By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

Yesterday (30 August) was the 203rd anniversary of the birth of Transcendentalist Caroline Sturgis Tappan. When I searched old posts at the Beehive and discovered I’d never written about this interesting and talented woman, I decided I should correct that oversight.

Caroline Sturgis was born on 30 August 1819, the daughter of Elizabeth and William Sturgis of Boston. She had four sisters and one brother. As the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Caroline had quite the privileged upbringing and was educated by some of the most eminent 19th-century thinkers and teachers, including Amos Bronson Alcott, Dorothea Dix, and Margaret Fuller.

Today, Caroline is known primarily as a Transcendentalist poet and children’s author. Her poems appeared in The Dial with the byline “Z,” and her children’s stories were published (anonymously) as Rainbows for Children and The Magician’s Show Box. She was also an intimate friend and confidante of both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, as described by Francis B. Dedmond in 1988, Kathleen Lawrence in 2005, and Megan Marshall in 2013.

Given her accomplishments and important literary connections, I think Caroline gets short shrift in histories of the Transcendentalist movement. I found no record of a full-length biography, though she’s mentioned in passing in biographies of Emerson, Fuller, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne.

Caroline may have been overshadowed by her older sister, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, who was also a poet. Even the notice that appeared in the pages of Literature magazine (page 178-82) after Caroline’s death, which characterized her work as “daring” and brilliant,” spent more time praising her sister’s “finer [poetic] touch” and citing Ellen’s poetry. You can see a similar dynamic in an 1885 article in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (pp. 249-50).

Meanwhile, a joint biographical sketch of the sisters in Notable American Women (vol. 2, pp. 214-5) describes Caroline as “the more outgoing and unconventional of the two.” One of her poems, published in The Dial in October 1840, begins with these lines:

Greatly to Be

Is enough for me,

Is enough for thee.

As an archivist, I’m most familiar with Caroline through her manuscript correspondence, which appears in a few different collections at the MHS, including the Davis-Sturgis-Tappan family papers and the Sturgis-Hooper family papers. Author Megan Marshall calls Caroline “high-spirited” (p. 100), and after reading through some of her letters, I have to agree. You can almost picture her grinning to herself as she writes. Here’s a sampling:

To her sister Ellen, 18 Sep. 1838: “Your tortoise of a letter has at length been welcomed at Naushon, & I thought at first it was from father, until I perceived it had no date & then I knew that it must of course be from you. I suppose you think time is nothing & it is not worth while to note down the day when you write.”

To Lidian Jackson Emerson, 4 June 1839: “I am sure it is very kind for you & Mr Emerson to invite me to stay with you, for I am as uninteresting as possible, & have nothing to say. […] I shall not send my love to the baby for I never like anything that can only express itself by doleful cries. I only love it when it arrives at smiles.”

To Ellen, about a mouse, 29 Sep. 1839: “I called him Romeo, because he roamed about & squealed O! all the time.”

To her husband William A. Tappan, 17 Jan. 1849: “It seems to be a great trouble to build a house & after it is done we shall feel as if we must like it whether we do or not.”

To her father William Sturgis, 9 Mar. 1854: “You know children will be children & mine do not make any pretensions to be angels, except that the other day Ellen refused a tart which was offered her, saying her mother did not let her eat tarts, which I consider slightly angelic.”

As an added treat, Caroline frequently illustrated her letters.

Caroline Sturgis married William Aspinwall Tappan, son of abolitionist Lewis Tappan, in 1847. The couple had two daughters, Ellen and Mary. Caroline survived all her siblings, dying on 20 October 1888, and is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass. In the 1930s, the Tappans’ home, Tanglewood, was donated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra by their daughter and granddaughter.

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about Caroline Sturgis Tappan as much as I have!

By Heather Rockwood, Communications Associate

John Quincy Adams retired from public life when he lost the 1828 presidential election to Andrew Jackson. However, he was not retired for long. In 1830, he ran for and was elected to a seat in the House of Representatives for Massachusetts. He served in this role, being elected to office nine consecutive times, until his death in 1848.

Adams had always exhibited a deep interest in astronomy, as I’ve written about here. In 1843, at the age of 76 and while serving as a congressman, he embarked on a journey to Cincinnati to lay the cornerstone of the Cincinnati Observatory. This observatory was built through the efforts of professor Ormsby McKnight Mitchel, who personally solicited donations for a month and a half, raising $7,500, enough to buy a telescope.

Adams recorded his travels in a daily diary, as he had been doing since he was a child, and he made an interesting entry on 1 November 1843—a list of locations with a number next to each. Perhaps those numbers indicated the number of days since he began his trip?

