[{"id":666,"date":"2026-03-05T11:17:37","date_gmt":"2026-03-05T17:17:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/?p=666"},"modified":"2026-03-13T16:33:49","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T21:33:49","slug":"gemini-as-transcriber-artificial-intelligence-and-documentary-editing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/gemini-as-transcriber-artificial-intelligence-and-documentary-editing\/","title":{"rendered":"Gemini as Transcriber?: Artificial Intelligence and Documentary Editing"},"content":{"rendered":"<h6 style=\"text-align: center\"><audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-666-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2026\/03\/Gemini-as-transcriber.mp3?_=1\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2026\/03\/Gemini-as-transcriber.mp3\">http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2026\/03\/Gemini-as-transcriber.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/h6>\n<h6 style=\"text-align: right\">Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson.<\/h6>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about AI.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">The notion, in its broadest sense, is not new. The mid-nineteenth century, as I have <a href=\"https:\/\/polk.lib.utk.edu\/exist\/apps\/polk-papers\/polk.xml?root=2.4.2.8&amp;odd=polk.odd&amp;view=div\">written elsewhere<\/a>, was a period of rapid scientific innovation. That innovation extended to what some described as artificial intelligence. On September 29, 1853, the <em>New-York Tribune<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/resource\/sn83035101\/1853-10-19\/ed-1\/?sp=1&amp;q=intelligent+machines&amp;r=0.502,0.746,0.657,0.403,0\">reported<\/a> on a wondrous shop in which \u201c<em>intelligent<\/em> machines were doing the work, once done by thinking and toiling men.\u201d One chopped iron bars, one cut steel plates, and one bore holes into wooden wheels. The journalist believed that a central machine, not the \u201cfew men made of flesh,\u201d was running the operation. Only months after Millard Fillmore\u2019s presidency, newspapers from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newspapers.com\/image\/489042976\/?match=1&amp;terms=%22intelligent%20machines%22\">Vermont<\/a> to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newspapers.com\/image\/40090510\/?match=1&amp;terms=%22intelligent%20machines%22\">Indiana<\/a> reprinted the account.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Over the next hundred seventy years, other technologies arose that some likened to the mind. In 1888, a few <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newspapers.com\/image\/313743622\/?match=1&amp;terms=%22intelligent%20machine%22phonograph\">observers<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/resource\/sn83030193\/1888-05-12\/ed-2\/?sp=3&amp;q=%22intelligent+machine%22&amp;r=0.021,0.872,0.387,0.237,0\">dubbed<\/a> Thomas Edison\u2019s phonograph an \u201cintelligent machine.\u201d Like a human, after all, it could preserve and reproduce speech. Cameras, soon thereafter, began to remember moving images. In the 1950s, computers could store and analyze massive amounts of data, and scientists and journalists started referring to \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newspapers.com\/image\/433449207\/?match=1&amp;terms=%22artificial%20intelligence%22\">artificial<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newspapers.com\/image\/177660381\/?match=1&amp;terms=%22artificial%20intelligence%22\">intelligence<\/a>.\u201d Computers moved into people\u2019s homes in the 1970s, the public internet emerged in the 1990s, and social media and smartphones appeared in the 2000s. OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022, exposing many to recent developments in \u201cgenerative\u201d\u2014and, on the screen, humanlike\u2014AI. Many competitors soon joined that product. People use them today for everything from composing emails to, for some reason, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/shorts\/jW_UPuIB2HI\">animating<\/a> antebellum presidents.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I am not here to tell the history of modern technology or of AI. You can turn to better qualified historians, such as Sarah Igo, Rebecca Slayton, and Aaron Mendon-Plasek, for that. They gave a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/event\/congressional-briefing-historical-perspectives-on-artificial-intelligence\/\">briefing<\/a> on the subject for Congress and the American Historical Association.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">I am here to discuss the impact of AI, in 2026, on the editing of historical documents. What role can and should it play?<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_667\" style=\"width: 526px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-667\" class=\"wp-image-667\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2026\/03\/Machines.jpg\" alt=\"illustrations of machines, some with people operating them\" width=\"516\" height=\"425\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2026\/03\/Machines.jpg 640w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2026\/03\/Machines-300x247.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 516px) 100vw, 516px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-667\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Metalworking machines, depicted in Iconographic Encyclopaedia of Science, Literature, and Art, by Johann G. Heck (New York, 1851), vol. 2, div. 10, taf. 28. Library of Congress.<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">In this blog, I often have listed and occasionally have detailed the stages of documentary editing. To make writings of historical actors accessible to today\u2019s readers, we editors (1) <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/where-the-letters-come-from\/\">locate<\/a> manuscript documents within our project\u2019s scope, (2) select those most useful to readers, (3) <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/transcription-101\/\">transcribe<\/a> them, (4) proofread the transcriptions, (5) <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/annotation-translating-the-past\/\">translate<\/a> documents not originally in English, (6) write <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/annotation-translating-the-past\/\">annotations<\/a> identifying people and topics, (7) <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/last-steps-finishing-a-documentary-volume\/\">list<\/a> the locations and subjects of documents we do not publish, (8) <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/last-steps-finishing-a-documentary-volume\/\">write<\/a> introductory matter and indexes that help readers navigate the collection, and (9) <a href=\"https:\/\/utpress.org\/9798895270981\/the-correspondence-of-zachary-taylor-and-millard-fillmore\/\">publish<\/a> the edition. Technological and cultural developments have prompted adaptations and improvements in each of these stages. Locating documents, for example, used to mean visiting libraries and archives; later, it also included scrolling through microfilm reels; now, it also includes searching online image databases. Indexing used to mean laying out stacks of <em>index<\/em> cards; now, thank goodness, software facilitates the process. Publication used to mean printing books; now, in addition, it means producing searchable websites. I could go on, but you get the idea.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">In short, the way we do each stage evolved, but we (professional, human editors) continued to do each stage. We still began with manuscript documents and gave our readers clearly typed, easy-to-read transcriptions and notes.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Until, perhaps, last November.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Transcription always has been one of the most challenging and most important elements of documentary editing. Professional editors decipher bad handwriting (in antiquated cursive, with faded ink, on damaged paper), turning it into easily read type, so that our readers don\u2019t have to. I described the process, years ago, in <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/transcription-101\/\">\u201cTranscription 101.\u201d<\/a> I might have added that reading old cursive was about as challenging for computers as it was for humans. Optical character recognition (OCR) software has, for decades, been able to read printed type fairly well. That\u2019s why you can search for a keyword in a pdf document or an ebook.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">But technology, even with recent developments in AI, struggled with cursive. Last year, a pair of <a href=\"https:\/\/generativehistory.substack.com\/p\/gemini-3-solves-handwriting-recognition\">historians tested<\/a> the handwriting recognition abilities of Google\u2019s Gemini (2.5 Pro) and Anthropic\u2019s Claude Opus (3.7), two of the most successful large language models (LLMs)\u2014general AI systems that try to answer all kinds of questions. They asked the LLMs to read English-language cursive from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gemini got 11 percent of words wrong and 4 percent significantly wrong; Claude missed 16 percent and 10 percent significantly. Meanwhile, a project called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.transkribus.org\/\">Transkribus<\/a>, developed by a cooperative of academics specifically for handwriting recognition, got about 20 percent of English words wrong but less than 10 percent wrong once trained on a specific document collection. Two historians transcribing a plantation tourist register from the 1930s, in an analysis <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tandfonline.com\/doi\/full\/10.1080\/15420353.2026.2614780#d1e512\">published<\/a> last week, found a customized version of OpenAI\u2019s GPT-4o, <a href=\"https:\/\/openai.com\/index\/hello-gpt-4o\/\">released<\/a> in 2024, to misread 12 percent of dates, 27 percent of names, and 36 percent of locations.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">These tools are impressive and helpful. If you have a handwritten document and lack the time or training to transcribe it yourself, they can tell you the basic content. Historians, genealogists, students, and anyone whose forebears left behind letters can make great use of them. But editors, I have found in conversations, are divided over their value for producing authoritative editions. Ensuring accuracy for generations of readers, few of whom will ever look at the manuscripts, requires extensive proofreading and correction of the AI-generated drafts. Some projects have still found those worthwhile as a start. Others, including the Taylor-Fillmore project, have continued employing humans\u2014historians and students\u2014to transcribe. Even some giant transcription undertakings, which might reasonably see AI as a timesaver, have kept relying on people. The National Archives, aiming to ease public access to official records in US history, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/news\/nation\/2025\/01\/12\/national-archives-needs-citizen-archivists-cursive\/77493951007\/\">declared<\/a> that \u201creading cursive is a superpower.\u201d By early 2025 it had recruited thousands of volunteers to type up documents stretching from the colonial era to the twentieth century.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Then came Gemini 3 Pro.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Google\u2019s latest version, <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.google\/products-and-platforms\/products\/gemini\/gemini-3-collection\/\">released<\/a> on November 18, 2025, changed things. I can\u2019t tell you how it works. I\u2019m no computer scientist, and even a historical colleague with far superior technological expertise is <a href=\"https:\/\/generativehistory.substack.com\/p\/the-sugar-loaf-test-how-an-18th-century\">uncertain<\/a> about what Gemini is (for lack of a better word) thinking. But I can report, from others\u2019 testing and mine, on the quality of its handwriting recognition. It\u2019s good. Really good. Other blogs\u2019 headlines make that point dramatically: <a href=\"https:\/\/generativehistory.substack.com\/p\/gemini-3-solves-handwriting-recognition\">\u201cGemini 3 Solves Handwriting Recognition and it\u2019s a Bitter Lesson\u201d<\/a>; <a href=\"https:\/\/newsletter.dancohen.org\/archive\/the-writing-is-on-the-wall-for-handwriting-recognition\/?ref=foundhistory.org\">\u201cThe Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition\u201d<\/a>; <a href=\"https:\/\/aigenealogyinsights.com\/2025\/12\/16\/when-the-machine-finally-learned-to-read-gemini-3-and-the-question-of-good-enough\/\">\u201cWhen the Machine Finally Learned to Read: Gemini 3 and the Question of \u2018Good Enough.\u2019\u201d<\/a> The first of those, by the AI-expert historian I just mentioned, announces that his team\u2019s test of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English-language documents (the same ones tested earlier with Gemini and Claude) revealed great progress. Gemini 2.5 Pro\u2019s 11 percent word errors and 4 percent significant errors were down in Gemini 3 Pro to 4 percent and 1 percent. The second blog piece reveals Gemini 3\u2019s \u201cperfect\u201d transcription of George Boole\u2019s (bad) handwriting from 1850. The quality left that historian \u201cstunned.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Google offers a free preview in the <a href=\"https:\/\/aistudio.google.com\/prompts\/new_chat\">Google AI Studio<\/a>. The unpaid version has several limitations, including on usage (it will only transcribe so many pages per time period), customization, and privacy. But it allowed me to test the model with letters from our corpus.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gemini\u2019s results with the Taylor and Fillmore letters are similar to those with blogging colleagues\u2019 documents. I first gave it a letter chosen essentially at random\u2014one that we had accessioned early and that was at the top of our list. It did a great job. But the handwriting in that letter was pretty good. So I turned to my old friend Thurlow Weed, the Whig Party boss whom I\u2019d sampled for my \u201cTranscription 101\u201d entry because of his horrendous cursive. To my awe, the virtual mind successfully read nearly every word of Weed\u2019s hastily scribbled page. I\u2019ve subsequently tried other hands, with similar results.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gemini doesn\u2019t get everything right. In one letter, it misread \u201cVetos\u201d as \u201cVotes,\u201d an error that drastically changed the meaning of a sentence about presidential rejections of congressional bills. It has a lot of trouble interpreting nineteenth-century punctuation and capitalization. It only occasionally recognizes superscript, and it doesn\u2019t even try (unless I\u2019m overlooking a hidden feature) to preserve underlines. It gives up quickly on truly horrible images such as <a href=\"https:\/\/catalog.archives.gov\/id\/446233045?objectPage=6\">this<\/a>. But, let\u2019s be honest, human readers will often have those same problems. I haven\u2019t quantified the results, but Gemini gets the large majority of words right in documents of reasonable quality. When I tested it (as <a href=\"https:\/\/prithivmlmods-multimodal-ocr3.hf.space\/\">you can<\/a>) against several other LLMs that colleagues had <a href=\"https:\/\/huggingface.co\/blog\/ocr-open-models\">commended<\/a> for handwriting recognition and ethical issues, I found Gemini far more consistently accurate. The latest version of Claude, dubbed <a href=\"https:\/\/www.anthropic.com\/news\/claude-opus-4-5\">Opus 4.5<\/a>, has received good <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=c1tyGdjVRy8\">appraisals<\/a>, but its paywall has delayed my testing it.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">What does this advance mean for documentary editing? Last July, Microsoft <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/working-with-ai-measuring-the-occupational-implications-of-generative-ai\/\">concluded<\/a> that historians\u2019 skills are among those most likely soon to be replicated by AI. Last month, a historian-blogger responded, as others have, by asking outright, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.oerproject.com\/blog\/historians-and-ai\">\u201cWill AI Replace Historians?\u201d<\/a> She answered no. (Phew!) The concern mirrors those expressed throughout the history of AI. The journalist in 1853 described the machines as \u201cdoing the work, once done by . . . men.\u201d A defender of the phonograph <a href=\"https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/resource\/sn83030193\/1888-05-12\/ed-2\/?sp=3&amp;q=%22intelligent+machine%22&amp;r=0.115,1.015,0.2,0.123,0\">admitted<\/a> that \u201cstenography will not be needed so much\u201d but assured critics that \u201can intelligent machine is not going to hurt intelligent laborers or employees.\u201d Also in 1888, though, a writer for the <em>Woman\u2019s Tribune<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/resource\/sn85038008\/1888-08-25\/ed-1\/?sp=2&amp;q=%22intelligent+machine%22&amp;r=0.223,0.495,0.521,0.32,0\">lamented<\/a> that \u201cthe steam engine and the well-nigh intelligent machine of man\u2019s invention, put man farther and farther away from the assurance of employment.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">I appreciate the trepidation and the shock value attached to existential questions. No one wants their \u201csuperpower\u201d to become irrelevant. But let\u2019s look at this more systematically than fearfully. Instead of asking whether AI will replace documentary editors, I pose a practical question that should become a central one for our field: To best accomplish the goals of documentary editing in the twenty-first century, in what ways can and should editors incorporate AI into our process? With attention to pragmatism and ethics, I offer a few initial proposals.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">First, let\u2019s return to the editing tasks <em>besides<\/em> transcription and proofreading. Most seem, to this editor, ill-disposed to robotic labor. Locating documents? Perhaps someone will develop an AI-powered drone that can fly into archives and leaf through folders of manuscripts, or an AI system that can scroll through microfilm reels and reliably identify which frames contain letters to Taylor and Fillmore (who aren\u2019t always named). Until then, the canvass must depend on human eyes, hands, and brains. Selecting those worth publishing? That means curating a selected edition for use in classrooms, libraries, scholarly research, and historical exploration. Anything requiring judgment, particularly about what humans need and want, must be done by humans. Translating into English? Certainly Google Translate and AI-based tools can provide quick readings for research purposes. But, as a professional translator <a href=\"https:\/\/data-workers.org\/tadhg\/\">has explained<\/a>, reliance on such tools for publications sacrifices the nuanced linguistic understanding of (and employment opportunities for) people immersed in the meanings of words in a particular time and place.