Seward Was an Upstate Lawyer

Dan Allosso

I was looking through the materials I photographed on my last trip to the American Antiquarian Society. This trip was mostly about acquiring background on the places where the people I’m researching lived. Although there are a LOT of old newspapers now available online, as Heather has recently pointed out, there are many that are not yet. The American Antiquarian Society has a huge collection of early papers, as well as broadsheets, political pamphlets, and books.

I photographed a lot of material, which is my strategy when I go to archives like this. Whenever digital photography is allowed, I focus on locating and recording as much in the archives as I possibly can in the time I have. There’s never enough time, but this strategy allows me to go home with more material than I’d ever be able to read, sitting at the desk in the archive. It amazes me that just a decade or so ago, people had to sit in these places for months and months—and then in many cases they still only managed to scratch the surface of what was available.

That’s not to say that past researchers haven’t done fabulously, getting to the meat of an issue and finding the relevant material. But I suspect it limited the time they had to look around the information they were seeking, to see, for example, what else might have been on people’s minds on the particular day a specific newspaper article they were looking for was printed. Not to mention, what might have been in the advertisements on the edge of the page.

For example, I was looking at a table of New York Bank Note discounts, in the Lyons NY Countryman for Tuesday, March 2nd 1830. The table was in the fifth column of page four. After I photographed it, I noticed there was a notice about the sale of a defaulted property in Lyons at the top of column six. So I shot a quick photo of it and moved on. It wasn’t until I reviewed my photos at home, that I read it through and found that, in addition to being an interesting example of a notice, complete with a detailed property description and a little more background information to add to my knowledge of people in Lyons, the final line answers an unresolved question from my earlier research.

As I was putting together all the legends that surround my subjects in upstate NY, I ran into a story that claimed they had spent a lot of time trying to build a ship canal around Niagara Falls. There were obviously good precedents to support the idea of an additional “internal improvement” in upstate New York. But it would take government money to build it, so they needed a patron. There was a brief mention of a long, late-1850s carriage-ride one of my subjects had with New York Senator and former Governor William Henry Seward, during which my guy bent Seward’s ear about the project and received the response that it would never happen until there was a change in administration. Which he took to be Seward’s way of saying “when I become President.”

I liked this story, and had always planned on using it. But the accidental newspaper discovery makes it much more plausible. The 1830 lawyer handling the default sale in Lyons, whose name appears at the bottom of the advertisement was none other than “Wm. H. Seward, Att’y.” A reminder that my guys, even though they were merely upstate businessmen, had a completely credible connection with the man who went on to become a key member of Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals.” Too often we forget that many of the “great men” who stride through the big histories, started somewhere as regular people. Unexpected material from the archives can not only provide background for a narrative, but from time to time, it can provide unexpected clues about meaning and context.

Primary Sources: Actual Books

Dan Allosso

Project Gutenberg, Google Books and the Internet Archive have been incredibly valuable to historians. I’ve personally downloaded hundreds of old books in pdf form, that I’ve been able to read, highlight, annotate, and link to my own documents, to enrich my research and improve my understanding of the past. Google's team has been places I can’t afford to go, and has scanned books that 25 years ago I probably wouldn’t have known existed. And the ability to “mine” all these old texts with keyword searches means that I can use a wide variety of sources for a project like my search for all the Massachusetts Darwins, that I’d never have had the time to look at one by one for each individual.

But sometimes there’s no substitute for seeing and touching the actual book. In addition to the antiquarian coolness of handling something old, the physical properties of old books are sometimes very meaningful. I learned this lesson well when I saw a little book recently at the American Antiquarian Society.

I’ve been interested in Dr. Charles Knowlton (1800-1850) for a couple of years. A lifelong resident of western Massachusetts, he is famous for publishing The Fruits of Philosophy, the first American book on birth control. Between 1832 and 1835, Knowlton was fined in Taunton, imprisoned in Cambridge, and then dragged into court again in Greenfield. A further illustratation of the radical nature of Knowlton’s birth control message and the social forces that opposed it: Over fifty years later Londoners Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant were tried by the Queen’s Bench for republishing Knowlton’s book!

There’s a full text copy of The Fruits of Philosophy available on Google. Printed in San Francisco, it’s an 1891 edition of Bradlaugh and Besant’s reprint, suggesting that Knowlton’s material remained interesting for generations after its initial publication. I thought this text had already told me all I needed to know about Knowlton’s book, so I asked to see the originals at the American Antiquarian Society out of a purely geeky desire to hold something that Knowlton might have once handled himself.

The Society’s two copies of The Fruits of Philosophy arrived at the librarian’s table in small cardboard boxes. As I carried them back to my desk, I thought they might contain fragments of the books or torn pages. When I opened the first box, I was surprised to find inside it a complete, palm-sized book in a blue cloth hard cover. In an “aha” moment of clarity, I remembered that when Knowlton was released from prison in Cambridge in 1833, he made a speech in which he referred to the Fruits as his “little book.” Later, in his 1835 article on the “Excitement in Ashfield,” he again said he had been persecuted for publishing a “little book.” It had never occurred to me that he was speaking literally.

The Fruits of Philosophy was contraband when it was published. Knowlton was fined, imprisoned, and continually harassed for several years after its printing. Abner Kneeland was tried and imprisoned for blasphemy, but people familiar with his case at the time understood he had been targeted for his role in publishing of the 1834 edition of the Fruits, and for advertising it constantly in The Investigator, his free-thought newspaper. It is completely obvious, in this context, why buyers of the book would have wanted it to be little, pocket-sized, easily concealable. But that obvious fact had never occurred to me, looking at the Google scan of the 1891 reprint.

The threadbare blue cover of the Society’s 1832 edition, and the low production quality (the title page has a faint double-strike) also tell us about the way the first edition of the The Fruits of Philosophy was produced, and about how it was probably passed from hand to hand secretly, by women who had decided by the 1830s that they ought to have some say in their reproductive lives. It’s easy to imagine women (and sometimes maybe their husbands) palming the little book, and handing it off literally under the noses of church and civil authorities who sought to suppress it. The 1834 “Kneeland” edition used higher quality type, paper, and binding, but it significantly retained the tiny dimensions of the original.

We’re very lucky that a few of these books have survived, to tell the story that surrounds, but is not included in the printed words.