“1. IV:30. Wednesday— From

If numbers meant days, then Adams had been traveling for the better part of a year! Between the above diary entry on 1 November, and his arrival in Cincinnati on Wednesday, 8 November 1843, he writes of having a cold with “head ache, feverish chills, hoarseness, and a sore throat and my tussis senilis in full force.” Tussis senilis was the name for a severe, chronic cough, but he also named one of his ailments as catarrh, or a buildup of mucus in the throat. His diary goes on to mention waking up several times during the night, something he records often on the later leg of his journey.

He also describes the other passengers with “fascinating manners (which) substitutes for beauty,” and the layout of the canal packet boat Rob-Roy used to convey him from Akron, up the Ohio Canal to Portsmouth, Ohio, then by land carriage to Cincinnati, with several stops on the snowy seven-day trip.

At each stop on his journey, Adams was met with a throng of people expecting him to make speeches, kiss cheeks, shake hands, dine, play cards, and generally be affable. He seemed not to mind this but rather to enjoy it in his irreverent way. In Portsmouth, a delegate from the Cincinnati Astronomical Society, Mr. William Green, joined Adams and accompanied him for the rest of his trip to Cincinnati. However, Adams’s mood wears thin within just a few days, “The activity and unceang (unceasing) attentions of this gentleman since he joined us, have alleviated much my anxiety; but my catarrh, and excessive kindness drive me to despair.”

Finally arriving in Cincinnati, Adams was ushered into a barouche, a type of open carriage. A welcoming crowd followed the carriage to a resident’s house, where the mayor made a welcoming speech and the crowd cheered Adams. However, after so many days traveling and feeling too ill to sleep properly, Adams confessed to his diary, “My answer was flat, stale and unprofitable, without a spark of eloquence or a flash of oratory—confused—incoherent—muddy, and yet received with new shouts of welcome.”

The next day was the day of the stone laying for the Cincinnati Observatory. Adams had been working on his address during his travels but notes in his diary his difficulty writing it because of the cramped conditions, the weather, his cold, and the company around him. Nevertheless, he finished the address before breakfast the morning of the stone laying. To get to the observatory, another barouche was set up to include the mayor and the president of the Astronomical Society. The procession also included carriages with other important Cincinnatians, a military escort, a band, and a crowd of supporters to walk beside the carriages. Then it started to rain. The cover of the barouche had to be lifted to protect the dignitaries from the rain, and in effect it “exclude(d) the sight of me from the people and of the people from me.” But the procession continued:

“The procession marched round sundry streets, the rain increasing till it poured down in torrents. Yet the throng in the Streets seemed not at all to diminish—It looked like a sea of mud—The ascent of the hill was steep and slippery for the horses, and not without difficulty attained—The summit of the hill was a circular plain of which the corner stone was the centre. At the circumference, a stage was erected from which my discourse was to have been delivered; but the whole plain was covered with an auditory of Umbrella’s instead of faces.”

Cincinnati Thursday 9. November 1843.

Adams laid the cornerstone and read his address, which received three “hearty cheers.” Afterward, the crowd dispersed. The discourse portion of the event was postponed to the following day and held inside a chapel. That evening, Adams attended a temperance tea party in a house that had formerly been a theater.

On his third day in Cincinnati, Adams gave a speech for nearly “two hours, without a symptom of impatience or inattention of the Auditory.” Afterward, the city named the hill upon which the observatory stands “Mount Adams.” Adams then shook hands with every member of the Astronomical Society, as well as anyone in the crowd who wished to shake his hand. He then retired to his accommodations and talked to numerous visitors bearing invitations. In the evening, he went to a theatrical comedy and then a ball. “The Ball was splendid—the banquet sumptuous and temperate and the company genteel and lovely— Thus closes, blessed be God one memorable day of my life.”  

By Susanna Sigler, Library Assistant

One of my first directives when I started at the MHS as a library assistant back in May was to begin to familiarize myself with using the ABIGAIL interface. This is how I found myself searching for materials on topics of interest to me, including the (admittedly very broad) topic of WWII.

I found in ABIGAIL that the MHS holds many collections related at least in some way to WWII — although it is a small fraction of the larger holdings — and is currently working to acquire more. Somewhat randomly, I picked the papers of Cambridge resident Frank T. Crawley to investigate further.

The record in ABIGAIL explains that these letters were largely to Frank’s fiancée Christine, and that they cover a variety of subjects, many related to his time stationed in the Panama Canal Zone with the U.S. Marine Corps. The memory of WWII in the United States today has ascended to a status that is almost beyond reproach, a kind of veneration expressed in severe memorials and Serious Dramas. I was interested in the experiences of Frank, who like many Americans serving in the war, did not see combat.

