
Boyd's notable address (published later as "Thomas Jefferson's
Empire of Liberty," Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. XXIV, No. 4,
Oct. 1948, pp. 538-54) a group of friends of the library met in the
McGregor Room for a simple ceremony in which Dumas Malone
presented to President Darden the first volume of his Jefferson and
His Time. This initial volume, Jefferson the Virginian, first fruit of
a great many years of planning and preparation, is dedicated to this
University, where some of the research was done, and where vicarious
pride is commensurate with Mr. Malone's accomplishment. It
was a satisfaction to acquire afterward the manuscript of the book
and the texts of the remarks made at the presentation.
The Undergraduate, the Scholar, and the Collections
Considerable expansion of our Map and Print collections
(19,228 new maps and 12,527 new prints and pictures) will be
noted under the respective headings below. The relatively strong
growth of our holdings in maps has been stimulated by the establishment
in the University several years ago of a full-fledged School
of Geography. Cause and effect here are hard to distinguish.
A decade ago the McGregor Library was established in the
University, at once becoming the central and preeminent collection
among the several special libraries constituting the Division
of Rare Books and Manuscripts. Through this gift, Lawrence Wroth
wrote in 1945, "the Charlottesville institution . . . has become an
important center for American studies in a part of the country
where the materials for such studies had not previously existed in
strength and number." (In "The Chief End of Book Madness,"
1945). In the meantime the collections of historical manuscripts, independent
of the McGregor Library, have increased by geometrical
progression. The American history faculty during the same
period has exactly doubled in size. The School of History has grown
to be the second largest department in graduate studies and has
outstripped all others in the humanities; its undergraduate section,
now numbering just under a thousand students, has today the
third largest enrollment of any school in the college of arts and
sciences. This is a phenomenon of some interest when one recalls
the New York Times Report of 1943 on the non-teaching of history
in American colleges, or even last month's report of a committee
of Virginia's General Assembly that "Virginia history and government,
as such, are not actually being taught in our schools."
In a year which has seen the bequest of the T. Catesby Jones
Collection of modern French prints, a generous addition to the
Fred O. Seibel Archive of contemporary political cartoons, and
some distinguished groups of historical engravings and political
cartoons of our earlier history, it is gratifying to report a notable
expansion of our facilities for the exhibits which have become an
increasingly popular activity of the Division. The new Exhibition
Gallery, opened several months ago with an exhibit from the Jones
Collection, has made it possible for undergraduates and other visitors
to examine closely many of the rarer items of large size, which
formerly were seldom seen except by the specialist.
The McGergor Library itself, once the almost exclusive domain
of the graduate student, the visiting biographer, and other
scholars, has become an increasing stimulus in undergraduate life.
Book collections of undergraduates are frequently displayed there,
and students in the college are active participants in the annual
book collectors' contests as well as in the work of the University
of Virginia Bibliographical Society, which meets in the room. The
McGregor Room Seminars in Contemporary Prose and Poetry, conducted
in recent months by such men as Basil Willey, Willard
Thorp, and W. H Auden, have stirred such enthusiasm among undergraduates
that they threaten to outgrow the room.
Towards the Implementing of Policy
Beyond our basic function of preservation, which we take to
include cooperation with others as well as the building of our own
not to exploit materials but rather to make them available to
scholars. Efforts have been made, therefore, to assist such projects
as the Union Catalog, the Jefferson editing at Princeton, the
17th Century Inventory at Yale, the Evans Bibliography continuation
at Worcester, the Short-Title Catalogue entries at Michigan, the
microfilm inventory at Philadelphia, the Florida Catalogue at Winter
Park, the Confederate Music listing at Emory, and the Confederate
unofficial publications at Chapel Hill. The Curator of
Rare Books is serving as general editor of the Virginia Imprints
Inventory, a cooperative venture which includes, besides this University,
the Library of Congress, the Virginia State Library, the College
of William and Mary, and the Virginia Historical Society.
Too much absorbed in the collecting and processing of new
material, I am personally to blame for the lateness of this report,
which is our principal means, other than correspondence and
photography, of making available to researchers elsewhere our
manuscript sources. With next year's report, which will include an
index for the years 1945-1950, we hope that it will resume its
proper character as an "annual" report. Other aids to research in
the manuscripts have gone forward satisfactorily. One of the happiest
appointments of recent years has been that of Mrs. Constance
E. Thurlow, formerly of the John Carter Brown Library, who is
engaged in overhauling the card catalogue to our manuscripts, and
is also preparing for the press the calendar of our Jefferson Papers,
previously mentioned. Assisted by a timely grant from the Richmond
Area University Center, Mr. William E. Stokes and I are compiling
a preliminary checklist of the writings of John Randolph of
Roanoke. By its publication and distribution we hope to obtain
many corrections and additions and to pave the way for an adequate
editing of Randolph's papers.
The resignations from our staff of Miss Evelyn Dollens and Mr.
William H. Gaines, Jr., who have given yeoman's service to all our
projects, are a source of regret to all of us. Their unselfish enthusiasm
in the work of the Division has greatly helped in carrying forward
into the future that "continuity with the past" which, according
to Mr. Justice Holmes, "is not a duty," but "only a necessity."
Curator of Manuscripts
| Annual report on historical collections University of Virginia Library | |