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Researching and writing annotations? Just as we editors have never left our readers on their own to trust Wikipedia or whatever shows up first in a web search, we will not abandon them to the response of a chat box. When they read a letter by Thurlow Weed or about a particular presidential veto, we will furnish a short biography or explanation that they can rest assured was written by expert scholars after research in reliable primary and secondary sources. Listing the letters not published? As with annotations in notes, these very brief topic summaries are best written by historians who understand the letters\u2019 context and can judge the keywords most meaningful to fellow readers. Besides, factchecking the results would take just as long as composing them. Writing introductions and indexes? Surely AI could produce such things, but I believe that human editors know best how to encapsulate the stories in their own edition and how to guide readers through it. Publishing? We defer to our wonderful colleagues at the <a href=\"https:\/\/utpress.org\/\">University of Tennessee Press<\/a> and the University of Virginia Press\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/rotunda.upress.virginia.edu\/\">Rotunda imprint<\/a> on whether AI can aid their work, but we certainly will never replace them. Overall, AI systems may indeed assist us editors with steps such as searching documents while we canvass, annotate, and index. But we must continue to do the ultimate work ourselves if readers are to trust and benefit from our product.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">That brings us back to transcription and, closely tied to it, proofreading. To assess the value of AI, we must remind ourselves of documentary editing\u2019s goal. Our profession aims to produce reliable, even authoritative, versions of historical texts. We provide access to the words of historical actors in editions that readers will rely on for a century or more. Accuracy, therefore, is paramount. We ensure that every word, every letter, every punctuation mark, and every formatting element appears as its author wrote it. (If we must make changes, for ease of reading or due to the limits of printed type, we explain those in the front matter.) Some AIs, especially Gemini, produce very nearly accurate transcriptions as far as the words go. For many uses, those transcriptions are good enough. But, for a documentary edition, \u201cgood enough\u201d is not good enough. Nowadays, we might even define our goal, in transcription, as to produce something <em>better than AI<\/em>: a more accurate, more dependable, more professional version of the text than readers can get at home either by straining their eyes or by asking a chat box. We produce authoritative texts that can be used to answer questions about the past by readers and, for that matter, by AI itself.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Furthermore, in some respects, the best LLMs still fall short of \u201cgood enough.\u201d As I noted, even the impressive Gemini Pro 3 occasionally misses a key word (\u201cVetos\u201d vs. \u201cVotes\u201d), has difficulty distinguishing authors\u2019 nonstandard capitalization, and often misreads punctuation (conflating, for example, hyphens and em-dashes). It doesn\u2019t reproduce some formatting elements, and it seems reluctant to admit\u2014and identify, as we do in our edition\u2014uncertainty about words. It\u2019s inconsistent in whether it follows my instruction to ignore authors\u2019 line breaks, sometimes insisting on (digitally) hitting \u201creturn\u201d at the end of each line of text.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">I discovered another shortcoming when I asked Gemini a question about overwritten text. If an author wrote one word, then covered it up with another, our project policy is to transcribe both. We thus give readers information about the author\u2019s writing (and thought) process. Our transcription looks like this: \u201c<span style=\"text-decoration: line-through\">original text<\/span> ^revised text^.\u201d When I was struggling to decipher a covered-up word, I imagined that Gemini might be able to figure it out. Not only did it fail, but the author\u2019s correction process hindered its ability to read even the final text. Gemini argued with me about my (correct!) reading and my (correct!) assessment that the author had overwritten a word. AI is not replacing the transcriber and the proofreader any time soon.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">But AI can help. Let\u2019s consider our traditional procedure. Once we Taylor-Fillmore editors have located, imaged, and accessioned a letter and selected it for publication, we assign it to a transcriber. That may be a student intern or one of us two editors. That person types a transcription from the original, then proofreads the transcription against the original. Then one of the editors (not the transcriber) proofreads it again. Then the other editor proofreads it yet again. Finally, the editor\/director (yours truly) reviews any remaining uncertainties or disagreements and finalizes the transcription. If necessary, one of us travels to the archive to check the original manuscript for words that were unclear in the scan or copy from which we transcribed. Altogether, toward producing the final transcription, the manuscript is scrutinized at least four times by at least two people, including both of our trained and experienced editors.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Where can AI fit in? Its best place, if any, seems to be at the very beginning. Gemini, or whatever model is best next week, usually produces a very passable first draft. We can use it for that but not expect of it anything more. The initial transcriber, especially for a long letter, may save time and eyestrain by running the manuscript images through this new technology. They must then add and adjust formatting to compensate for Gemini\u2019s limitations and prepare the document for our systems.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Every proofreading stage, however, must still follow. We never relied on one person\u2019s reading of a manuscript, even if that person was a PhD-educated professional with many years of experience. So we would not rely on one AI\u2019s. Only with all the usual proofreadings, by the transcriber and by both editors, can we promise to catch errors and guarantee a reliable text. Only then, as professional editors, can we take proper responsibility for our work. Furthermore, we are not willing to sacrifice human employment and educational opportunities for the speed associated with AI transcription. As university-based scholars, we design internships to benefit the students as much as the project. We must continue to help students learn about antebellum America, documentary editing (including reading cursive), and methodological debates such as the roles of AI. In short, we can best use AI to improve <em>quality<\/em>, not <em>quantity<\/em>. It shouldn\u2019t speed up the process, because each human must still carefully examine each document, but it can become one more pair of (digital) eyes that do so.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">In sum, returning to the \u201cwill AI replace us?\u201d question, the answer is no. An AI can produce a good but imperfect transcription from a digital image, but it cannot locate and image documents, judge which of them readers should see, produce authoritative transcriptions, and supply reliable annotations and indexes. A chat box\u2019s transcription does not a documentary edition make. But the \u201chow can we use AI?\u201d question has real answers that benefit editors and ultimately readers.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Editors, evaluating their own projects and discussing innovations with colleagues, should continue to identify the best ways to use AI. I am writing this blog entry, in part, to open that conversation. We should, though, be wary of changing our process too often. I read of other industries\u2019 reshaping their workflows (and shrinking their workforces) multiple times each year amid rapid AI advances. For businesses working on short timelines and beginning new projects every few months, that may make sense. For editors spending many years on a single project, it does not. There\u2019s a reason why I worked on a project still using WordPerfect for DOS and 3.5-inch disks in 2009 and on one still using card catalogs in 2019. The editors weren\u2019t ignorant or fearful of technological change. Rather, they knew that migrating materials to new systems would take time and effort that was better spent editing the documents. The migration from one technology to another, furthermore, risks producing inconsistent results. If volume 2 differs in structure or appearance from volume 1\u2014say, its index organizes topics differently\u2014readers may have difficulty navigating them together. Some midstream innovations are necessary, but redesigning workflows every time a new gadget or a better LLM comes out is neither efficient nor responsible.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Beyond documentary editors, the question of how to use (or resist) AI has prompted discussion among historians, other humanists, and academics generally. The University of Virginia Library, last month, released the practically and ethically driven <a href=\"https:\/\/library.virginia.edu\/news\/2026\/protecting-what-remains-introducing-uva-archival-ai-protocol\">UVA Archival AI Protocol<\/a>. American University hosted the <a href=\"https:\/\/kogod.american.edu\/2026-ai-research-conference\">Artificial Intelligence Research Conference<\/a> in February and, here at the School of Public Affairs, convenes the <a href=\"https:\/\/mediaspace.american.edu\/media\/SPA+AI+Teaching+Practices+-+with+from+Stacie+St.+Louis%2C+JLC\/1_s9m24plw\">SPA AI Teaching Practices<\/a> series each fortnight. The National Council on Public History has been hosting a wonderful speaker series on <a href=\"https:\/\/ncph.org\/conference\/ethics-ai-and-the-public-humanities\/\">Ethics, AI, and the Public Humanities<\/a>. Those who produce and those who use documentary editions have an important part to play in crafting those conversations and applying their lessons to our work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson. &nbsp; I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about AI. The notion, in its broadest sense, is not new. The mid-nineteenth century, as I have written elsewhere, was a period of rapid scientific innovation. That innovation extended to what some described as artificial intelligence. On [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3183,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":655,"date":"2026-01-29T13:22:37","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T19:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/?p=655"},"modified":"2026-02-05T11:57:45","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T17:57:45","slug":"immigration-and-politics-in-the-1840s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/immigration-and-politics-in-the-1840s\/","title":{"rendered":"Immigration and Politics in the 1840s"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">On June 9, 1848, the Whig National Convention nominated Zachary Taylor as president and Millard Fillmore as vice president. The next day, Boston engineer John E. Gowen <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/sunyoswego\/id\/31129\">wrote to Fillmore<\/a>. He asked two questions. First, did Fillmore support changing naturalization laws and, in particular, \u201cexcluding Foreigners from participating in the elective franchise until they have been here <u>at <\/u><u>least<\/u> <u>Twenty<\/u> <u>one<\/u> <u>years<\/u>\u201d? Second, did the nominee support taxing future immigrants \u201cto such an extent as to protect the American mechanic from Foreign competition in the labor market\u201d? Fillmore responded a week later but refused to answer the questions (<em>Boston Daily Evening Traveller<\/em>, Sept. 23, 1848).<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Immigration was big news in the 1840s. Britons and other Europeans had been arriving on American shores throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Slave traders had forcibly brought Africans there until 1808, when <a href=\"https:\/\/www.archives.gov\/education\/lessons\/slave-trade.html\">Congress banned<\/a> the international slave trade, and occasionally even thereafter. The discovery of gold in California, just before the United States acquired that province from Mexico in 1848, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.library.ca.gov\/california-history\/gold-rush\/discovery\/\">attracted fortune-seekers<\/a> from Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. Finally, and most remarked upon in US political debates, many thousands of <a href=\"https:\/\/guides.lib.cua.edu\/c.php?g=1414334&amp;p=10477547\">Catholics immigrated<\/a> to the largely Protestant United States in the 1840s. They came from the various independent German states and, to avoid starvation amid the potato famine, from Ireland.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Taylor\u2019s and Fillmore\u2019s correspondence includes voices of immigrants and their families. In the volume that we\u2019re publishing this year, for example, you\u2019ll find David M. Nagle. He had led a rebellion in his native Ireland before settling in New York City. On November 3, 1847, he <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/sunyoswego\/id\/28467\">thanked Fillmore<\/a> for the latter\u2019s \u201cunremitting regard\u201d on behalf of \u201cmy adopted fellow citizens.\u201d Three years earlier, Fillmore had heard from Nicholas Carroll, \u201cthe son of an Irishman.\u201d Carroll <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/sunyoswego\/id\/35058\">wrote<\/a> on September 8, 1844, of his family\u2019s support for the US Revolution and of the impact of his Catholic religion on his voting choices.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Writers born in the United States often discussed the politics of immigration. Those politics differed greatly from today\u2019s, partly owing to two legal differences. First, US law did not then distinguish between legal and illegal (or undocumented) immigration. Only in 1875 did Congress begin passing laws that banned certain people\u2019s entry. It excluded <a href=\"https:\/\/scholarship.law.duke.edu\/faculty_scholarship\/3826\/\">Chinese prostitutes<\/a> in 1875, nearly all <a href=\"https:\/\/www.archives.gov\/milestone-documents\/chinese-exclusion-act\">Chinese people<\/a> in 1882, and other specific groups thereafter. In 1924 it passed the first general law limiting immigration from each country. During the United States\u2019 first century, essentially all immigration was legal.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Second, America did not consistently restrict voting to citizens. Many states (and, under federal law, territories), during parts of the nation\u2019s first 150 years, <a href=\"https:\/\/scholarworks.wm.edu\/entities\/publication\/1a2ea183-7d24-4c3e-a5a3-597ddb9800c4\">allowed unnaturalized<\/a> immigrants <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nypl.org\/sites\/default\/files\/hayduk_-_chapter_2.pdf\">to vote<\/a>. Six states did so in the 1840s. The provisions varied but generally extended suffrage to White men who had lived in the state a defined period of time. Only in the 1920s did the last states end the policy. As a result, Americans in most of the nineteenth century did not debate the presence of illegal immigrants, a yet-to-be-created category, but did debate the propriety of noncitizens\u2019 voting.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_656\" style=\"width: 650px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-656\" class=\"size-full wp-image-656\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2026\/01\/Fishing-for-Votes.jpg\" alt=\"Cartoon of man holding fishing pole over group of men\" width=\"640\" height=\"455\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2026\/01\/Fishing-for-Votes.jpg 640w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2026\/01\/Fishing-for-Votes-300x213.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-656\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">This cartoon of 1848 shows Democratic presidential nominee Lewis Cass &#8220;fishing&#8221; for Irish immigrant voters. Library of Congress.<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Taylor, Fillmore, and the Whig Party both made use of and bristled at immigrants\u2019 votes. They paid particular attention to \u201cGermans\u201d: immigrants from the German states and their US-born and German-speaking children. Because many of those people could vote, Whigs campaigned to them. Chicago\u2019s Samuel Lisle Smith <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/sunyoswego\/id\/34520\">wrote to Fillmore<\/a> and other Buffalo Whigs on January 17, 1844, to coordinate the development of pro-Whig, German-language newspapers in Illinois and New York. (Smith mentioned \u201cmy colleague M<sup>r<\/sup> Lincoln,\u201d a young Illinois politician who participated in the effort and who would become rather famous.) On April 26, Alfred Babcock observed in a <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/sunyoswego\/id\/34757\">letter to Fillmore<\/a> that New York Whig leaders \u201chave been . . . courting all foreigners and especially the Irish and Catholic forigners.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Though Whigs sought immigrants\u2019 votes, they weren\u2019t necessarily happy that immigrants\u2014especially recent ones\u2014did vote. John C. Hamilton <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/sunyoswego\/id\/35274\">opined<\/a> to Fillmore on October 11, 1844, that immigrants should have \u201c<u>immediate<\/u> access to all <u>social<\/u> rights\u201d but not \u201c<u>political<\/u> <u>privileges<\/u>.\u201d Taylor, the year he ran for the presidency, expressed annoyance at \u201cthe immense influx of foreigners into to our Country.