By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

This is the second installment in a series on the diary of William Logan Rodman at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Click here to read Part I.

A few weeks ago, I introduced you to William Logan Rodman of New Bedford, Mass., whose diary was recently acquired by the MHS.

When we left him, Rodman was describing the remarkable series of events surrounding Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 presidential election. Rodman, who supported Lincoln and despised Pres. James Buchanan, initially dismissed all the talk of secession in the newspapers. But then the unthinkable happened. On 20 December 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union.

The secession of South Carolina meant that Maj. Robert Anderson, commander of the federal forces at Charleston, suddenly found himself in the middle of enemy territory. Just six days later, under the cover of darkness, Anderson relocated his base of operations from the vulnerable Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island to Fort Sumter in the middle of Charleston Harbor. Although the fort was unfinished, it was solidly built and sat in a more defensible position. South Carolinians were outraged when they awoke the next morning to see the U.S. flag flying over Sumter.

Rodman also reacted to the news with anger, but not at Major Anderson. His target was “the imbecile, traitorous [and] cowardly” Buchanan, who had left Fort Moultrie with few troops and provisions. Rodman wrote, “the people are beginning to swear both deep & loud.”

To say tensions were running high would be a profound understatement. Even solidly Republican Boston wasn’t immune. For example, on 24 January 1861, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society held its annual meeting at Tremont Temple. The meeting was disrupted by anti-abolitionists, and Boston Mayor Joseph Wightman, who had denied the society its request for adequate police protection, shut the meeting down and locked the doors. In his diary, Rodman scoffed:

What short sighted babydom prevails in Boston. The Mayor fears Ward [sic] Phillips & the Abolitionists will make a riot and so closes the Anti Slavery Convention. Boston gentlemen or rather Boston snobbery must stop the mouths of the radicals and fanatics because forsooth the Traitors of S Carolina wont like it. Bah. The fools make me sick.

In the four months between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, events escalated at a furious pace. Almost every day brought some new development, faithfully recorded in Rodman’s diary. There was the attack on the ship Star of the West on its way to Fort Sumter with reinforcements and supplies, the resignation of Southern sympathizers from President Buchanan’s cabinet, a rumored plot to assassinate President-elect Lincoln as he passed through Baltimore, and the treachery of David E. Twiggs, commander of the U.S. Army’s Department of Texas, who turned over his entire command to the Confederacy. War was looking more and more inevitable.

Rodman dreaded the possibility of war, but he was also horrified by sentiments such as those expressed by Alexander Hamilton Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America, in his “Cornerstone Speech” of 21 March 1861. Rodman called Stephens’ full-throated and unapologetic defense of white supremacy “strange indeed in this enlightened age.”

I would argue that Rodman, in fact, recognized what many of his contemporaries didn’t seem to (or didn’t want to): that no compromise was possible with the perpetrators and defenders of chattel slavery.

Still I am not easy for the Devils of SC may by an attack on Fort Sumter make a new complication. I should like to make some concession to testify my regard for Patriots in the Border States but I dont see how it can be done. Under the garb or style of Compromise we are asked to concede our whole claim and receive nothing in return. It won’t do. Either we are right or we are wrong. If right Lets stick to our position. We are right. So we must stick. Q.E.D.

Like dominoes falling, more Southern states seceded. By the time Lincoln was inaugurated, seven states had left the Union: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.

By Heather Rockwood, Communications Associate

“A challenged world is an alert world and from challenge comes change.”
– Maria Weston Chapman

On International Womens Day 2021, meet a woman who chose to challenge the practice of slavery in the United States, Maria Weston Chapman.

Chapman and her sisters Caroline and Anne from Weymouth, Mass., were active abolitionists. Through their “kin-work”, the sisters supported each other through family responsibilities in order to take their active public roles. By taking up the cause of abolition they endured pro-slavery mobs, social ridicule, and public attacks on their characters.

Chapman edited and published The Liberty Bell, an annual abolitionist gift book to be sold or gifted to participants in the Boston Anti-Slavery Bazaar, which Chapman lead. This book was published almost every year from 1839 to 1858.

In addition to her work on The Liberty Bell and the Bazaar, between 1835 and 1865, Chapman served on the executive and business committees of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, the New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS) and the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). She wrote the annual reports of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) and published tracts to raise public awareness.

She also served as editor to The Liberator in William Lloyd Garrison’s absence, and was on the editorial committee of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the official mouthpiece of the AASS. Chapman was also a member of the peace organization, the Non-Resistance Society, which published The Non-Resistant.