One topic in particular also caught my eye — “his love for her.” I was intrigued by what that might look like. Real WWII love letters, the stuff of movies. Some special, more pure kind of devotion that people insist does not exist today.

Having taken a dive into the beginnings of this collection of correspondence, I feel confident in reporting that couples in the 1940s were very much the same as they are today, differences in slang notwithstanding. “Swell” and “grand” are common adjectives, “gee” is peppered throughout, his nicknames for her are a carousel of darlings, honeys, and sweethearts. His proclamations are often and strong, that he misses her, that he loves her, that her happiness means everything to him and that he wishes the war were over so that they could be together.

Your love keeps me going and keeps my heart warm. Darling you’re so sweet and thoughtful and I’ll never stop loving you no matter where I am or who I am. 

Additionally, a member of Frank’s family or from Christine’s makes their way into the mix. There is a whirlwind of a letter from Frank’s sister-in-law Marie, who, in her update to Frank, had become an American citizen, obtained her driver’s license, and was on her way to becoming a 2^nd Lieutenant in the Red Cross Motor Corps, all in quick succession.

Frank and Christine marry on June 6^th, 1943, one year prior to D-Day. On their anniversary, Frank sends a telegram, as well as a letter. About D-Day he writes,

Darling it looked like General Eisenhower waited for your big day to put on his show and from the radio reports it is going along quite successful and I hope and pray that Germany will be knocked out in a hurry. We are all so darn sick of this war and the sooner it ends the better. 

Though the vast majority of the letters are from Frank, there are scattered replies from Christine in which she returns his sentiments, thanking him for his latest “sugar report,” and updates him on events back home.

Honey, you wrote that you had seen the Andrew Sisters in “Always a Bridesmaid.” Jo & I saw that Monday night, a few days after you did. You seem to see the same pictures we have playing at the local theatres. It’s fun hearing we’ve seen the same pictures at almost the same time. Somehow, it feels as if we had seen them together. — almost.  

There are many passages that are similarly moving, so much so that it only really hit me about halfway through the second box of letters that that was what I was reading — someone’s personal correspondence. These were words that presumably Frank didn’t think anyone besides Christine, and possibly her family, would ever see (well, besides the censor).

In some ways it feels even more like an intrusion due to the letters’ relative recency. Frank and Christine were about the same age during the war as my grandparents. Their letters feel more personal than looking at business papers, or those of a noted head of state. These are Frank and Chris, who love movies and baseball and talk about how desperate they are to see each other on the rare weekends he’s allowed during training. Even the fact that I’m casually referring to them by their first names and nicknames, these people I’ve never met, feels like something that really only happens in an archive.

Ultimately, this collection helped me continue with what I set out to do — familiarize myself with the MHS catalog and the reading room handling guidelines. It also fueled my interest in exploring more collections related to WWII, and to start compiling information for a potential subject guide that researchers could use. But it also made me pause, and remember the intense personal nature of manuscript collections — all manuscript collections — and just how a person’s life, and their most intimate relationships, can become “history.”

Citations

Christine Panariello Crawley to Frank T. Crawley, 10 March 1944, Frank T. Crawley Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

Frank T. Crawley to Christine Panariello Crawley, 13 February 1943, Frank T. Crawley Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

Frank T. Crawley to Christine Panariello Crawley, 7 June 1944, Frank T. Crawley Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. “Research Starters: US Military by the Numbers.” The National WWII Museum. Accessed August 5, 2022. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-us-military-numbers

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

The job of processing the MHS’s terrific collections falls to members of the Collections Services department. Processing archivists like me are responsible for arranging and describing collections in the best and clearest way possible for our researchers, be they scholars, teachers, students, authors, genealogists, members of the general public, or MHS staff.

Not only are collections cataloged in our online catalog ABIGAIL, but many of our manuscript, photograph, graphics, and artifact collections are further described in online guides. The guides contain more detailed historical and contextual information and allow researchers to zero in on the specific material they’re looking for. But these guides are not static. They’re frequently revised, and new guides are posted on a regular basis.

I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight a few of the guides that have been added to our website recently.

The Kimball-Griswold family papers consist of papers of Unitarian clergyman John C. Kimball, his wife Emily, their adopted daughter Grace, and other family members. Rev. Kimball was a Civil War chaplain and a social activist for temperance, abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and workers’ rights. Emily Kimball was a teacher, school administrator, and women’s rights advocate. John’s brother Joseph served in the Civil War as an officer in the 37th and 116th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiments and took part in 37 battles.