\u201d He complained to his son-in-law Robert C. Wood, on February 18, 1848, that they \u201care carried to the polls &amp; are permitted to vote immediately on their arrival, naturalized or not,\u201d and that \u201cnineteen out of twenty if not more, vote the democratic ticket\u201d (Huntington Library, Zachary Taylor Papers). During the campaign, some accused Taylor of opposing the rights of naturalized citizens. He sharply denied that charge.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Democrats tended to welcome immigrants from Europe, including Catholics, more wholeheartedly. President James K. Polk was particularly supportive. During the Mexican-American War, he appointed two Jesuit priests to accompany General Taylor\u2019s army. He hoped that they, besides conducting services for Catholic US soldiers, could convince Catholic Mexicans of the United States\u2019 good intentions. When a Presbyterian minister opposed the appointments, Polk <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/The_Diary_of_James_K_Polk_During_His_Pre\/vRcOAAAAIAAJ?q=&amp;gbpv=1&amp;bsq=fanatic#f=false\">labeled him<\/a> \u201ca hypocrite or a bigotted fanatic.\u201d The Polk administration also <a href=\"https:\/\/trace.tennessee.edu\/utk_polk\/15\/\">argued<\/a>, during a dispute with the United Kingdom over the status of Irish-born Americans, that US naturalization made one not only a citizen but \u201c<em>a natural born<\/em>\u201d one.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_657\" style=\"width: 407px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-657\" class=\"wp-image-657\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2026\/01\/American-Republican-Song.jpg\" alt=\"sheet music headed by US flag\" width=\"397\" height=\"500\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2026\/01\/American-Republican-Song.jpg 508w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2026\/01\/American-Republican-Song-238x300.jpg 238w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 397px) 100vw, 397px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-657\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">This song of 1844 advertises the nativist American Republican Party. Library of Congress.<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some politicians, on the other hand, made opposition to immigration and vilification of immigrants centerpieces of their platform. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, committed nativists coalesced into <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Transforming_America\/gxfOEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;dq=%22Native+American+Party%22+%22American+Republican+Party%22+holt&amp;pg=PA217&amp;printsec=frontcover\">an organization<\/a> called both the Native American Party and the American Republican Party. (It had nothing to do with either Indigenous people or the as-yet-unestablished Republican Party.) It aimed to reduce immigration and to reduce immigrants\u2019 and Catholics\u2019 political influence. At its convention on September 10, 1847, it <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Zachary_Taylor\/H42TwTwE1IwC?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;bsq=%22native%20american%22\">recommended Taylor<\/a> for the presidency (without his having sought the endorsement and long before his nomination by the Whigs). John E. Gowen, who wrote to Fillmore with policy questions in June 1848, did so on that party\u2019s behalf. Its Massachusetts branch wanted to know whether Taylor\u2019s running mate shared its views.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fillmore\u2019s refusal to answer, given his past efforts to win German immigrants\u2019 votes (and his and Taylor\u2019s general refusals to reveal policy positions), is unsurprising. Later, though, Fillmore moved to the center of nativist politics. In the 1850s, the Native American Party gave way to the American Party, also called the \u201cKnow Nothings.\u201d The political arm of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, a secretive fraternal organization, it promoted the same anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic message. In 1856, the Whig Party having collapsed, ex-president Fillmore accepted that <a href=\"https:\/\/novapublishers.com\/shop\/millard-fillmore-the-limits-of-compromise\/\">group\u2019s nomination<\/a> for the presidency. The connection with the secret order was ironic. Fillmore had first entered politics in the 1820s under the Anti-Masonic Party, an organization founded on opposition to secret orders. But his acceptance of the nativist message, one that in the mid-nineteenth century crossed party lines and often had been embraced by Whigs, made pragmatic political sense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On June 9, 1848, the Whig National Convention nominated Zachary Taylor as president and Millard Fillmore as vice president. The next day, Boston engineer John E. Gowen wrote to Fillmore. He asked two questions. First, did Fillmore support changing naturalization laws and, in particular, \u201cexcluding Foreigners from participating in the elective franchise until they have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3183,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":647,"date":"2025-12-08T10:47:48","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T16:47:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/?p=647"},"modified":"2025-12-08T10:47:48","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T16:47:48","slug":"last-steps-finishing-a-documentary-volume","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/last-steps-finishing-a-documentary-volume\/","title":{"rendered":"Last Steps: Finishing a Documentary Volume"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">This spring, I <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/time-to-celebrate-anniversaries-armies-and-parades\/\">announced<\/a> that we had completed the manuscript of volume 1 of <em>The Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore<\/em>. Now I can share a few more details. (I\u2019ll add other project news at the end of this entry.) The volume, featuring letters of January 1844 to June 1848, is scheduled for release in hardcover on August 18, 2026. The University of Tennessee Press has a summary of the contents <a href=\"https:\/\/utpress.org\/title\/the-correspondence-of-zachary-taylor-and-millard-fillmore\/\">here<\/a>. Online retailers feature it <a href=\"https:\/\/www.barnesandnoble.com\/w\/the-correspondence-of-zachary-taylor-and-millard-fillmore-michael-david-cohen\/1148429717?ean=9798895270981\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B0FTRPRJR9\/ref=x_gr_bb_amazon\">here<\/a>, and you may order it at your favorite local bookshop. Rotunda (at the University of Virginia Press) will release the digital version as part of its <a href=\"https:\/\/rotunda.upress.virginia.edu\/entrance.xqy\">American History Collection<\/a> around the same time.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-648 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/12\/Cover-smaller-file-692x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"cover of book with portraits of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore and title &quot;The Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, Volume 1, January 1844\u2013June 1848&quot;\" width=\"338\" height=\"500\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/12\/Cover-smaller-file-692x1024.jpeg 692w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/12\/Cover-smaller-file-203x300.jpeg 203w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/12\/Cover-smaller-file.jpeg 720w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 338px) 100vw, 338px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">With publication nearing, I should explain what we editors do in the final months. Earlier in this blog, I outlined four major stages of editing primary documents: <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/where-the-letters-come-from\/\">locating<\/a> the documents, <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/transcription-101\/\">transcribing<\/a> them (and <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/annotation-translating-the-past\/\">translating<\/a> if necessary), proofreading the transcriptions, and <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/annotation-translating-the-past\/\">annotating<\/a> the content. Those stages occupy the bulk of our time. But they are neither the beginning nor the end of the editorial process. At the beginning, we define the scope of the project\u2014which historical actors, topics, years, and document types it will feature\u2014and build a work plan and collaborative team. Later, perhaps, I\u2019ll look back and reflect on those initial tasks. Today, I will outline the last stages of our process.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Years of work by editors and student contributors result in a series of computer files. Those contain hundreds of transcribed letters and thousands of notes identifying the people and topics therein. Before considering them complete, we do some final checks. Because we transcribed from scans, photocopies, and microfilm copies of the letters, some letters include words that we could not read with certainty but which we suspect may be clearer in the original manuscripts. In such cases, we visit the repositories\u2014mainly the National Archives and the Library of Congress\u2014to see the originals. Handling (carefully!) the papers to which Taylor, Fillmore, and others set their pens is a thrill for a historian. Having deciphered or confirmed a few more words, we return to our desks and proofread the whole volume, fact-checking the annotations to ensure that we give readers trustworthy and helpful context for the letters.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">We next write the sections of the book that precede and follow the annotated letters. At the front of the book are the dedication, acknowledgment, and sponsor pages, where we get to thank the many people and organizations that made the volume possible. Next comes the introduction, which briefly chronicles Taylor\u2019s and Fillmore\u2019s lives, especially during the years covered by the volume, and outlines the major topics in the letters. It describes our editorial practices, such as how we reproduce handwritten text in print form and what information we include in the notes. The introduction, in sum, both whets readers\u2019 appetites for the letters and enables them to navigate the book. It ends with a bibliography of suggested further readings. After the introduction come tables of abbreviations used in the annotation, genealogies of Taylor\u2019s and Fillmore\u2019s families, and tabular chronologies of the two presidents\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the end of the volume appears what we call the \u201ccalendar.\u201d Taylor, Fillmore, and their correspondents wrote more than three thousand letters in the four and a half years covered by volume 1. Lacking space to include them all, we selected the 371 (plus 5 enclosures) that we thought readers would find most interesting and useful. But some readers may want to consult others. So we compile a calendar: a table of all surviving letters. It lists their dates, authors, recipients, repository locations, and major topics. People interested in, say, German-language newspapers or army courts-martial will, therefore, know where to find relevant letters beyond those that we publish.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">With those sections written and proofread, the volume is whole. After making some final formatting adjustments, we send it the University of Tennessee Press. We also send images to illustrate it. Daguerreotypes (early photographs) of Taylor and Fillmore go on the cover, as shown in the lovely design above by the press\u2019s design expert. Inside, images of manuscripts accompany several transcriptions to show what the original documents look like. They include a hand-drawn map of the Rio Grande warfront that Taylor enclosed with a letter and Mexican woman Mariquita Lopez\u2019s Spanish letter that we publish in translation.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">The press then gets to work finalizing the text. They copyedit the front matter to guarantee clarity and proper style, then send the revised version to us for approval. We return it to them, and they begin creating \u201cproofs\u201d or \u201cpages.\u201d (The press is in that process now.) This means turning Microsoft Word documents into book pages. When finished, the press sends us an image of how each page of the published book will look. That way, both the press and us editors can review those pages and ensure that every paragraph, every line, every word, every punctuation mark, and every page number is exactly as it should look\u2014<em>before<\/em> printing the book copies. We notify them of any errors, they make the corrections, and they send us a second set of proofs so we can confirm that everything was fixed.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Finally, we write the index. I consider an index essential for any nonfiction book, but even more so for a documentary edition. Say you want to find letters in our volume written by the Mexican general and politician Santa Anna, or letters about the US movement promoting abstinence from alcohol. Paging through the whole book will take a while. But the index will direct you right to the relevant pages. In the digital version, of course, you can do a keyword search. But because writers may have referenced a topic without using the words you have in mind, or may have misspelled them, that may not bring up every relevant letter. So, even there, an index crafted by the editors who assembled the volume is an indispensable tool. We thus create one, more comprehensive and more specific in its entries than those in most books, using the text and pagination in the second proofs.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Then, at last, the press sends the volume\u2014front matter, annotated letters, calendar, and index\u2014to the printer. The printer, um, prints the books and binds them. Libraries stock them, and you, of course, can purchase your very own copy (an excellent gift for <em>all<\/em> occasions). The press also sends the indexed volume to the digital publisher, which converts it into a searchable edition matching the format of others in Rotunda\u2019s American History Collection. On paper or online, readers everywhere can learn antebellum US history from the words of Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, and their contemporaries.<\/p>\n<p> &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Besides the imminent volume 1, we\u2019ve had several exciting developments at the Taylor-Fillmore project in the past few months. Two relate to our <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/staff\/\">team<\/a>. Amy Larrabee Cotz, associate editor of the project since 2021, was named its coeditor in September. The appointment recognizes her central role in publishing the presidents\u2019 letters and the expertise she brings from both this and her earlier editorial work. Josie Hannah, a junior at St. Olaf College, joined us as an intern in October. A history and political science major, she has been transcribing letters from the election of 1848 that will appear in our second volume.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">I, meanwhile, have had opportunities to share the project\u2019s discoveries. On the <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/videos\/\">August 1 episode<\/a> of <em>Kentucky Chronicles<\/em>, a podcast of the Kentucky Historical Society, I discussed the Taylor letters in the society\u2019s holdings with host Daniel Burge. On November 6, the Oklahoma Political Science Association welcomed me to its annual conference. I am grateful to Aaron L. Mason, a member of our advisory board and the new president of that association, for inviting me. I joined a panel on \u201cPresidencies Past and Present\u201d and gave the keynote address on \u201cThe Role of Presidential History.\u201d I also joined the team of In Pursuit, a project to commemorate the United States\u2019 250th anniversary through essays about the presidents and first ladies. On its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.inpursuit.org\/\">website<\/a>, you can view the impressive list of contributors (who include three former presidents) and sign up to receive the free essays beginning on Presidents\u2019 Day 2026.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most exciting of all, on August 1, the <a href=\"http:\/\/neh.gov\/\">National Endowment for the Humanities<\/a> announced a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.neh.gov\/news\/neh-announces-3479-million-97-humanities-projects\">major grant<\/a> for our project. Part of the NEH\u2019s Scholarly Editions and Translations program, the two-year, $197,322 award to American University will support our work expanding access to primary documents throughout 2026 and 2027. This is the Taylor-Fillmore project\u2019s first grant from the NEH and its largest from any source. We are deeply grateful to the NEH, an independent federal agency that supports the humanities in every US state and jurisdiction, both for its essential financial support and for its recognition of our project\u2019s value to education and research in American history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This spring, I announced that we had completed the manuscript of volume 1 of The Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. Now I can share a few more details. (I\u2019ll add other project news at the end of this entry.) The volume, featuring letters of January 1844 to June 1848, is scheduled for release [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3183,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":626,"date":"2025-06-12T12:22:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-12T17:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/?p=626"},"modified":"2025-06-15T14:27:14","modified_gmt":"2025-06-15T19:27:14","slug":"time-to-celebrate-anniversaries-armies-and-parades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/time-to-celebrate-anniversaries-armies-and-parades\/","title":{"rendered":"Time to Celebrate: Anniversaries, Armies, and Parades"},"content":{"rendered":"<h6 style=\"text-align: center\"><audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-626-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/06\/Time-to-Celebrate.mp3?_=2\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/06\/Time-to-Celebrate.mp3\">http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/06\/Time-to-Celebrate.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/h6>\n<h6 style=\"text-align: right\">Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson.<\/h6>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">We at the Taylor-Fillmore project have something to celebrate. We just completed the manuscript of the first volume of Zachary Taylor\u2019s and Millard Fillmore\u2019s letters. Editors and student contributors transcribed and annotated 376 documents written by or to those powerful but little-known figures in nineteenth-century America. They stretch from 1844, when the United States was preparing to annex Texas, to mid-1848, after it had acquired half of Mexico. Now we will work with the publishers to finalize the print and digital volume. You\u2019ll be able to read the letters, at your library or on your computer, next summer. We thank all who have made this possible, including the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.archives.gov\/nhprc\">NHPRC<\/a>) and our other <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/sponsors\/\">sponsors<\/a> committed to expanding readers\u2019 access to original historical documents.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Two weeks ago, I got to share that good news with the folks at American POTUS. They kindly invited me to join their podcast about US presidents. My conversation with host Alan Lowe about Taylor and Fillmore is now available on the American POTUS <a href=\"https:\/\/americanpotus.org\/episode-information\">website<\/a>, on our <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/videos\/\">website<\/a>, and pretty much wherever you get your podcasts.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, let\u2019s discuss bigger celebrations.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<div id=\"attachment_627\" style=\"width: 566px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-627\" class=\"wp-image-627\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/06\/Washington-Monument-procession.jpg\" alt=\"lithograph of military and civilian procession in Washington, DC\" width=\"556\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/06\/Washington-Monument-procession.jpg 741w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/06\/Washington-Monument-procession-300x216.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 556px) 100vw, 556px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-627\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Washington Monument cornerstone-laying procession, lithograph by James S. Baillie, 1847 (Library of Congress)<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2026, the United States will commemorate its semiquincentennial: the 250th anniversary of its founding. All states and territories have established commissions to mark the occasion. At the federal level, Congress created the <a href=\"https:\/\/america250.org\/about-america250\/a250-leadership\/\">US Semiquincentennial Commission<\/a> in 2016, and President Donald J. Trump issued an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.federalregister.gov\/documents\/2025\/02\/03\/2025-02231\/celebrating-americas-250th-birthday\">executive order<\/a> creating Task Force 250, with him as chair, this February. Private organizations ranging from the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.oah.org\/tah\/us-history-at-250\/\">Organization of American Historians<\/a> to <a href=\"https:\/\/theblackamerica250.org\/\">Black America 250<\/a> have assembled educational materials tied to the anniversary. I sit on the Semiquincentennial Committee of the Association for Documentary Editing, which aims to focus attention on key documents from the full span of US history. Commemorations will culminate next summer, when we reach 250 years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the meantime, Americans have celebrated other specific anniversaries. This April 19 was the 250th of the Battles of <a href=\"https:\/\/lex250.org\/\">Lexington<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/visitconcord.org\/concord-250\/\">Concord<\/a>, which launched the US Revolution. May 10 was the 250th of the <a href=\"https:\/\/prologue.blogs.archives.gov\/2025\/05\/08\/the-second-continental-congress-convenes\/\">convening<\/a> in Philadelphia of the Second Continental Congress. And this Saturday will be the 250th birthday of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.army.mil\/1775\/\">US Army<\/a>. On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress passed a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lineofdeparture.army.mil\/Portals\/144\/PDF\/Journals\/Infantry\/Infantry-Spring-2025\/14%20June%201775.pdf\">resolution<\/a> creating ten companies of riflemen and designating the colonists\u2019 military organization \u201cthe American continental army.\u201d It, under General George Washington\u2019s command, became the official seed of the armed forces in which brave men and women have served their country in the two and a half centuries since.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.army.mil\/1775\/\">festival and parade<\/a> in Washington, DC, will form the centerpiece of the national celebration of the army and of servicepeople past and present. The Association of the United States Army <a href=\"https:\/\/ausa.org\/goarmy250\">will hold<\/a> another parade and related events in Philadelphia. By a historical coincidence, these happen to fall on Flag Day (precisely two years after creating the army, Congress <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/topic\/Flag-Day\">adopted<\/a> the Stars and Stripes). By another coincidence, they fall on President Trump\u2019s seventy-ninth birthday (discussion of the commemoration began <a href=\"https:\/\/www.army.mil\/article\/270501\/u_s_army_and_revolutionary_war_250th_commemorations_highlighted_at_ausa\">years ago<\/a>, though the specific plan for a parade emerged <a href=\"https:\/\/abc3340.com\/news\/nation-world\/trump-planning-military-parade-through-dc-for-americas-250th-anniversary-report\">this spring<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">These political and military anniversaries got me thinking\u2014as I tend to do\u2014about Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. As we\u2019ve worked through their letters, we\u2019ve come across discussions of anniversaries, military tributes, and, yes, parades. This seems a good time to share what types of celebrations they and their correspondents witnessed and what those Americans of an earlier era thought about marking dates on the calendar and honoring soldiers in the field.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">As in the 2020s, Americans in the 1840s celebrated national anniversaries. Although no major ones arose in that decade\u2014the nation\u2019s seventy-fifth did in 1851, but our project hasn\u2019t gotten there yet\u2014Independence Day came each year. I wrote a little about that holiday <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/independence-day-and-summer-travel\/\">earlier<\/a> in this blog.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some politicians used July 4 for partisan ends. In 1844, supporters of the Whig Party invited Fillmore to their festivities in Rushford, NY. He <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/sunyoswego\/id\/34816\">responded<\/a> that he already had committed to attend an event elsewhere \u201con the anniversary of the Birth day of our nation.\u201d But he took the opportunity, in his response, to equate the colonists who had rejected British rule\u2014known in their time as \u201cwhigs\u201d\u2014with his nineteenth-century party: \u201cThe whig spirit of \u201976 gave us Independence &amp; freedom and the Whig spirit of 1844 must maintain that independence and freedom, or the blood of the Revolution was poured out in vain.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fillmore\u2019s letters more often discussed celebrations planned for purely political, not commemorative, purposes. In August 1844, Whigs <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/sunyoswego\/id\/34950\">invited<\/a> him to a \u201cMASS CONVENTION\u201d in Seneca Falls, NY. Beginning with a \u201cprocession\u201d complete with \u201cBanners and Music,\u201d it promoted Henry Clay\u2019s candidacy for the White House and the party\u2019s support for a high tariff and opposition to annexing Texas. Four years later, Amos Brown wrote to Fillmore <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/sunyoswego\/id\/31214\">recounting<\/a> Democratic presidential nominee Lewis Cass\u2019s arrival home in Detroit. After \u201ctwo brass pieces fireing\u201d at the wharf, where Cass\u2019s steamboat landed, he went to his house with a \u201cpossession [procession] which . . . consisted of a band of music five carriages one buggy and one too horse wagon and betwene one and two hundred fo[o]tmen in al the company about the house encluding locoes [i.e., Democrats] whigs and boys and in the possession there might have been one thousand.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Around Taylor, who spent most of this time commanding troops in Texas and Mexico, festivities honored his army. He was not always happy about that. By the end of 1845, as Texas was becoming a state and his forces were defending it against Mexico and Indigenous peoples, he had tired of both the monotonous work and the noisy entertainment. He wrote to his daughter Mary Elizabeth, on December 15, about the \u201cconstant employment . . . what with instruction, mounting guards, reviews &amp;c.\u201d He acknowledged that \u201cfine bands &amp; excellen field music has made the pass tolerably rapidly; but,\u201d he added, \u201call the pomp &amp; parade of such things are lost on me, I now sigh for peace &amp; quiet with my family around me-\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Later, when Taylor returned home as a presidential candidate, he developed mixed feelings about the political festivities to which he was constantly invited. He told Orlando Brown, on March 15, 1848, that he would have enjoyed visiting Kentucky at the state legislature\u2019s invitation, seeing \u201cmany old &amp; long cherished friends, all of whom I should have been delighted to have met.\u201d But he was still an officer in the army (he didn\u2019t resign until three months after his election). He worried that opponents would accuse him of spending his leave of absence \u201ctraveling about the country for eletioneering purposes; I therefore deemed it most prudent to decline all such invitations\u201d (Kentucky Historical Society).<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">His reluctance to travel to celebrations, while at least partly rooted in political calculation, may also have accorded with his limited view of the presidency. Candidate Taylor determinedly refused to share his political opinions and argued that even a sitting president\u2019s opinions \u201care neither important nor necessary\u201d (ZT to Unknown, March 29, 1848, in <em>Washington Daily Union<\/em>, October 14, 1848) in a country where Congress took precedence in setting policy. Keeping out of the electoral limelight, perhaps, fit his electoral platform.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Taylor firmly supported, however, honoring the men with whom he served. He may not have loved \u201call the pomp &amp; parade,\u201d but he did not deny it to the officers and soldiers in his army. He also welcomed civilians\u2019 recognition of the hardships that military personnel endured. He often wrote, as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/resource\/mss42440.001_0027_0913\/?sp=433\">he did<\/a> to Jefferson Davis on July 27, 1847, of \u201cour young gallant respectable volunteer soldirs, who have volunteered in the cause of their country, who are daily falling victims to the hardships, privations &amp;c common to a soldiers life, &amp; to the diseases that accompany the march . . . under a tropical sun.\u201d He appreciated written expressions of gratitude for their sacrifices.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Taylor also gratefully read about the \u201cilluminations\u201d\u2014the lighting up of public and private buildings\u2014organized in US cities to celebrate victories in Mexico. He wrote to Robert C. Wood, likely on June 4, 1847, \u201cThe brilliant illuminations in New Orleans, &amp; elsewhere on acc<sup>t.<\/sup> of the success of our arms, shewes that our Citizens duly appreciate the labors, privations &amp; dangers encounted in the publis servants by those employed by them, which demonstations of respect &amp; gratitude must be consoling in some degree to those who have lost relatives, health &amp; friends during this contest\u201d (Huntington Library). Those visual displays were not overseen by the national government. But Taylor and, presumably, many other officers, soldiers, and family members took heart from the local expressions of understanding and support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson. &nbsp; We at the Taylor-Fillmore project have something to celebrate. We just completed the manuscript of the first volume of Zachary Taylor\u2019s and Millard Fillmore\u2019s letters. Editors and student contributors transcribed and annotated 376 documents written by or to those powerful but little-known [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3183,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":586,"date":"2025-01-31T10:32:45","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T16:32:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/?p=586"},"modified":"2025-02-11T12:08:32","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T18:08:32","slug":"news-from-haiti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/news-from-haiti\/","title":{"rendered":"News from Haiti"},"content":{"rendered":"<h6 style=\"text-align: center\"><audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-586-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/01\/News-from-Haiti.m4a?_=3\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/01\/News-from-Haiti.m4a\">http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/01\/News-from-Haiti.m4a<\/a><\/audio><\/h6>\n<h6 style=\"text-align: right\">Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson.<\/h6>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">When documentary editors begin a project, we expect it to cover certain topics. I was confident, when I started preparing Zachary Taylor\u2019s and Millard Fillmore\u2019s letters for publication, that the letters would cover topics I associated with America in the 1840s and 1850s. They would discuss the Mexican-American War, the expansion of slavery, the cholera pandemic, tariff reform, immigration from Germany and Ireland, and the forced removal of Indigenous peoples. On a more personal level, they would discuss Taylor\u2019s and Fillmore\u2019s families, the day-to-day lives of those Taylor and others enslaved, and specific political and diplomatic relationships.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Other topics come as surprises. Presidents wrote and received thousands of letters. We\u2019ve already located nearly five thousand from the decade ending with Fillmore\u2019s administration. Those embrace a wide variety of correspondents and interests, both within and outside the anticipated. I knew the war would show up, but I didn\u2019t know that Taylor corresponded with engineers about setting up a line of flags to communicate across Mexico by semaphore (the letters appeared in the <em>Baltimore Commercial Journal, and Lyford\u2019s Price-Current<\/em>, November 6, 1847). I might have expected letters about art, but I didn\u2019t know that Fillmore corresponded with Elizabeth Milligan about her miniature painting of the former first lady Dolley Payne Todd Madison (Milligan\u2019s letter of June 5, 1844, is in SUNY\u2013Oswego\u2019s Millard Fillmore Papers).<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">I also did not expect to find much about Haiti. Perhaps I should have known better. Through a violent revolution that lasted from 1791 to 1804, Haiti\u2019s enslaved Blacks overthrew the French colonial government. They set up an independent government and excluded Whites from citizenship. Haitians\u2019 success prompted fears among US Whites that the people they enslaved would launch similar uprisings. Those fears, which persisted for decades, helped motivate state laws restricting US Blacks\u2019 freedom and literacy. (You can read more about Haiti in this era in books by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/The_History_of_Haiti\/_bzOEAAAQBAJ\">Steeve Coupeau<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Haiti_The_Tumultuous_History_From_Pearl\/L5KnihgGoIMC\">Philippe Girard<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/isbn_9780761802303\">Robert Debs Heinl et al.<\/a>) So I might have expected to read about Haiti in letters of the 1840s and 1850s, or at least about US perceptions of it.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Personal relationships, though, are key. Both Taylor and Fillmore, it turns out, had close ties with White Americans who spent time in Haiti. Taylor\u2019s second cousin William Taylor, whom he often mentioned in letters, served as agent or consul at Port-au-Prince and Cape Haytien in the 1810s. More important for our period, Millard and Abigail Powers Fillmore were close friends with the Manhattan couple Joseph C. and Julia A. Mason Luther. Millard corresponded with both. Joseph, as it happened, served as US commercial agent at Port-au-Prince from 1843 to 1849.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_587\" style=\"width: 770px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-587\" class=\"size-full wp-image-587\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/01\/Hispaniola-1853.jpg\" alt=\"map of Hispaniola\" width=\"760\" height=\"478\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/01\/Hispaniola-1853.jpg 760w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/01\/Hispaniola-1853-300x189.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 760px) 100vw, 760px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-587\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Map by J. R. Beard of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1853. New York Public Library.<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Joseph Luther wrote Fillmore detailed letters about politics and culture in Haiti. He was there during a tumultuous period. A series of new revolutions rocked the country beginning the year he arrived, as did a major earthquake and fire. Luther recounted the formation of a new constitution and the succession of political and military figures who tried to establish control.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Luther didn\u2019t want to be there. He shared the day\u2019s racist assumptions about People of Color and low esteem for a Black-ruled nation. He told Fillmore <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/sunyoswego\/id\/34591\/rec\/26\">on February 21, 1844<\/a>, that he would rather \u201chave obtained an appointment to some prominent port in Europe, or even in South America, but their being no vacancy of that discription, . . . I was compelled to accept of such as there were, or get none at all.