Chapman was a prolific writer, writing most of the content of The Liberty Bell and publishing Right and Wrong in Massachusetts in 1839 and “How Can I Help to Abolish Slavery?” in 1855. Aside from these works, she published her poems and essays in abolitionist periodicals.

By Viv Williams, Processing Assistant and Library Assistant

An MHS-seasoned revolutionary-era researcher may already be well acquainted with The Annotated Newspapers of Harbottle Dorr, Jr. The collection was acquired in pieces between 1798 and 2011, and the web page for the fully digitized collection was launched in 2013. The launch announcement can be found in a previous blog post. It consists of four digitized volumes of Boston newspapers and pamphlets spanning 1765-1776. All collected and annotated by a Mr. Harbottle Dorr, Jr.

The homepage notes that Mr. Dorr was a Boston merchant and Son of Liberty whose main intention in collecting these newspapers and pamphlets was to preserve a “political history” that would well-document that riveting and “revolutionary,” if you will, time that he was inhabiting.  Much like Lin Manuel’s Schuyler sisters, Dorr was well aware of how lucky he was to be alive “right now.” Dorr’s closeness with the politics of the time lends a unique and insightful commentary which he left for us in the form of annotations and an incredibly thorough index of the collection. In many cases, he has identified the authors of entries that would otherwise be anonymous. Dorr further explains his motivations for compiling the newspapers in his written introduction to the collection.

This resource has proved to be vastly invaluable to researchers, providing a wealth of insight into not only the way major events of the revolution were being reported, but also aspects of daily life. In fact, one of the more popular uses for the collection is actually seeking out the advertisements. There are many reasons a historian might study advertisements from a colonial newspaper such as accumulating data on the typical occupations of an area or economic status, general cost and use of different materials, dietary customs, tracking the provenance of an item, or tracing the trafficking of enslaved people. At Assumption College in Worcester, MA, students studying Colonial America, Revolutionary America, Research Methods, and Public History have pulled from the Harbottle Dorr Newspapers to contribute to a project called the Adverts 250 Project. This project allows students to study 18th century advertising by sharing and reflecting on different newspaper advertisements on their 250th anniversary of being published.

While vastly invaluable, the collection can also be vastly intimidating to beginner researchers. It is, well… vast… after all. The collection consists of thirteen different titles documenting both Patriot and Loyalist sympathies and sentiments, including: The Boston Evening-Post; The Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal; The Massachusetts Gazette: and the Boston Weekly News-Letter; and the The New-England Chronicle: or, the Essex Gazette. There are 805 issues coming out to a whopping 3,969 digital images to browse through. Those numbers could make anyone feel like they need a little hand-holding, but don’t you worry. I’m a reference librarian, and I’m happy to hold your hand through it right after I finish giving a round of applause to our digital team for all their hard work *claps*.

Much effort was devoted to making all 3,969 images easily browsable and searchable. In addition to a content outline of each volume, the collection is also browseable by date, newspaper or pamphlet title, and of course volume. Remember those indexes I mentioned? Well it turns out there are about 5,000 entries, and they are often long-winded. While the website does not necessarily provide a complete list of the 5,000 index terms, the indexes themselves are digitized, transcribed, and searchable by keyword. You can access this function under the “Search” tab found at the top of the homepage. Upon entering a keyword to search, the platform will provide you with two options. You can either click on individual search results which will take you to indexed instances of the phrase within the newspapers themselves or see the place in the index where the searched term is used. Additionally, there will be a double blue arrow that will allow you to preview the search results in case the commitment of leaving the page for the unknown is too much pressure.

For a more exploratory or experimental researcher, you can try out the search function for Newspaper Descriptions. This search function is still in BETA, at the moment, and only applies to 25 newspapers, but allows a researcher to run searches for title information and complimentary summary texts created for some of the issues in the collection.

If you’ve made it this far, I will leave you with a bonus treasure hunt. The Digital Team has hidden a secret web page within the home page. See if you can locate the secret entry. Hint: What is that finger pointing to?

Further Reading

“Glimpses of Harbottle Dorr, Jr.,” by Nancy Heywood

“The Idiosyncratic Index Subjects of Harbottle Dorr, Jr.,” by Peter K. Steinberg

“Mysteries Solved! Using Harbottle Dorr’s Index to Find Missing Pamphlets,” by Peter K. Steinberg

“Digitizing Dorr’s Annotated Newspapers,” by Laura Wulf.