The Heath-Doliber-Hedge-Hammond family papers contain papers of four interrelated families, including a large number of diaries kept by several different women. Correspondence of Charles H. Heath covers his travels to California, Jamaica, Italy, Greece, Nicaragua, and Mexico in the mid-19th century. And one interesting journal describes the “water cure” at a hydropathic institution in Brattleboro, Vermont.

And last but certainly not least, the Garrison family papers consist of papers of noted abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and several members of his family, particularly his son George T. Garrison. George worked in various professions all over the country and during the Civil War served as an officer in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry, a Black regiment. The collection includes 50 years of his diaries. John Ritchie, whose papers also form part of the collection, was a Garrison family friend and officer of another Black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry.

These are just three of the most recent collections now available for research at the MHS. You’ll find guides to hundreds of other collections of manuscripts, photographs, and other materials at our website.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention here the contributions of our crack digital team that works diligently to provide digital access to MHS material. For examples of the work they do, see the recently digitized papers of the Indian Industries League, diaries of Charles Edward French and John Rowe, and 17th-century sermon notes by Robert Keayne. To see more digitized collections, look for the blue “Digital Content” label.

By Evan McDonagh, Library Assistant

Visitors to the MHS will not be surprised to learn that the Society holds an extensive records collection on early American history. On paper and film alone, the Society houses more than fourteen million pages of manuscripts, approximately 120,000 images, more than 10,000 broadsides, and over 2,500 maps among a plethora of books and other items.[1] However, the MHS also possesses a wide range of unconventional American artifacts, many of which receive less visibility than the more prominent paper records. The Society’s numismatic holdings provide one such example.

As defined by Meriam-Webster dictionary, numismatics refers to “the study or collection of coins, tokens, and paper money and sometimes related objects (such as medals).” The Society holds a plethora of coins, tokens, and medals, with medals’ being of particular interest.

Beginning shortly after the end of the Revolutionary War, the production of medals and tokens bearing the likenesses of prominent heroes and political figures cemented and reinforced the developing American mythos. Likewise, collecting these special coins, tokens, and medals became a means of demonstrating individual patriotism and of flexing one’s status and means.

Patriotic artisans found a popular subject in the Revolutionary War hero Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. Born on 6 September 1757 in Chavaniac, France as the orphaned son of a French aristocratic family, Lafayette traveled to the rebelling American colonies in July 1777 to obtain glory as a revolutionary fighter. Despite his lack of experience, the young soldier quickly won the friendship of George Washington. Lafayette earned distinction and fame for his actions at the Battle of the Brandywine in 1777, Barren Hill in 1778, and his successful campaigns against British commanders Benedict Arnold and Lord Charles Cornwallis in 1781.

By the war’s end, Lafayette had attained nationwide fame, so much so that several states named him an honorary citizen during a 1784 visit. Lafayette’s youth and reputation marked him as an ideal figurehead and symbol for Revolutionary War medals and tokens.[2]

In the present day, the MHS has the good fortune to hold a number of Lafayette medals dating from the Revolutionary War to the late 19th century. Many of these medals come from the collection of William Sumner Appleton, Sr., a wealthy Boston resident in the late 19th century. Appleton specialized in the preservation of historic homes, but American coins and medals ranked high among his other interests. Upon Appleton’s death, his estate split up his numismatic collection, and though it sold a majority of the coins, the “Americana” part of the collection – U.S. colonial and federal coins and U.S. and personal medals – found its way to the MHS in 1905. Other Lafayette medals entered the collection in the following decades.

The Lafayette medal collection showcases a method by which Americans have left their history and mythos to the future. Even during the 19th and 20th centuries, the production of new Lafayette medals saw the celebration of the general and of American patriotism go hand in hand. This 1934 Lafayette medal (above), produced by the American Friends of Lafayette to celebrate the centenary of the general’s death, demonstrates this dichotomy. Lafayette walks past a pillar labeled “America’s Adopted Son,” a reflection of Lafayette’s French roots and the mythos of the great American melting pot. Meanwhile, the depiction of the sword and olive branch, of war and peace, reflects the symbology present on the Great Seal of the United States.[3]

The Lafayette medals serve as a portable, collectible reminder of the American experiment. Their inclusion in the Society’s collection alongside other numismatic items and artifacts speak to the plethora of ways in which Americans have chosen to remember and to commemorate their history.

[1] Massachusetts Historical Society. “Our Collections.” Accessed July 27, 2022. https://www.masshist.org/collections/our-collections.

[2] Leepson, Marc. “Marquis de Lafayette.” Britannica. Accessed July 27, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marquis-de-Lafayette.

[3] National Museum of American Diplomacy. “The Great Seal.” Accessed July 29, 2022. https://diplomacy.state.gov/exhibits/explore-online-exhibits/the-great-seal/.