\u201d With Julia back in the United States, furthermore, \u201cI am . . . most wretchedly lonesome out here amongst the negroes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Luther\u2019s criticisms of Haitians ranged from the political to the cultural. He described the constitutional convention, in the same letter, \u201cas somewhat of a sumary way of forming Governments\u201d by US standards, \u201cbut it goes down here as perfectly orthodox.\u201d He conceded that lighter-skinned Haitians included \u201cmany well educated and talented men\u201d but insisted that \u201cthe commonality of the people, are quite uneducated, and exist in the lowest state of moral degradation that it is easy to conceive.\u201d He described Carnival, Haiti\u2019s February celebration, as embracing \u201ccaps and cocked hats of gaudy appearance\u201d and \u201cinstruments for making noises of the strangest and most heathenish sounds possible.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">A week after Luther wrote that letter, another revolution arrived. Since 1822, Haiti had comprised the entirely of the island of Hispaniola. Now eastern residents declared themselves the independent Dominican Republic. War ensued, but Luther reported <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/sunyoswego\/id\/35571\/rec\/30\">on June 10<\/a> that the Dominicans had prevailed. In what remained of Haiti, he predicted \u201cthat the whole government will become dismembered, and formed into small districts or tribes, similar to those of the Indians on our Western Frontiers.\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/sunyoswego\/id\/26583\/rec\/24\">On September 15, 1845<\/a>, he added that the government remained \u201cin a deplorable condition\u201d and observed that, with most men recruited as soldiers, \u201cnearly all the produce which has come to market . . . have been the fruits of female labour.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Joseph Luther still wasn\u2019t happy about his assignment. Neither was Julia. She asked Fillmore <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org\/digital\/collection\/sunyoswego\/id\/26856\/rec\/25\">on November 4, 1846<\/a>, to use his influence to get Joseph a job in New York, \u201cso he may hereafter be at home.\u201d If Fillmore tried, he failed. But the Luthers\u2019 discontent redounds to history students\u2019 benefit. Joseph continued writing to his friend from Haiti until 1849. The transcribed and annotated letters, published in our digital and print volumes, will become new sources both for events in that country and for US attitudes toward it. <em>The<\/em> <em>Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore<\/em> will shed light on both expected and surprising facets of life in the mid-nineteenth century.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Speaking of those volumes, I have an update on our progress. Longtime readers of this blog may recall my forecast that we editors would send our first volume to the publisher this winter. Research, though, sometimes yields an overabundance of riches. We\u2019ve found even more letters and even more sources to annotate them than we\u2019d expected. So we\u2019ve planned some extra research trips to make the volume as complete and informative as possible. I was at the National Archives just this month. We\u2019ll be completing volume 1, which will cover January 1844 to June 1848\u2014and include all the Luthers\u2019 letters quoted here\u2014in the spring. You can expect to see it online and on bookshelves in the spring or summer of 2026. It will be an exciting new source for US history as the nation celebrates its 250th birthday.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_588\" style=\"width: 292px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-588\" class=\"wp-image-588\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/01\/NARA-box-577x1024.jpg\" alt=\"box of manuscript letters\" width=\"282\" height=\"500\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/01\/NARA-box-577x1024.jpg 577w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/01\/NARA-box-169x300.jpg 169w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/01\/NARA-box-768x1364.jpg 768w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/01\/NARA-box-865x1536.jpg 865w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2025\/01\/NARA-box.jpg 1080w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 282px) 100vw, 282px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-588\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Manuscript records at the National Archives in Washington, DC.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson. &nbsp; When documentary editors begin a project, we expect it to cover certain topics. I was confident, when I started preparing Zachary Taylor\u2019s and Millard Fillmore\u2019s letters for publication, that the letters would cover topics I associated with America in the 1840s and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3183,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":578,"date":"2024-12-31T12:17:22","date_gmt":"2024-12-31T18:17:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/?p=578"},"modified":"2025-02-11T12:19:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T18:19:00","slug":"a-presidency-almost-lost-in-the-mail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/a-presidency-almost-lost-in-the-mail\/","title":{"rendered":"A Presidency (Almost) Lost in the Mail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center\"><audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-578-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/12\/A-presidency-almost-lost-in-the-mail.m4a?_=4\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/12\/A-presidency-almost-lost-in-the-mail.m4a\">http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/12\/A-presidency-almost-lost-in-the-mail.m4a<\/a><\/audio><\/p>\n<h6 style=\"text-align: right\">Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson.<\/h6>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>We wish those who celebrate a belated merry Christmas, an ongoing happy Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, and, of course, a joyous new year! Furthermore, why not a grievous Festivus? <em>Seinfeld<\/em> introduced that made-up holiday to television audiences in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0697790\/?ref_=ttep_ep10\">1997<\/a>, but we\u2019ve encountered the word in the nineteenth-century press. The <em>New York Herald<\/em> of August 2, 1867, <a href=\"https:\/\/chroniclingamerica.loc.gov\/lccn\/sn83030313\/1867-08-02\/ed-1\/seq-3\/#date1=1756&amp;index=0&amp;rows=20&amp;searchType=advanced&amp;language=&amp;sequence=0&amp;words=Festivus+Tournament&amp;proxdistance=5&amp;date2=1963&amp;ortext=&amp;proxtext=&amp;phrasetext=%22festivus+tournament%22&amp;andtext=&amp;dateFilterType=yearRange&amp;page=1\">announced<\/a> a \u201cFestivus Tournament\u201d at the Bowery Theatre. The paper didn\u2019t give details, so I can\u2019t confirm whether it involved sharing of grievances and feats of strength.<\/p>\n<p>As we celebrate and look forward, this seems a good time to relate one of the more humorous tales from Zachary Taylor\u2019s political life. It comes from the presidential election of 1848. Because it revolves around developments in mail delivery, I\u2019ll begin with some background on how the post office worked back then.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Postal service in the United States stretches back to the nation\u2019s earliest days. The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/smithsonian-institution\/brief-history-united-states-postal-service-180975627\/\">Second Continental Congress<\/a>, the Articles of Confederation, and the <a href=\"https:\/\/constitution.congress.gov\/browse\/essay\/artI-S8-C7-1\/ALDE_00001068\/\">Constitution<\/a> all authorized it. But postage stamps are newer. None existed before the 1840s. In the first seven decades, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Spreading_the_News\/yH2sBwOiAuIC?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;printsec=frontcover\">Americans paid<\/a> to <em>receive<\/em> rather than to <em>send<\/em> mail. They went to local post offices, collected letters addressed to them, and paid associated costs. Those costs varied according to origin, destination, and size. (Certain government officers, including members of Congress and the president, received mail for free\u2014a privilege known as franking.) Writers did have the option of prepaying postage at the post office, saving recipients the money, but they rarely exercised it.<\/p>\n<p>For those of us studying history through presidential letters, that old system is a boon. Because Americans didn\u2019t need to pay for stamps, they could more affordably write to the president. Many people with limited resources wrote to the White House about their lives and the state of the nation. Had doing so cost money, some probably would not have.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_579\" style=\"width: 279px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-579\" class=\"wp-image-579 size-medium\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/12\/stamp-1845-MO-269x300.jpg\" alt=\"10-cent stamp\" width=\"269\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/12\/stamp-1845-MO-269x300.jpg 269w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/12\/stamp-1845-MO.jpg 628w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 269px) 100vw, 269px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-579\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">St. Louis postmaster\u2019s provisional, 1845. National Postal Museum.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>In 1845, the system started to <a href=\"https:\/\/postalmuseum.si.edu\/exhibition\/about-us-stamps\/postmasters-provisionals-1845-1847\">change<\/a>. First, President John Tyler signed a law simplifying postage rates. Second, Postmaster General Cave Johnson authorized local postmasters to issue adhesive stamps. His action came five years after the introduction of stamps in the United Kingdom. Cities including New York City and St. Louis began printing these \u201cpostmasters\u2019 provisionals,\u201d making it easier for letter writers to prepay postage. The vast majority of communities, however, continued to rely on postpayment or special arrangements for prepayment at the local office.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_580\" style=\"width: 522px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-580\" class=\"wp-image-580\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/12\/stamps-1847.jpg\" alt=\"5-cent and 10-cent stamps\" width=\"512\" height=\"500\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/12\/stamps-1847.jpg 700w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/12\/stamps-1847-300x293.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-580\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Proof of 1847 US stamps. National Postal Museum.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Two years later, on March 3, 1847, President James K. Polk <a href=\"https:\/\/postalmuseum.si.edu\/the-1847-issue\">signed a law<\/a> authorizing the federal government to print stamps. This law opened to all Americans the modern way of sending mail. The Post Office Department introduced two stamps, one worth five cents with Benjamin Franklin\u2019s image and one worth ten with George Washington\u2019s. (Officeholders\u2019 franking privilege came to mean sending, rather than receiving, mail for free.) Even so, the law did not require correspondents to use the stamps. They still could choose between affixing those or leaving letters\u2019 recipients responsible for the postage. Sending mail postage-due, not postage-paid, remained the more common practice. Not until 1855 did Congress <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Spreading_the_News\/yH2sBwOiAuIC?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;bsq=prepayment\">mandate prepayment<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>As postage stamps appeared on the scene, so did presidential candidate Zachary Taylor. In 1847, while he won battles in the Mexican-American War, supporters began promoting him as Polk\u2019s successor. Many wrote to him expressing their support and urging him to run. After he returned in December from Mexico to his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, stacks of letters about his electoral prospects began arriving there. In his own letters he often repeated his reluctance to serve in Washington, but he allowed allies to introduce his name at the Whig National Convention in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n<p>On June 9, 1848, the convention nominated Taylor as president of the United States. The convention\u2019s president, John M. Morehead, wrote to him the next day announcing his nomination and requesting his acceptance.<\/p>\n<p>Taylor did not respond.<\/p>\n<p>Morehead waited a week. Then another. Then most of another. But no word came from the presidential nominee. So, on June 28, Morehead wrote another letter. He enclosed a copy of his first.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Taylor had <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Zachary_Taylor\/H42TwTwE1IwC?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;bsq=morehead\">learned<\/a> of his nomination, but not from Morehead\u2019s letter. Telegraph wires, unknown in the United States five years earlier but rapidly laid down since, carried the news to Memphis. From there, a steamboat\u2014named, of all things, the <em>General Taylor<\/em>\u2014brought the news down the Mississippi River to its namesake\u2019s Cypress Grove Plantation. The crew fired guns, and the passengers shouted congratulations to the nominee when they spotted him. Taylor, according to a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/President_Zachary_Taylor\/fmDjQXgSxVQC?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;bsq=%22general%20taylor%22\">biographer<\/a>, displayed no emotion. He noted in some private letters that he had heard the news. But, he added, he was still waiting for an official notification.<\/p>\n<p>What had happened to the letter? Well, Morehead had sent it the old way: postage-due. So, throughout the spring, had many of those writing unofficial letters of support to Taylor. When he went to the Baton Rouge post office and saw the volume of his postage-due mail, he decided not to pay for it all. He glanced through the letters, accepted those whose handwriting or senders\u2019 names he recognized, and refused receipt of the rest. The refused letters totaled forty-eight from April to June. They included Morehead\u2019s announcement of Taylor\u2019s nomination for the presidency. The local postmaster sent it, along with the other forty-seven, to Washington for deposit in the dead letter office.<\/p>\n<p>Taylor soon heard what had happened. He requested the letters\u2019 return, and the Baton Rouge postmaster relayed that request to Washington on July 8. The Post Office Department sent them back on July 22. But before they arrived (if they ever did\u2014we haven\u2019t found the original Morehead letter), Morehead\u2019s second letter with the enclosed copy of the first one did (they\u2019re now in the University of Kentucky\u2019s Zachary Taylor Collection). Perhaps guessing what had gone wrong, he had paid the postage on that one. Apparently not having an adhesive stamp available, he\u2019d had a postal employee stamp it in ink. Finally getting the official notification of his nomination on July 14, Taylor responded, accepting it, the next day.<\/p>\n<p>Newspapers around the country reported the mishap. Whig papers either blamed the post office for the letter\u2019s delay, before learning otherwise, or praised Taylor for his thrift and priorities. According to the <em>Plaquemine (LA) Southern Sentinel<\/em> of August 10, he had chosen wisely to spend his money on \u201cobjects of charity . . . more deserving\u201d than unpaid letters from people he didn\u2019t know. Democratic papers portrayed him instead as a miser. The <em>Washington Daily Union<\/em>, the Democratic Party\u2019s chief organ, issued regular reports on the developing story of the missing missive. After learning why Taylor had not received it promptly, the <em>Union<\/em> on July 25 charged him with \u201cmiserable petty economy\u201d in not \u201ctaking all his letters.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After the delay and drama, Taylor had gotten Morehead\u2019s letter. We are as yet unsure of the other forty-seven letters\u2019 fate. Taylor formally accepted his nomination for the presidency, journalists turned the incident to partisan purposes, and the campaign carried on. The story, if nothing else, highlights the value of that invention of the 1840s, the postage stamp.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Before I close this post and this year, I want to highlight some project <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/news\/\">news<\/a>. The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.archives.gov\/nhprc\">National Historical Publications and Records Commission<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.delmas.org\/\">The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation<\/a> recently awarded generous grants to American University\u2019s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies to support our work in 2025\u201326. We are deeply grateful to the NHPRC and the Delmas Foundation, both of them multiyear supporters, for their commitment to expanding access to historical documents. The NHPRC award of $124,097, the largest grant ever made for our project, is one of many awards announced in a National Archives press release and the latest NHPRC <a href=\"https:\/\/www.archives.gov\/nhprc\/newsletter\/december2024\">newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Oh, one more thing! The Taylor-Fillmore project is now on LinkedIn. We\u2019re sharing project updates, nineteenth-century tidbits, and news from others who edit and publish historical documents. If you\u2019re on the site, please consider following <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/company\/taylorandfillmore\">@taylorandfillmore<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson. &nbsp; We wish those who celebrate a belated merry Christmas, an ongoing happy Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, and, of course, a joyous new year! Furthermore, why not a grievous Festivus? Seinfeld introduced that made-up holiday to television audiences in 1997, but we\u2019ve encountered the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3183,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":560,"date":"2024-07-22T09:03:18","date_gmt":"2024-07-22T14:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/?p=560"},"modified":"2025-06-03T14:07:17","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T19:07:17","slug":"when-the-president-stepped-aside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/when-the-president-stepped-aside\/","title":{"rendered":"Bonus Blog: When the President Stepped Aside"},"content":{"rendered":"<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-560-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/Bonus-blog-when-the-president-stepped-aside.m4a?