By LJ Woolcock, Library Assistant

We’re getting close to a year since the pandemic set in here in the US, which I think we can all safely say, no one could have imagined when things first started closing down in 2020. While sourdough definitely stole the show as America’s new hobby, my colleagues and I at the MHS library know there’s also a wave of new historians who have been using their time in quarantine to dive into research. At the same time, most historical institutions, libraries, and archives remain shuttered. As a library assistant, one of the most difficult things I have to do on a regular basis is tell patrons that they’re going to have to wait or request reproductions of the materials they’re interested in using.

So, how can you carry on with historical research when many archival collections are inaccessible and libraries are closed?

I’d like to offer some of the sources that I regularly turn to–both in helping patrons as well as with my own research–when I am not able to access unique archival collections.

Print Materials

Books, pamphlets, advertisements, broadsides, and other printed materials often are unappreciated when it comes to historical research. They’re not given the same value as manuscript collections because they are not unique documents. They also lack the “numen” that archives hold for people: that sense that you’re touching history, making a direct physical connection with the past. However, printed materials contain a wealth of information and ought not to be overlooked.

A fantastic example is city directories. They are incredible tools for identifying regular people living in the city in the past. If you’re looking for someone specific, they list names, addresses, and professions, which you can then use to try to find further sources on an individual. On a broader scale, they also give a bird’s eye view of who was living in the city, where they lived, and what they did for a living. They allow you to form a textual map of a street, neighborhood, or the city as a whole.

The MHS holds physical copies of Boston city directories from the first publication of the Boston Directory in 1789, into the 20th century:

But many have also been digitized and can be accessed for free on HathiTrust and the Internet Archive.

This is just one example. If a printed book is in the public domain (in general, works published before 1926 or were released more than 95 years ago), there’s a chance that it’s been digitized. For example, if you’re interested in the history of Black activism or Boston’s Black community, David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles, one of the only published works in U.S. literature to openly encourage to Black people to resist slavery and other forms of white oppression, is available in full on Google Books. Walker self-published his Appeal from Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, and thousands of copies travelled to Black readers across the US.

Working with print materials may not provide the same experience of tracing the pen strokes of the past like archival documents, but it does emphasize how history is something that’s built—that you have to take many scattered pieces to construct an image of what the past looked like.

Published Archival Documents/Edited Editions

Two resources we often use at the MHS are our publications Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society and Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. These publications, documenting new acquisitions and meetings of the Society, hold unexpected treasures. They’re filled with full transcriptions or edited editions of documents that would be otherwise inaccessible outside of our reading room.

If you find a collection or source in our catalog, check the form “Additional Forms available.” If it has been published in either Collections or Proceedings, it will most likely be indicated there with the series, volume, and page number.

Many collections of archival documents that were edited and published in the 19th century are now in the public domain, and many have been digitized and made available online as well. Some editions that I’ve used during the pandemic include the early colonial Records for the Town of Boston (colorfully titled “Second Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston”—there are many subsequent reports that publish town records into the 18th century), the digitized volumes of Massachusetts Town Vital Records to 1850, and Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War.

Modern edited editions, such as the digital edition of the Adams Papers, are also easily accessible during the pandemic.

Digitized Archival Collections

Of course, these are the current gold of pandemic researchers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “If only more had been digitized!”

Many of the MHS’ digitized collections live in our online collection guides. If you see a collection guide with a blue “Digitized Content,” you can click through to see what materials are available online.

Objects, art, and some additional archival sources are accessible through on our online Collection Highlights and Online Resources. There are also digitized collections in more unexpected places; for example, the papers of Mary Hartford, a member of Boston’s free black community in the 18th and 19th centuries, can be found in one of our past digital exhibits, “African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts,” along with materials from many other collections that otherwise haven’t been digitized.

Consult a Librarian

If you’re not sure where to start or how to identify sources that might speak to a topic, you can always email librarians and archivists to ask for help. The MHS library has its contact information here, including our live chat service.

Keep a “for-later” List

Something that I do while conducting my own research, is to keep a document where I save citations of documents, collections, digital history resources, secondary books, and other things related to my topic that are relevant, along with the place I found them. Anything that you think you may want to remember, or check out in the future related to your research can be thrown inside.

I’ve always found it to be a helpful tool, but during the pandemic it’s been especially essential. If you’re only able to access books from your library using a to-go service, you can look at their footnotes and keep a record of what sources you might want to Google. You never know what might be available online; but even if it’s not possible to access those documents now, you’ll have a record of what you’re interested in and where they are.

Keeping a list also provides you with an intellectual history of your own curiosity: you’ll be able to see what in a particular article sparked your interest, and any new paths you may want to explore. And, I guarantee you—no matter how awesome it sounds right now, you will not remember the name of that collection, or the date of that one letter, later on. I can’t tell you how many times my list has saved me from pandemic brain-fog forgetfulness.

