June 9, 2007
Joy and Serendipity in Archival Research Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:15 PM EST The June 8 edition of The New York Times reported the discovery in the National Archives of a two-sentence letter written by Abraham Lincoln to Major General Henry W. Halleck, the Union general in chief, in the wake of the Union victory at Gettysburg. The contents of the letter was known, because the two sentences had been forwarded by telegram to General Meade, though without the original document the accuracy of the Halleck’s telegram would always be in question. More to the point, or at least my point, the archivist who found the letter, Trevor Plante, was not searching for it. “I was looking for something else,” Plante said. Archival research, as anyone who has done it knows, can be tedious, frustrating, and fruitless. Few of us will ever experience the thrill of finding a missing Lincoln letter. But spend enough time burrowing into original documents and you are almost sure to experience at least an occasional moment of serendipity and joy. Plante’s discovery stuck me with special force, because I had just returned from the Houghton Library at Harvard. I had gone there to study some Margaret Sanger documents in the papers of the American Birth Control League, and I found what I was looking for. I also stumbled across a letter I had heard about but never read verbatim. This was not a discovery. The letter was catalogued. Others had seen it. But holding in my hand the worn stationery and reading Sanger’s exact words to her husband brought me suddenly closer to the story and revealed the wily woman behind the fearless warrior. Sometimes revisiting even well-known documents provides rewards. A few years ago, when I was researching a book on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, I kept running across references in secondary sources to a letter from ER to her mother-in-law early in her marriage. The quote did not show the future First Lady at her best. She complains of the “Jew party” at Bernard Baruch’s and says she never wishes “to hear money, jewels, or labels mentioned again.” ER’s early anti-Semitism did not surprise me. I took it as a signpost indicating how far she traveled from the point where she began. But the word labels confused me. In all the pictures I studied, I never spotted a small polo player on FDR’s shirts or an LV on ER’s handbags. I did not go back to the original letter to check it. I was too busy stalking the less well-documented Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. But another historian did, and managed to decipher ER’s difficult handwriting, made more illegible by her habit of writing first horizontally, then vertically over it in an old-fashioned attempt to save paper. What she wishes never to hear mentioned again is not labels but sables, a luxury far more in keeping with the early years of the twentieth century. Lest I sound too much like a Luddite in praise of original documents, I must add that the one infinitesimal historical discovery I ever made came not from archival sources but from the wonders of technology. Most historians date Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd’s first visit to the White House, under her secret service code name of Mrs. Johnson, to August 1941. Thanks to the constant updating of the presidential chronology, I found a meeting on June 5 of the same year. The difference of several weeks would not seem important to anyone other than an obsessed writer, except for the incidents of the previous evening. While Lucy and the President met for the first time in more than two decades, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, FDR’s personal secretary and constant companion during those same two decades, lay in her small room on the third floor of the White House, incapacitated by the after-effects of a stroke suffered the night before. Thus, as one woman exited FDR’s life, another reentered it. The digitalization of sources is a boon to historians, just as the dusty original documents will always be a seduction. According to Allen Weinstein, the United States archivist, the discovery of the Lincoln letter “reminds us that history is a dynamic thing, new information will always come to light.” I might add to that the idea that subsequent students of history will always experience anew the thrill of connecting with old documents.
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