_=5\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/Bonus-blog-when-the-president-stepped-aside.m4a\">http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/Bonus-blog-when-the-president-stepped-aside.m4a<\/a><\/audio>\n<h6 style=\"text-align: right\">Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson.<\/h6>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\nSometimes the world surprises even us historians. Less than two weeks have passed since my last blog entry, and I didn&#8217;t intend to return so soon. But recent news makes this seem the right time to share events from the 1840s and 1850s that will sound familiar today.<\/p>\n<p>Two stories in presidential politics have dominated the headlines this month. First, a would-be assassin shot Donald Trump. The former president and Republican nominee, thank goodness, survived, but one supporter was killed, and two others were severely injured. Second, amid questions about Joe Biden\u2019s age and capability, some Democrats have called for the incumbent president\u2019s replacement as their presumptive nominee. Yesterday, President Biden announced his withdrawal from the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.<\/p>\n<p>Neither Zachary Taylor nor Millard Fillmore, to our best knowledge, was the target of an assassination attempt. Some have speculated that Taylor\u2019s death while president, usually attributed to gastrointestinal illness, resulted instead from murder by arsenic poisoning. But neither documentary nor chemical evidence\u2014the latter obtained when his body was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.c-span.org\/video\/?124351-1\/exhumation-zachary-taylor\">exhumed<\/a> in 1991\u2014supports that hypothesis.<\/p>\n<p>Taylor and Fillmore did, however, live in an age when some presidents voluntarily served only one term. From 1888 until yesterday, every president who completed a first term sought and won his party\u2019s nomination for a second. Not so before then. In the decade our project studies, not just one, and not just two, but <em>three<\/em> first-term presidents chose not to seek a second. Two of them did so despite significant support from constituents. John Tyler in 1844, James K. Polk in 1848, and Fillmore in 1852 either prevented or declined their parties\u2019 nods for four more years.<\/p>\n<p>In 1844, Tyler had little chance of victory. Previously a Democrat, he had been elected vice president as a Whig in 1840. When President William Henry Harrison died after one month in office, Tyler succeeded him. Never having supported many policies popular with Whigs, he made decisions as president that led to their officially expelling him from the party and left him with little support anywhere. In 1844 he launched a third-party candidacy under the so-cleverly named \u201cTyler Party.\u201d In August, however, facing the reality that he could not win and the satisfaction that the Democrats had not nominated Martin Van Buren, whom he detested, Tyler ended his campaign. The election came down to the Whig Henry Clay and the Democrat Polk. Polk won.<\/p>\n<p>Four years later came Polk\u2019s chance for reelection. He, however, already had dismissed the idea. Right after his nomination in 1844 by the Democratic National Convention, Polk took his friend Aaron V. Brown\u2019s advice to pledge that he would serve only one term. (Harrison had made such a pledge in 1840, but his death had rendered it a moot point.) In his letter accepting the nomination, Polk announced that, if elected, \u201cAt the end of four years I am resolved to retire to private life. In assuming this position I feel that I not only impose on myself a salutary restraint, but that I take the most effective means in my power of enabling the Democratic party to make a free selection of a successor.\u201d (Brown\u2019s May 30 and Polk\u2019s June 12 letters are published <a href=\"https:\/\/trace.tennessee.edu\/utk_polk\/8\/\">here<\/a>.) In other words, Polk seems to have been motivated by other Democrats\u2019 ambitions for the White House. He would defer those ambitions for only four years, not eight.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_561\" style=\"width: 968px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-561\" class=\"size-full wp-image-561\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/election-cartoon-1848.jpg\" alt=\"cartoon portraying presidential candidates of 1848 as a funeral\" width=\"958\" height=\"627\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/election-cartoon-1848.jpg 958w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/election-cartoon-1848-300x196.jpg 300w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/election-cartoon-1848-768x503.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 958px) 100vw, 958px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-561\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">This political cartoon of 1848 shows Polk, on the right, being carried away on a stretcher. Library of Congress.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The pledge did not stop supporters from trying to change Polk\u2019s mind. Benjamin Boston, an Indiana Democrat, <a href=\"https:\/\/trace.tennessee.edu\/utk_polk\/3\/\">wrote him<\/a> on July 7, 1847, \u201cI have heard that you had Declined Being a Candidate for the Presidency. I hope it is not So for the Country Canot Do Without your Services four years Longer and I hope you Will consent to Run a Second time.\u201d Right up until the convention, held in Baltimore in May 1848, some argued that only Polk could unite the party and defeat the Whigs. After some delegates told him that they might nominate him in spite of his wishes, Polk found it necessary to write <a href=\"https:\/\/trace.tennessee.edu\/utk_polk\/15\/\">a letter<\/a> to the convention on May 20 forswearing his own candidacy and vowing to support the nominee. The convention nominated Lewis Cass, who lost the election to the Whig Taylor.<\/p>\n<p>In 1852, it was Fillmore\u2019s turn. Having been elected vice president in 1848 and succeeded to the presidency after Taylor\u2019s death in 1850, he had time to consider whether to seek a term in his own right. And he took his time. By the end of 1851, he privately had indicated a lack of interest in the Whig nomination and support for the candidacy of Daniel Webster\u2014who, as secretary of state with the vice presidency vacant, was the second most senior member of the administration. But Fillmore did not formally withdraw or otherwise publicly announce his plans. He <a href=\"https:\/\/www.invaluable.com\/auction-lot\/autograph-letter-signed-millard-fillmore-13th-pre-39-c-a27c031a4d\">wrote<\/a> to his friend Thomas M. Foote on April 27, 1852, laying out his stance: he did not want the nomination, and he would not work to obtain it, but he would not stop others from trying to give it to him. He admitted to Foote that this was \u201ca false position before the public.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Fillmore\u2019s supporters, neither encouraged nor impeded by him, pursued his nomination. Some described him as the party\u2019s only chance at victory. Fillmore delegates joined those supporting Webster and Winfield Scott (the other lead Mexican-American War general, besides Taylor) at the Whig National Convention in Baltimore in June. There were no primaries in the nineteenth century, so delegates got to make their own decisions about whom to nominate.<\/p>\n<p>Just before the convention began, Fillmore finally issued his decision\u2014sort of. He sent a letter to the convention, via delegation leader George R. Babcock, announcing his withdrawal. But Babcock ignored the letter and pursued the nomination anyway. (The Babcock correspondence is in the Free Library of Philadelphia\u2019s Presidential Letters collection). So the delegates voted . . . and voted . . . and voted. They voted fifty-three times.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_562\" style=\"width: 936px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-562\" class=\"wp-image-562\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/election-cartoon-1852-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"cartoon portraying presidential candidates of 1852 by the Salt River\" width=\"926\" height=\"627\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/election-cartoon-1852-scaled.jpg 2560w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/election-cartoon-1852-300x203.jpg 300w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/election-cartoon-1852-1024x693.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/election-cartoon-1852-768x520.jpg 768w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/election-cartoon-1852-1536x1040.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/election-cartoon-1852-2048x1387.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 926px) 100vw, 926px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-562\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">This political cartoon of 1852 shows Fillmore, on the left, being kicked into the river. Library of Congress.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>From the start, Fillmore and Webster together had a majority. But neither of those two insider candidates had one alone. For days, neither publicly announced his withdrawal in the other\u2019s favor. Then, without consulting each other, <em>each<\/em> notified the convention <em>simultaneously<\/em> that he was withdrawing. Their conflicting telegrams merely confused the delegates. Even Fillmore and Webster afterwards <a href=\"https:\/\/rotunda.upress.virginia.edu\/founders\/WBST-01-07-02-0315\">wrote<\/a> to <a href=\"https:\/\/rotunda.upress.virginia.edu\/founders\/WBST-01-07-02-0316\">each other<\/a> expressing uncertainty about how the convention would react (but not proposing any clarification). In the end, absent any coordination between those two, a few delegates from each camp switched to Scott and gave that outsider the nomination. He lost the election to the Democrat Franklin Pierce.<\/p>\n<p>Thus Tyler, Polk, and Fillmore\u2014at least in part by choice\u2014became one-term (or less) presidents. After four years out of office, Fillmore did again seek a second term. The Whig Party having collapsed, he won the American (or Know-Nothing) Party\u2019s nomination in 1856. Meanwhile, under different circumstances, a trend continued: in neither 1856 nor 1860 did the incumbent president get his party&#8217;s nomination. But that\u2019s another blog.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>For more details on these presidential withdrawals, see the Tyler biographies by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/_\/wxEpAAAACAAJ\">Oliver Perry Chitwood<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/President_without_a_Party\/SGfXDwAAQBAJ\">Christopher J. Leahy<\/a>, the Polk ones by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/President_James_K_Polk\/PYSs5yfHZCIC\">Louise A. Mayo<\/a> and \u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/Polk\/pumXB9TONO4C\">Walter Borneman<\/a>, and the Fillmore ones listed <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/millard-fillmore\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, we have a social media update! You can now follow us @ZTandMF on both <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/ZTandMF\">X<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.threads.net\/@ztandmf\">Threads<\/a>. You also can subscribe to this blog, if you\u2019re viewing it on a computer, in the column to the left.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson. &nbsp; Sometimes the world surprises even us historians. Less than two weeks have passed since my last blog entry, and I didn&#8217;t intend to return so soon. But recent news makes this seem the right time to share events from the 1840s and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3183,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":554,"date":"2024-07-10T09:40:35","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T14:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/?p=554"},"modified":"2025-06-03T14:44:13","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T19:44:13","slug":"war-religion-atrocities-and-prisoners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/war-religion-atrocities-and-prisoners\/","title":{"rendered":"War, Religion, Atrocities, and Prisoners"},"content":{"rendered":"<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-554-6\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/War-Religion-Atrocities-and-Prisoners.mp3?_=6\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/War-Religion-Atrocities-and-Prisoners.mp3\">http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/War-Religion-Atrocities-and-Prisoners.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<h6 style=\"text-align: right\">Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson.<\/h6>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<div id=\"attachment_556\" style=\"width: 354px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-556\" class=\"wp-image-556\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/eclipse-783x1024.jpg\" alt=\"map of 1846 solar eclipse\" width=\"344\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/eclipse-783x1024.jpg 783w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/eclipse-229x300.jpg 229w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/eclipse-768x1005.jpg 768w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/eclipse.jpg 1080w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 344px) 100vw, 344px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-556\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Library of Congress.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n<p>April 25, 1846, was a dark day in North American history. Literally. On that day, the moon passed directly between Earth and the Sun. Some Caribbean islands experienced a total solar eclipse. Much of Mexico and the United States got a partial one. As on April 8, 2024, the sky\u2019s light was blotted out.<\/p>\n<p>But that was not all. For those who cherished peace, April 25 was also a dark day in a figurative sense. Near the shore of the Rio Grande, in territory disputed between the two countries, Mexican troops surrounded and fired on US ones. On that dark day, the Mexican-American War began.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>With the occasional break for astronomical phenomena, much of the news today centers on international violence. Most prominent are the wars between Ukraine and Russia and between Israel and Hamas. This emphasis is not new. Both news cycles and historical eras have long been defined by wars. Historians of the United States, for instance, divide their timeline into the Revolutionary Era, the Civil War Era, the Cold War Era, and suchlike.<\/p>\n<p>That periodization makes me think about our project\u2019s place in the span of US history. We are editing letters written between 1844 and 1853. That decade was part of what historians usually call the <em>antebellum<\/em> period, meaning the period <em>before the war<\/em>. The label is accurate, as both the chronology and the letters reflect. Americans fought the Civil War eight years after Millard Fillmore\u2019s presidency. His and Zachary Taylor\u2019s letters, including some that I\u2019ve <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/taylor-coups-and-union\/\">quoted<\/a> in this blog, express fears or threats of such a conflict.<\/p>\n<p>But our decade wasn\u2019t just <em>before<\/em> a war. The United States, from 1846 to 1848, was <em>at<\/em> war. In addition to the numerous violent struggles with Indigenous peoples whose land White Americans coveted\u2014struggles in which Taylor had built his military career\u2014these years revolved around the Mexican-American War. Given how central it was to Taylor\u2019s life, and how central it will be to our first volume of letters\u2014which is rapidly approaching completion\u2014it seems high time to devote a blog entry to it. Regular readers of the blog, and users of our <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/teaching-guide-texas\/\">teaching guide<\/a>, already know parts of the story. Today I want to highlight some tragedies and dilemmas of war that, though in different forms and contexts, persist across space and time.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>It started with Texas. In 1821, Mexico won its independence from Spain. One of the new nation\u2019s states was Coahuila y Tejas. White Americans soon began immigrating into the part of it that they called Texas, often bringing enslaved African Americans and setting up cotton plantations. Mexico\u2019s closing the border in 1830 did not stop them from immigrating illegally. In 1836 US expatriates outnumbered Mexicans in Texas, controlled its government, declared its independence, and asked the United States to annex it. The US government hesitated, fearing that annexation would anger both Mexico, which still claimed Texas, and Northern US Whites, who resented the political power of Southern enslavers. Interested parties did not even agree on how much hitherto Mexican territory Texas included. But in 1845, at the insistence of Presidents John Tyler and James K. Polk, the United States admitted Texas as a state, come what might.<\/p>\n<p>Those anticipating Mexico\u2019s anger had been right. As far as its government was concerned, the United States had no right to annex Mexican Texas. And it had even less right to annex the land southwest of the Nueces River and northeast of the Rio Grande, which Polk claimed was included in the deal but which Mexico denied was even part of Texas. Both nations prepared for war. Under orders from Washington, General Taylor led troops into Texas in 1845 and to the Rio Grande in 1846. On April 25, Mexican troops ambushed a US scouting party at the Carricitos Ranch, just north of the river. Eleven Americans died, and the war had begun.