Hopefully this provides some new paths for pandemic historians out there. Suggestions like these may not be able to take the place of archival research, but they do provide us some way into our questions. Limits frustrate us, but they also foster creativity—we learn to think in unexpected ways, and create connection that previously might have gone unexplored.

Works Cited

The David Walker Memorial Project. “David Walker’s Appeal.” David Walker Memorial Project, http://www.davidwalkermemorial.org/appeal (accessed 1 March 2021).

By Rakashi Chand, Senior Library Assistant

With COVID-19 precautions in mind, my husband and I attempted to provide our children with a wholesome school vacation experience by going on a road trip.

We were tested before and after our road trip, wore masks whenever we existed the car, and avoided crowds. We did stop to stay overnight in hotel rooms that we sanitized ourselves with an array of cleaning products packed into the car. We decided this would be the best we could do in the midst of a pandemic. So we drove, and drove, and drove…

Eventually we made it from Boston’s subzero temperatures to northern Florida in what had at times seemed like an impossible mission.

We ended up in the old city of St. Augustine and were pleasantly surprised by the cultural influences that had shaped the small city over the centuries. As we drove, we passed the old Castillo de San Marcos dating from 1672 which proudly boasted to be the oldest masonry fortification in the continental United States.  And here, I had to stop. I needed to get out and look at the Castillo.

“Fort Marion,” I uttered as my children and husband watched me walk towards it.

Images flooded my head as I approached the walls of the old fort. This was not a place that I ever thought I would visit. Yet there I was on an unplanned road trip with no destination. Colors, faces, images, and pictographs poignantly came to life in front of me as I thought of a collection housed at the MHS that has always touched my heart, the Book of Sketches Made at Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Fla., 1877.

Members of the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Comanche Nations were imprisoned during the Red River War of 1874-1875 and forced to walk over a thousand miles from their homelands to an internment camp at Fort Marion. There, Lieut. Richard H. Pratt lead an experimental program to force prisoners to ‘integrate’, by dressing them in military uniforms, teaching them to read and write, farm, or do carpentry, and converting them to Christianity. A 24 year-old Cheyenne warrior named Bear’s Heart (“Nockkoist”) was among the prisoners. While at Fort Marion, he became an accomplished artist. The prisoners were given blank books or ledgers, pens, and colored pencils and used this new medium as they would have in the traditional practice of decorating hides with depictions of life on the plains. Often referred to as Ledger Art, the most striking of these drawings is a possible depiction of the Sand Creek Massacre by Bear’s Heart, uniquely portraying the massacre from an Indigenous point of view. His art is beautifully melancholy as it captures and preserves the way of life he left behind. Bear’s Heart documented the prisoners’ long and arduous journey to Florida through his art. After release from Imprisonment, he went on to be a spokesperson for Lieut. Pratt’s education program. Over 100 of Bear Heart’s drawings survive, and the MHS is fortunate to have seven of his pieces. Learn more.

Another name that came to mind was Howling Wolf or Ho-na-nist-to, a Cheyenne warrior who was appointed sergeant of the guards at Fort Marion. When he was released in the spring of 1878, he intended to remain in the east to continue his education but his eyesight was failing. He came to Boston for eye surgery. It was unsuccessful so he rejoined his people on a reservation. There he was struck by the poverty he witnessed. He began speaking out for Indigenous Rights and against the encroachment of Anglo-American culture including the implementation of the Dawes Act in 1887.

When Howling Wolf left Fort Marion, he drew a pictographic map of his journey from Fort Marion to Savannah, GA and beyond on a postcard that he sent to his father. Both the pictogram postcard and a translation of the pictogram by historian Francis Parkman are in the Book of Sketches Made at Fort Marion. I thought of what it must have meant to finally leave Fort Marion and felt honored that I was going to follow in Howling Wolf’s footsteps (Though I had the unfair advantage of a car!).  Luckily, the pictogram had been tucked into the Sketchbook so it could live on.

The art from the sketchbook is a vivid and beautiful memorial to the lives that the artists once lived, before Fort Marion. Hunting Buffalo by Making Medicine is one beautiful example. The collection is fully digitized to explore at home. Within the walls of Fort Marion, many people dreamt of the lives they lived before and through this collection of Sketches we can view some of those moments through their eyes. And, if you are willing to drive, you can even touch the very walls that held so many prisoners surrounded by the beating ocean and wind swept palm trees.

