June 10, 2007
Joy and Serendipity in Archival Research II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:30 AM EST Ellen Feldman’s most interesting post reminded me of my own two great moments in research, although only in one case archival. As with her, they were not Lincoln letters, alas, but peculiarly satisfying nonetheless, one bit of joy, one bit of serendipity. When I was writing about New York City in the 1840s I turned, as all who need to know about New York City in the 1840s must, to Philip Hone’s diary. Hone (1780–1851) had been mayor of New York in the 1820s and was one of its leading citizens until his death. His diary, along with that of his younger contemporary, the lawyer George Templeton Strong (1820–1875), are simply indispensable to the history of New York as it exploded in size from a modest seaport to the megalopolis of the western hemisphere. They are also very good reading, and Strong’s diary is often very, very funny. By the 1840s Hone was getting old and crotchety, bemused and often annoyed. In 1844, for instance, he wrote, “. . . this world is going too fast. Improvements, politics, reform, religion—all fly. Railroads, steamers, packets, race against time and beat it hollow. Flying is dangerous. By and by we shall have balloons and pass over to Europe between sun and sun. Oh, for the good old days of heavy post-coaches and speed at the rate of six miles an hour!” I was struck by the now-trite phrase “the good old days.” I suddenly realized, however, that before Hone’s generation there had been no such thing. Hone’s parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had been born into a world that had been relatively unchanging in terms of its technology and economics, and therefore its social and political relationships. Until the first decades of the nineteenth century, the old days had been pretty much the same as the new days, at least as to how life was lived day to day. I wondered when was the first use of the phrase, “the good old days,” and so I turned, as again one must, to the Oxford English Dictionary. To my utter delight, the first use of the phrase given in the OED was 1848. I had found one four years older and, so far as I know, the very first use of the phrase. I became interested in this first generation to experience what we now take for granted—ceaseless technological change and its affect on our quotidian existence—and I wrote about it for American Heritage here. My little bit of serendipity came when I was in the New York Public Library looking for letters by Jim Fisk, the Wall Street figure who was spectacularly murdered in 1872. (See my book The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Erie Railway, and the Birth of Wall Street.) He didn’t write many, and the one I found that day was of no interest, having been written by a secretary on a trivial subject and only signed by Fisk. In the same folder, however, was a letter written by Henry Adams when he had been serving as secretary for his father Charles Francis Adams, who was minister to Great Britain during the Civil War. I forget what the letter concerned, for what fascinated me was Henry Adams’s handwriting. It was as regular and precise as though it had been written by a machine. Nineteenth-century handwriting was often very readable, as students were taught penmanship in school then and good handwriting was a sign of a good education. It was also, of course, the only way for a person to communicate by writing in those days, and so it simply had to be readable. Adams’s handwriting was something else entirely, very atypical of the handwriting of the day and completely devoid of even the slightest carelessness. It was the handwriting of a calligrapher, not a secretary, with a peculiar cramped style. I had always disliked Henry Adams, brilliant as he was, and now I knew exactly why: Anyone with handwriting like that had to be a most unpleasant human being.
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