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_557\" style=\"width: 339px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-557\" class=\"size-full wp-image-557\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/war.jpg\" alt=\"map of Mexican-American War\" width=\"329\" height=\"424\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/war.jpg 329w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/war-233x300.jpg 233w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 329px) 100vw, 329px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-557\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Joel Dorman Steele, A Brief History of the United States (New York: American, 1885). Private collection of Roy Winkelman\/Florida Center for Instructional Technology, University of South Florida, https:\/\/etc.usf.edu\/maps.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I won\u2019t give all the details here. You can read them in narratives of the war by historians such as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nebraskapress.unl.edu\/bison-books\/9780803261075\/\">K. Jack Bauer<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.penguinrandomhouse.com\/books\/200246\/a-wicked-war-by-amy-s-greenberg\/\">Amy S. Greenberg<\/a>\u2014or in the letters by Taylor and his contemporaries when our volume comes out. To summarize, though, in 1846 and 1847 Taylor commanded at battles near the Rio Grande while General Winfield Scott led an invasion of southern Mexico that culminated in the capture of Mexico City. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, ended hostilities and transferred half of Mexico\u2019s territory\u2014everything from Texas to California\u2014to the United States. Taylor\u2019s military success made him a national hero, leading to his election as, well, you know. Debate over whether to extend slavery into the new US possessions escalated the debate over slavery, eventually leading to Southern secession and, well, you know.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>When mentioning the war in earlier blog entries, I have noted its connections with <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/race-history-and-presidents\/\">race<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/taylor-fillmore-and-the-constitution\/\">constitutionalism<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/dont-elect-me\/\">electoral politics<\/a>. But Taylor, Polk, and their Mexican counterparts also faced other questions as they determined and executed war policy. Those included questions prominent in the wars on our televisions today.<\/p>\n<p>For one, what role would religion play? The United States, a majority Protestant nation, was fighting (invading, from the Mexican perspective) an officially Catholic one. With many native-born Americans resentful of Catholic immigrants, people in both countries wondered if the United States would use this war to weaken or overthrow the Catholic Church in Mexico. The Polk administration tried to quash that speculation, to some nativists\u2019 dismay, appointing Jesuit priests to accompany the army and ordering Taylor to proclaim in June 1846 that Mexicans\u2019 religion and Church property would be protected. \u201c[W]e come to overthrow the tyrants who have destroyed your liberties,\u201d the Americans explained, \u201cbut we come to make no war upon the people of Mexico.\u201d (Copies of the proclamation, in Spanish and English, are at Yale\u2019s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Huntington Library, and the National Archives.) Some Mexicans remained unconvinced. The Mexican revolutionary Hilario de Mesa told Taylor on February 2, 1847, of his compatriots\u2019 concerns that their northern neighbors would attempt \u201cthe entire conquest of Our race, [and] of our religion\u201d (National Archives).<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_558\" style=\"width: 385px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-558\" class=\"wp-image-558\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/proclamation-769x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"US proclamation in Spanish to Mexican people\" width=\"375\" height=\"500\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/proclamation-769x1024.jpeg 769w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/proclamation-225x300.jpeg 225w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/proclamation-768x1023.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/proclamation-1153x1536.jpeg 1153w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/proclamation-1537x2048.jpeg 1537w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2024\/07\/proclamation-scaled.jpeg 1922w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 375px) 100vw, 375px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-558\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">National Archives, Record Group 233, file code 29A\u2013E1.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Whatever their policies, neither civil nor military authorities could control every soldier. Taylor\u2019s letters are littered with reports of and frustrations over war atrocities. A series of crimes that particularly irked him began when US volunteers near Agua Nueva raped several Mexican women on Christmas Day 1846. Retaliatory murders of US soldiers and Mexican civilians led to an investigation by Taylor and other officers. Unable to identify the guilty men, Taylor punished their entire companies. On February 18 he told Eduardo Gonzalez, a local Mexican politician, \u201cthose outrages could not have caused you a deeper regret than it did myself.\u201d Citing \u201cthe interests of humanity,\u201d he expressed a determination \u201cto punish them as severely as the laws will permit\u201d and to \u201cprevent . . . such scenes in future.\u201d He added, however, that in other instances Mexicans had attacked or killed US soldiers \u201cwithout provocation\u201d (National Archives).<\/p>\n<p>Taylor also corresponded regularly with Mexican leaders about prisoners of war. After the US surrender at the Carricitos Ranch, the Mexicans incarcerated nearly the entire US scouting party. When Taylor\u2019s forces captured cities, such as Monterrey in a major battle in September 1846, they likewise took prisoners. After each such event, the commanding officers discussed whether, when, and how to exchange POWs. Both sides wanted their people back, but ironing out the details sometimes required a long exchange of letters. Those details sometimes extended beyond the release of captured soldiers. Francisco de Paula Morales, governor of Nuevo Le\u00f3n, wrote to Taylor on September 23 that poor families in Monterrey had lacked the resources to leave before the battle. He asked Taylor either to let them evacuate or to order US troops to \u201crespect\u201d them. Taylor, answering the same day, chose the latter but with a caveat: \u201cthe rights of individuals, who are not hostile, particularly women and children, will be respected as much as is possible in a state of warlike operations.\u201d (Morales\u2019s letter is in the National Archives; Taylor\u2019s was published in the <em>Washington Daily Union<\/em>, Nov. 10, 1846.)<\/p>\n<p>Given the privations and tragedies faced by those living amid the Mexican-American War\u2014both soldiers and civilians\u2014it is perhaps unsurprising that the lifelong officer Taylor often yearned for peace. He wrote to Congressman Truman Smith on March 4, 1848, \u201cI am a peace man, and . . . I deem a state of peace to be absolutely necessary to the proper and healthful action of our republican institutions\u201d (<em>Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer<\/em>, Aug. 2, 1848). Once he became president, he was surely happy to <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=XE1DAAAAYAAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=A+Compilation+of+the+Messages+and+Papers+of+the+Presidents,+1789-1908,+Volume+5&amp;hl=en&amp;newbks=1&amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjh79r46sLoAhWNB50JHRQSC6QQ6AEwAHoECAUQAg#v=onepage&amp;q=%22we%20are%20at%20peace%22&amp;f=false\">report<\/a> in his Annual Message to Congress (what we today call the State of the Union Address) on December 4, 1849, that \u201cWe are at peace with all the other nations of the world.\u201d The claim was an exaggeration, given the continuing violent removal of Indigenous peoples. From his perspective, though, a brighter day had dawned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Click above to listen to this article, read by Kate E. Hutchinson. &nbsp; April 25, 1846, was a dark day in North American history. Literally. On that day, the moon passed directly between Earth and the Sun. Some Caribbean islands experienced a total solar eclipse. Much of Mexico and the United States got a partial [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3183,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":522,"date":"2024-01-31T10:17:54","date_gmt":"2024-01-31T16:17:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/?p=522"},"modified":"2024-01-31T10:17:54","modified_gmt":"2024-01-31T16:17:54","slug":"annotation-translating-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/annotation-translating-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Annotation: Translating the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier in this blog, I discussed our processes for <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/where-the-letters-come-from\/\">locating<\/a> Zachary Taylor\u2019s and Millard Fillmore\u2019s letters and for <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/transcription-101\/\">transcribing and proofreading<\/a> them. Those tasks continue, as we are always finding more documents in libraries, archives, and private collections. Our database now includes over 4,500 letters by or to the twelfth and thirteenth presidents, plus hundreds of enclosures and cover letters.<\/p>\n<p>Mostly, though, we\u2019ve moved on to the next stages of documentary editing. As you may recall, we intend to publish three print and digital volumes of Taylor\u2019s and Fillmore\u2019s letters from 1844 to 1853, the decade preceding and including their presidencies. Volume 1, which we will send off to the publisher next winter, will cover from January 1844 to June 1848, ending just after the Mexican-American War and the two men\u2019s nomination for president and vice president. By last summer we had located nearly all surviving letters from that period (but please <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/contact-us\/\">tell us<\/a> if one\u2019s in your attic!) and transcribed and proofread those that will appear in the volume.<\/p>\n<p>Today I want to tell you what we\u2019ve been up to lately. It\u2019s time to discuss what documentary editors do after finalizing the transcriptions.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve subtitled this entry \u201cTranslating the Past.\u201d For some letters, the next stage is <em>literal<\/em> translation. Because most people studying US history read English, that will be the language of the edition. Both Taylor and Fillmore were native speakers, and we have yet to find any letter than either man wrote in another language. But they <em>received<\/em> letters from diverse people around the United States and beyond. Many immigrants and their US-born children continued to use continental European tongues, many Native Americans used those of their own nations, and diplomats often wrote in French, the literal <em>lingua franca<\/em> of their profession. During the Mexican-American War, Taylor corresponded with Mexican leaders and citizens who wrote in Spanish. So the incoming letters, unlike the outgoing ones, are a linguistically diverse corpus.<\/p>\n<p>Our first volume will include two dozen letters originally written in Spanish and one originally written in French. For some of those, we have contemporary translations. Taylor\u2019s aide-de-camp (and later son-in-law) William W. S. Bliss, for example, was a talented linguist who translated for the general. In those cases, we will publish the English version that the future president read. But if we only have the Spanish or French, we will translate it for our readers. Editorial colleagues and American University students are helping us with that process. Thus we can include letters by such people as Mariquita Lopez, of Matamoros, Mexico, who sought Taylor\u2019s help to support her indigent family (the letter\u2019s held <a href=\"https:\/\/www.archives.gov\/findingaid\/stat\/discovery\/94\">here<\/a>), and Ynocenio Leyba, likely a Mexican soldier, who had lost his right foot and was lying in a hospital destitute of money and clothing (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sanjacinto-museum.org\/Learn\/Library\/\">here<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Having found the letters, transcribed and proofread them, and, if necessary, translated them into English, we\u2019re ready to publish, right? No. Of course not. My blog entries are rarely this short. Besides, I\u2019ve titled this one \u201cAnnotation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Our goal is to make original documents from US history widely accessible. <em>Accessible<\/em> means more than <em>available<\/em>. Please pardon what may sound like semantic hairsplitting. We editors often use <em>available<\/em> to mean \u201cin a place where readers can find them\u201d and <em>accessible<\/em> to mean \u201cin a condition in which readers can use them.\u201d Under these definitions, we could make the letters <em>available<\/em> by publishing images of handwritten manuscripts. Or, to be kinder to users\u2019 eyes and screen readers, we could do so by publishing transcriptions and translations. But would those be <em>accessible<\/em>\u2014would they be <em>usable<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p>Consider an example I cited in my blog entry on transcription. Here\u2019s the beginning of a letter that Thurlow Weed wrote to Fillmore on September 19, 1844:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_298\" style=\"width: 730px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-298\" class=\"size-large wp-image-298\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2021\/04\/Weed-1024x413.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"720\" height=\"290\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2021\/04\/Weed-1024x413.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2021\/04\/Weed-300x121.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2021\/04\/Weed-768x310.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2021\/04\/Weed-1536x619.jpeg 1536w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2021\/04\/Weed-2048x825.jpeg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-298\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Thurlow Weed to Fillmore, Sept. 19, 1844 (Millard Fillmore Papers, SUNY-Oswego)<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Weed\u2019s handwriting was terrible (or, as editors say, \u201ca fun challenge\u201d), so publishing just the image would be cruel. But say we were to publish a transcription:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\">Dear Fillmore,<br \/>\nI found your Letter last night on my return from Auburn, where I was called to arrange some matters that would permit Seward to get off to <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through\">his<\/span> fulfil his appointments in the Northern Counties.<\/p>\n<p>Now you can read the text. But what does it mean? Someone reading <em>The Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore<\/em>, and with access to its introduction, probably knows who \u201cFillmore\u201d was. But who was \u201cSeward\u201d? Who, for that matter, was Weed? Which letter of Fillmore\u2019s is he referencing? To understand Weed\u2019s letter and to use it to study history, you need to know these things. Sure, Wikipedia will reveal that William H. Seward was New York\u2019s former governor and that Weed was an Albany journalist and Whig Party manager. But do you trust Wikipedia without checking it against reliable primary sources and historical research? I don\u2019t recommend that. Fact checking is important and takes time. And we\u2019ve only gotten through the first of thirteen paragraphs in the letter.<\/p>\n<p>Besides, most people and events aren\u2019t famous. They aren\u2019t on Wikipedia or other freely available (let alone trustworthy) websites. Let\u2019s move on from Weed. Consider a letter that Amy Larrabee Cotz and I have been working on recently (held <a href=\"https:\/\/www.archives.gov\/findingaid\/stat\/discovery\/94\">here<\/a>). Anthony Bracklin wrote this to Taylor on June 4, 1846:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\">I was sent to the, Genl Depot at Fort Columbus and from the<span style=\"text-decoration: line-through\">ir<\/span>^re^ assigned to Company \u2018H\u2019 1<u><sup>st<\/sup><\/u> Arty which Company I joined at Eastport, where, as the Company ^was^ over the number of laundresses alowed by law, my wife lost her rations on account being the youngest.- Impossible to support a family with $6<span style=\"text-decoration: line-through\">00<\/span>^&#8221;&#8221;^ dollars a month, and a single ration per day, separated hundreds of miles from my family; I tried to find a chance for transfer to a Company where a laundress is wanted<\/p>\n<p>To understand this letter, we need some background. Bracklin tells us that he\u2019s a soldier in a particular army unit and that he served at Fort Columbus and then Eastport. But additional information on him would be nice. Where was he from? What years did he live? Did he have much military experience? Where were Fort Columbus and Eastport? Most important to the letter, who was Anthony\u2019s wife? He doesn\u2019t name her. What\u2019s this business about \u201claundresses alowed by law\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>Wikipedia or a Google search will not answer most of these questions. We spent significant time going through other historians\u2019 research and through primary sources beyond Anthony\u2019s letter. We then wrote footnotes, which we will include with the letter when we publish it, telling readers that he was a longtime soldier from New York (where Fort Columbus and Eastport were); that his wife was Mary A. Bracklin, who later lived independently while working as a washerwoman; and that the army hired women as laundresses from 1802 to 1883. Military enlistment records, city directories, and historical newspapers, most of them neither freely available to nor easily navigable by our readers, were especially helpful in researching this letter\u2019s annotation.<\/p>\n<p>In short, we editors provide readers with the knowledge that a letter\u2019s author assumed the recipient had, plus additional information that helps put the letter in its historical context. Or, as Bianca Swift wrote in her excellent introspective <a href=\"https:\/\/scholarlyediting.org\/issues\/40\/time-enough-but-none-to-spare\/\">essay<\/a> about digitizing the works of Charles W. Chesnutt, \u201cWe try to make his world a formula we can understand.