See Howling Wolf’s pictogram to his father Minimic: MHS Collections Online: Howling Wolf’s pictogram to his father Minimic (masshist.org).

See Francis Parkman’s translation of Howling Wolf’s pictogram: MHS Collections Online: Francis Parkman’s translation of Howling Wolf’s pictogram (masshist.org).

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

This is the first installment of a series on the diary of William Logan Rodman. Stay tuned to the Beehive for more.

About a year ago, the MHS acquired a very interesting diary kept by William Logan Rodman of New Bedford, Mass. Though it covers only a year and a half of Rodman’s life, it’s full of terrific anecdotes, descriptions, and hot takes on current events leading up to and including the first year of the Civil War.

If he sounds familiar to you, that may be because of his grandfather Samuel Rodman (1753-1835), a very prosperous merchant who made his name in the whaling centers of Nantucket and New Bedford. Samuel married Elizabeth Rotch, and several other Rodmans also married into that family, interweaving the two powerful New England whaling dynasties. William’s maternal grandfather, meanwhile, was Thomas Morgan, a prominent merchant of Philadelphia.

Members of the Rodman, Rotch, and Morgan families were also practicing Quakers and fervent opponents of slavery.

In October 1860, when he began his diary, William Rodman had a comfortable life. He was 38 years old, unmarried, living in New Bedford, and “participat[ing] moderately in business,” as his Harvard biography puts it. But his life would change dramatically in the coming months, and it all began with the momentous election of Abraham Lincoln on 6 November.

Southern backlash to the election was fierce, but Rodman was initially sanguine about it, writing the day after, “I have no fears of Secession or Revolution. The South will bluster & Resolve but […] all will be quiet.” And a few days later: “They will have to submit to the will of the majority viz the Union or go to everlasting smash out of it.” He dismissed what he called “Southern secession nonsense” in the newspapers.

James Buchanan was now a lame-duck president. Rodman hated him, and he did not mince words. He called the administration “corrupt and degraded” and the man himself “the meanest & vilest of the American Presidents,” lacking “a vertebral column.” He rarely even referred to Buchanan by name, preferring epithets such as “the Old Public Functionary,” “an inefficient old fool,” and even “Mrs. Buchanan,” probably a not-so-veiled reference to rumors about the bachelor president’s sexuality.

Buchanan’s political positions were abhorrent to opponents of slavery like Rodman. Buchanan had intervened in the deliberations of the U.S. Supreme Court in Dred Scott, pressuring justices to rule against Scott and deny citizenship to Black people. He supported the Fugitive Slave Law requiring free states to return enslaved people to their enslavers and argued for a federal law protecting slavery in the territories. And he used his 1860 State of the Union address to pre-emptively blame the Northern states for Southern secession (emphasis mine):

The long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States has at length produced its natural effects. The different sections of the Union are now arrayed against each other, and the time has arrived, so much dreaded by the Father of his Country, when hostile geographical parties have been formed.

I have long foreseen and often forewarned my countrymen of the now impending danger. This does not proceed solely from the claim on the part of Congress or the Territorial legislatures to exclude slavery from the Territories, nor from the efforts of different States to defeat the execution of the fugitive-slave law. All or any of these evils might have been endured by the South without danger to the Union (as others have been) in the hope that time and reflection might apply the remedy. The immediate peril arises not so much from these causes as from the fact that the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question throughout the North for the last quarter of a century has at length produced its malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar. This feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehensions of servile insurrections. Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before the morning. Should this apprehension of domestic danger, whether real or imaginary, extend and intensify itself until it shall pervade the masses of the Southern people, then disunion will become inevitable. […]

How easy would it be for the American people to settle the slavery question forever and to restore peace and harmony to this distracted country! They, and they alone, can do it. All that is necessary to accomplish the object, and all for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way.

Historians have consistently ranked Buchanan at or near the bottom in lists of U.S. presidents. One 2015 biography is even called The Worst President: The Story of James Buchanan.

At the beginning of December, still three months away from Lincoln’s inauguration, Rodman was beginning to sound a little less sure of himself on the question of secession. He wrote, “I cannot feel that this great confederacy is to be destroyed just yet and I dont like to contemplate the fearful ruin that must overtake the South if they pursue their mad schemes.”

Sure enough, on 20 December 1860, South Carolina became the first of eleven states to dissolve its ties with the Union. Rodman had not wanted to see it happen, but now that it was underway, he recorded his feelings in his diary:

Some of our citizens talk blood and warfare, but this is easy talking far away from the probable scenes of danger. I hope we may have peace without blood but if not why my first wish is for wiping Charleston off the face of creation.