Acknowledgments

Documentary editing is by nature a collaborative exercise, and the Society’s editors have benefited greatly from the assistance of a number of individuals and institutions. 


Our gratitude goes to the Paine family for generations of preserving these documents and entrusting them to the Massachusetts Historical 
Society. Members of the family also helped establish a fund to publish the early volumes of the Paine papers, and we owe our gratitude to them for enabling the existence of this project. We would like to thank Thomas M. Paine in particular for his involvement with and enthusiasm for the Paine papers.


The development of this volume was funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), and its completion would not have been possible without their support. The NHPRC is one of the key supporters of documentary editing projects in the United States, and we are grateful for their confidence in the merit of The Papers of Robert Treat Paine and for their financial support of the project.


We are eternally grateful to our colleagues at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Some have given their time to examine the contents of many document boxes to find that elusive last document; others have lent their keen eyesight and insight to help to decipher some apparently impossible bits of Paine’s handwriting. All are wonderfully ready and willing to aid in our quest.


A number of individuals outside of the Society also deserve particular thanks. Beverly Palmer, Alan Rogers, and John Tyler generously lent us their expertise and read all of the transcriptions and original annotation for the full text of this volume. We greatly appreciate their time and recommendations. Elizabeth Bouvier with the Massachusetts Judicial Archives helped us navigate the vast collections of legal records in Paine’s own hand and generously transported large volumes to the Massachusetts Archives reading room for our use. John Hannigan at the Massachusetts Archives tracked down state documents and assisted with a plethora of citation questions. The project as a whole benefited from the insight of our colleagues at the Association for Documentary Editing, and in particular for the training and editing community provided at the ADE’s Institute for Editing Historical Documents.


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Multiple institutions generously granted us permission to include manuscripts from their collections: the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the Massachusetts Archives, Boston, Massachusetts; the National Archives; the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Massachusetts; Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts; the New York Public Library, New York, New York; and the Massachusetts Judicial Archives, Boston, Massachusetts.