\u201d This is how I think of annotation: even if a letter is in English, we editors are responsible for translating references such as \u201cSeward,\u201d \u201cmy wife,\u201d and \u201claundresses alowed by law\u201d\u2014perfectly clear, perhaps, to the letters\u2019 original recipients\u2014into explanations meaningful to people today. We identify people, institutions, events, and other topics in the letters so that twenty-first-century readers can use them to learn nineteenth-century history without all the preliminary work needed to understand the letters themselves. That doesn\u2019t mean we find everything. Swift, when reading Chesnutt\u2019s reflections on the challenges of a Black lawyer and writer, finds herself \u201cwonder[ing] if he cried\u201d and unable to answer the question for her readers or herself. We share the basic (but often hard-to-find) background so that readers can mine the letters for what <em>they<\/em> reveal about the nineteenth-century world.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes the references we must identify (or translate, in this figurative sense) verge on the comical or the maddening. Zachary Taylor, when discussing various relatives in letters to his daughter, often refers to two of them as \u201cM<sup>r.<\/sup> &amp; M<sup>rs.<\/sup> Taylor.\u201d The family, of course, included quite a few couples by that name. From the context and comparisons among the letters, we were able to determine which couple he meant. The dreaded \u201cMr. Smith\u201d reference presents a similar challenge. And, as a leader of a society that threatened to divide Black families and in which Black family names were uncommon, Zachary Taylor referred to people he enslaved only by first names\u2014as \u201cMary,\u201d for example, even though he enslaved multiple women named Mary. We do our best, using records behind online paywalls, in physical archives and libraries, and on our own bursting bookshelves, to translate the \u201cTaylors,\u201d \u201cSmiths,\u201d and \u201cMarys\u201d into real individuals with real stories that give the letters meaning.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Before I go, I want to share a conversation I recently had about (surprise, surprise) Millard Fillmore. The <em>American History Hit<\/em> podcast kindly invited me to speak with Don Wildman about him as part of a series on all the presidents. (Dr. Cecily Zander did the one on Taylor.) We covered quite the gamut of Fillmore topics, from slavery\u2019s expansion to controversy over Freemasonry to trade with Japan and China. You can listen to our conversation and find the rest of the series <a href=\"https:\/\/shows.acast.com\/american-history-hit\/episodes\/president-millard-fillmore-the-most-handsome-president\">here<\/a> or, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, Don and the History Hit team, for this fun opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier in this blog, I discussed our processes for locating Zachary Taylor\u2019s and Millard Fillmore\u2019s letters and for transcribing and proofreading them. Those tasks continue, as we are always finding more documents in libraries, archives, and private collections. Our database now includes over 4,500 letters by or to the twelfth and thirteenth presidents, plus hundreds [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3183,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":511,"date":"2023-12-05T13:37:31","date_gmt":"2023-12-05T19:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/?p=511"},"modified":"2023-12-05T13:37:31","modified_gmt":"2023-12-05T19:37:31","slug":"getting-together-on-campus-on-the-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/getting-together-on-campus-on-the-air\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Together: On Campus &amp; On the Air"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, and I were on television this week. Well, one of us was, talking about the other two. But I should back up.<\/p>\n<p>When I started this blog in 2020, I noted the <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/our-project-and-our-blog-begin\/\">context<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/progress-in-a-pandemic\/\">impact<\/a> of the Taylor-Fillmore project\u2019s beginning during a pandemic. American University\u2019s campus was minimally staffed, everyone who could was working at home, and visits to archives and libraries were indefinitely postponed. I relied heavily on the generosity of archivists and librarians who located, scanned, and shared the manuscript letters in their care. When Associate Editor Amy Larrabee Cotz, undergraduate and graduate students, and other contributors joined the project, we interacted entirely via Zoom, email, and telephone.<\/p>\n<p>A lot has changed. Americans still suffer from COVID-19, much as they still suffered from cholera after the pandemic\u2019s height in 1848\u201349. But 2023 is not 2020. I want to update you on how we work now and on our first big in-person event.<\/p>\n<p>In late 2021, we began returning to archives and libraries in person. As I <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/where-the-letters-come-from\/\">wrote<\/a>, we initially did so between COVID surges and under strict pandemic protocols. Things eventually got easier and more consistent. In 2022, research consultant David Gerleman and I hunted for Taylor and Fillmore letters in the Library of Congress and the National Archives amid relaxed capacity limits and appointment requirements. We appreciated both the opportunity to see the documents directly and to discuss sources with experts such as Michelle Krowl of the Library of Congress\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/research-centers\/manuscript\/about-this-research-center\/\">Manuscript Reading Room<\/a>. Our database of letters from 1844\u201353 thus has grown rapidly. We now have more than 4,600. (Once we get to the presidential years of 1849\u201353, in about a year, that will double or treble.) Meanwhile, I had the pleasure of getting to know <a href=\"https:\/\/www.american.edu\/spa\/faculty\/dbarker.cfm\">David Barker<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.american.edu\/profiles\/staff\/hpurkey.cfm\">Hannah Purkey<\/a>, my colleagues at American University\u2019s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, in person. As I\u2019d expected, they are as kind and as committed to the project\u2019s success in person as they had seemed from our respective remote bunkers.<\/p>\n<p>The next steps after finding letters, as I\u2019ve <a href=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/transcription-101\/\">noted<\/a> before, are choosing which to publish, transcribing those, and proofreading the transcriptions. Those tasks, which depend on digitized images and are often solitary, suit themselves well to remote collaborations. Little, therefore, has changed in how our editors and student contributors go about them.<\/p>\n<p>Then comes annotation. This year we reached the stage in editing our first volume\u2014the pre-presidential one\u2014when we write notes identifying the people, events, organizations, laws, and other topics that show up in the letters. The notes help make the letters not only <em>available<\/em> to readers in print and online but also <em>accessible<\/em> to those who aren\u2019t familiar with everything happening in the 1840s (i.e., all of us). How we annotate is a large topic worthy of its own blog entry, so stay tuned. For now, I just want to point out how essential both remote and in-person resources are. The internet is vast, and we mine its seams\u2014from <a href=\"http:\/\/ancestry.com\/\">Ancestry<\/a> to <a href=\"http:\/\/fold3.com\/\">fold3<\/a> to <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/\">Google Books<\/a> to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.findagrave.com\/\">FindaGrave<\/a> to <a href=\"https:\/\/chroniclingamerica.loc.gov\/\">Chronicling America<\/a> to the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tshaonline.org\/handbook\/browse\/all\">Handbook of Texas<\/a> to other documentary editions like ours\u2014for data on the famous and obscure people and topics featured in the letters. That was true before 2020, and during the pandemic some institutions (including the State University of New York, Oswego, home of the <a href=\"https:\/\/nyheritage.org\/collections\/millard-fillmore-papers\">Millard Fillmore Papers<\/a>) expanded their commitments to digitize historical data.<\/p>\n<p>Yet, contrary to popular belief, not everything is online. We have actual books in our offices, and the libraries of American University and the Washington Research Library Consortium have far more. Still more books on paper and manuscripts on microfilm (including many held by the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.archives.gov\/publications\/microfilm-catalogs-0\">National Archives<\/a>) are available to us via interlibrary loan. Our student editorial assistants, particularly Jamshid Mohammadi this semester and Nicholas Breslin last semester, have joined Ms. Larrabee Cotz and me in perusing those, um, ancient artifacts of print culture. Thanks to today\u2019s relative safety of entering libraries, we thus can draw on all available sources to track down elusive references in the letters. In 2020 I thanked the workers in healthcare, education, and other essential industries who made remote work possible for some of us. Now I thank them and all others who have enabled a return to something closer to normal.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of normal, how about a conference? In 2020 our own staff didn\u2019t meet in person, let alone invite a hundred others to come see us. I was involved with the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.documentaryediting.org\/\">Association for Documentary Editing<\/a> (ADE), which each year since 1979 had held a meeting of people who produce editions of historical and literary documents. But even the ADE canceled its 2020 meeting and moved the next two to Zoom.<\/p>\n<p>With the ADE hoping again to gather in person in 2023, it seemed the right time for a special location. So, we thought, why not the nation\u2019s capital? Why not American University? Our staff volunteered to plan the conference, along with fellow Washington-area editors including those at the <a href=\"https:\/\/erpapers.columbian.gwu.edu\/\">Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project<\/a>. On June 22\u201325, the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies hosted over one hundred creators and users of documentary editions for a successful return-to-in-person conference. We streamed most of it, so several dozen more joined us on Zoom, a few even presenting remotely from around the country and the world.<\/p>\n<p>Those of us on-site celebrated our return to conferencing with an opening reception at the Katzen Arts Center. That was sponsored by our Center, the University of Virginia <a href=\"https:\/\/centerfordigitalediting.org\/project\/dpc\/\">Digital Publishing Cooperative<\/a> (of which we\u2019re a member), and the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.primarysourcecoop.org\/\">Primary Source Cooperative<\/a> at the Massachusetts Historical Society. We thank them and the conference\u2019s other sponsors: the <a href=\"http:\/\/utpress.org\/\">University of Tennessee Press<\/a>; the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.upress.virginia.edu\/\">University of Virginia Press<\/a>; the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flare-net.org\/aws\/FLARE\/pt\/sp\/home_page\">First Ladies Association for Research and Education<\/a> (FLARE), based here at American; the <a href=\"https:\/\/nhalliance.org\/\">National Humanities Alliance<\/a>; the <a href=\"https:\/\/historycoalition.org\/\">National Coalition for History<\/a>; the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oah.org\/\">Organization of American Historians<\/a>; the <a href=\"https:\/\/shfg.wildapricot.org\/\">Society for History in the Federal Government<\/a>; and the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thesha.org\/\">Southern Historical Association<\/a>. We also thank our colleagues at Katzen, the Washington College of Law, University Conference &amp; Guest Services, and throughout American for their hard work to make the event happen.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_512\" style=\"width: 334px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-512\" class=\"size-full wp-image-512\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2023\/12\/poster.png\" alt=\"poster advertising editions of Zachary Taylor's, Millard Fillmore's, and Martin Van Buren's papers\" width=\"324\" height=\"463\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2023\/12\/poster.png 324w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2023\/12\/poster-210x300.png 210w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 324px) 100vw, 324px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-512\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Poster by University of Tennessee Press, a conference sponsor<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Four days of sessions covered the diverse work that documentary editors do. You can read the program <a href=\"https:\/\/www.documentaryediting.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/ADE_Program_Revised.pdf\">here<\/a> and watch recordings of several sessions <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCcDaxrJ54u6SWDJfxsR6Lqw\">here<\/a>. Highlights\u2014to pick a few out of many\u2014included a roundtable of current and former student interns on editing projects, a FLARE-organized session on \u201cThe Documentary Legacies of First Ladies,\u201d and a breakfast presentation by Mia Owens on the \u201cHistory of Slavery and Its Legacies in Washington, DC.\u201d Ms. Owens, now of the 1882 Foundation and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, worked with the White House Historical Association as the inaugural fellow on that subject while she earned her public history degree at American. Between sessions, attendees enjoyed tours of the National Gallery of Art\u2019s Archives, the Library of Congress\u2019s Preservation Directorate, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History &amp; Culture, the Department of the Interior, and Eleanor Roosevelt\u2013related sites around the city.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_513\" style=\"width: 499px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-513\" class=\"size-full wp-image-513\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2023\/12\/session.png\" alt=\"conference session\" width=\"489\" height=\"306\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2023\/12\/session.png 489w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2023\/12\/session-300x188.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 489px) 100vw, 489px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-513\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Session on internships in documentary editing<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I mentioned TV, didn\u2019t I? Well, we\u2019re especially proud of two sessions. I joined editors from the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sup.org\/books\/title\/?id=21071\">Emma Goldman Papers<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/mbepapers.org\/\">Mary Baker Eddy Papers<\/a>, and the <a href=\"https:\/\/janeaddams.ramapo.edu\/\">Jane Addams Papers<\/a> in a roundtable titled \u201cStill Important Today: Recognizing Historical Patterns in the Present.\u201d My colleagues discussed their efforts to engage audiences in learning about the present and the past. I talked about doing that through this very blog. Then we welcomed two very special guests: Shelly C. Lowe, Chair of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.neh.gov\/\">National Endowment for the Humanities<\/a>, and Linh Anh Moreau, Coordinator of International Programs on the Memory of the World at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.unesco.org\/en\">UNESCO<\/a>. These humanities leaders held a fascinating keynote conversation, facilitated by Christopher Brick of George Washington University, on \u201cPublic Humanities and Indigenous Voices.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Those two sessions, especially the keynote, spoke to an audience well beyond the ADE and our university community. C-SPAN, wishing to share them with viewers across the country, recorded them and recently began showing them on its cable\/satellite networks and its website. You can see the schedule of TV broadcasts or stream them online anytime <a href=\"https:\/\/www.c-span.org\/event\/?528933\/documentary-editing-american-history.\">here<\/a>. Enjoy!<\/p>\n<p>Beyond the practical benefits of in-person activities, for both our editorial progress and interproject collaboration, getting together helps remind us of the value of a professional community. I mentioned how nice it was, after the worst of the pandemic, finally to meet my colleagues at our research center face-to-face. At the conference, Amy Larrabee Cotz and I got to meet two of our student editorial assistants, Mercedes Atwater and Cameron Coyle. Both have contributed mightily to the Taylor-Fillmore project, and their hard work will be reflected in the volume of letters that we send off to the publisher a year from now. It was lovely finally to see them <em>not<\/em> on Zoom.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_515\" style=\"width: 262px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-515\" class=\"size-full wp-image-515\" src=\"http:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2023\/12\/editors.png\" alt=\"three people\" width=\"252\" height=\"448\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2023\/12\/editors.png 252w, https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1556\/2023\/12\/editors-169x300.png 169w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 252px) 100vw, 252px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-515\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Editors Michael Cohen and Amy Larrabee Cotz with, in middle, student editorial assistant Cameron Coyle<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, and I were on television this week. Well, one of us was, talking about the other two. But I should back up. When I started this blog in 2020, I noted the context and impact of the Taylor-Fillmore project\u2019s beginning during a pandemic. American University\u2019s campus was minimally staffed, everyone who [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3183,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/taylorandfillmore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]