Chester Alan Arthur papers, 1843-1960

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History of the Collection

[From Index to the Chester A. Arthur Papers (Washington, D.C.: 1961), pp. v-vii]

You may be sure that I am as interested as you are in having the Arthur papers finally come to rest in the Library of Congress. The ones that I have in my possession have travelled a good deal—over to Europe, back to Colorado, California, and now here [New York]. During his lifetime, my father would never let anyone see them—not even me. When they finally came into my possession, I was amazed that there were so few. At my father's funeral in Albany, or rather at the interment of his ashes which took place several months after his death [July 17, 1934], I enquired of all the cousins there assembled—the nieces and nephews of my grandfather, as to what had happened to the bulk of the papers. Charles E. McElroy, the son of Mary Arthur McElroy who was my grandfather's First Lady, tells me that the day before he died, my grandfather caused to be burned three large garbage cans, each at least four feet high, full of papers which I am sure would have thrown much light on history.

So wrote Chester A. Arthur III to Dr. Thomas P. Martin, then Acting Chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, on April 15, 1938. [1]

For many years President Arthur was represented in the Manuscript Division by a single document, a letter he had written during the Civil War and which the Library purchased in 1902. Beginning in 1910 and continuing to the present, successive chiefs of the division have done what they could do to assemble surviving Arthur manuscripts. For the first of these chiefs, Gaillard Hunt, who in that year initiated the search for the main body of the Arthur Papers, there was little but discouragement as a result of his inquiries. However, his persistence and what he was able to learn were to encourage his successors. He wrote first to Col. William G. Rice and learned the address of Mrs. John E. McElroy, Arthur's sister and official hostess during his administration. Mr. Hunt wrote to her and learned from her that Chester A. Arthur, Jr., controlled the papers. After several attempts, Mr. Hunt learned Mr. Arthur's address and wrote to him. The reply—written on March 13, 1915, five years after the search began—provided the first concrete but frustrating evidence:

I beg you will excuse my tardiness in replying to your letter of November 4th [1914]. The question of my father's papers is a very sore subject with me.
These papers were supposed to be in certain chests which were stored on their receipt from Washington, in the cellar of 123 Lexington Avenue. After my father's death, they were removed, I believe, by direction of the executors to a store house recommended by Mr. McElroy at Albany. Several years ago on making my residence in Colorado, I sent for these chests of papers and found in them nothing but custom house records of no particular value or importance. Where the papers they were supposed to contain have vanished, is a mystery.

Three years later, in 1918, the Library acquired, as a loan, its second Arthur document, the draft of his veto message of the Fitz-John Porter bill. Arthur H. Masten, a nephew of the President, had not inherited the document but had received it as a gift from the widow of Adrian H. Joline, in whose autograph collection it had been found. Masten's heirs have given the Library of Congress title to this manuscript.

The Library renewed its inquiries in various quarters from time to time with no significant result until Charles Moore, in 1924, while Acting Chief of the Manuscript Division, wrote a long letter to John H. Finley of the New York Times. [2] As a result, Dr. Finley published in the Times an editorial plea for Arthur manuscripts, but there was no immediate response. Other inquiries were made to: J. Stanley-Brown, who had been President James A. Garfield's secretary and who had also served Arthur briefly; Charles M. Hendley, a former White House executive clerk, who provided some personal recollections; Rudolph Forster, in 1924 executive clerk at the White House; Elihu Root and Robert T. Lincoln; and the County Clerk of New York County, N.Y., who provided a copy of Arthur's will; and various others.

In June 1925 Louise Reed Mitchell, the daughter of Arthur's secretary, James C. Reed, informed the Librarian of Congress that she had inherited some 50 Arthur manuscripts. She sold these to the Library. The Librarian's Annual Report for 1925, p. 56-57, reviewed the search and the results up to that time and assessed the collection as "neither extensive nor are the documents themselves of high historical importance; but a gap in the records of the presidency has been filled in as satisfactory a manner as is possible."

In 1938 a fresh trail, opened up by a suggestion made by Jeannette P. Nichols, led to President Arthur's grandson, part of whose reply introduces this essay. In the same year, as a result of an exchange of letters with the Library, Mr. Arthur deposited 90 of the more important documents he had in his possession. [3] These manuscripts, together with an additional 470 documents which had remained in his possession, were sold to the Library in 1958.

It was fortunate that the greatly augmented but still small collection reached its present size soon after the Congress authorized and directed the Librarian of Congress to arrange, microfilm, and index the Arthur and 22 other collections of Presidential Papers. Before the filming and indexing had been completed, further additions were received. Twelve letters written by Arthur in the 1850's were given by the noted collector, Charles A. Feinberg.

Another major segment of the Arthur Papers is available because of a friendship that began during the Civil War. Robert G. Dun and Chester A. Arthur were business associates and personal friends in New York City for at least a quarter of a century. Both were members of the Union League Club in New York. Arthur served as counsel for The Mercantile Agency, as Dun's company was called, for two decades. Fortunately for all who may interest themselves in the career of Arthur, Owen A. Sheffield, retired Secretary of Dun & Bradstreet, Inc., presented photocopies or typed copies accompanied by annotations, of all known documents in the files of the company relating to Arthur. The gift was made in 1959 with the consent and the cooperation of J. Wilson Newman, president of Dun & Bradstreet. Many of these documents have particular value. A letter written by Dun to the manager of his Pittsburgh office on June 1, 1870, for example, contains a spirited description of Arthur's character, written long before anyone guessed that he would be the 21st President of the United States.

Also in 1959, Robert S. Macfarlane, president of the Northern Pacific Railway, kindly supplied copies of several telegrams and related material which add to the records concerning Arthur's trip to Yellowstone Park in 1883. A few other documents and copies of documents complete one of the smallest of the 23 groups of Presidential Papers in the Library. The number of items is 1,413 and they are bound in 12 volumes. The microfilm reproduction of these was released to the public in 1960.

There remains the matter of the large number of lost Arthur manuscripts. Letters written by Arthur to others and preserved in their papers, together with copies of their letters to him, offer a sampling of what the Arthur Papers once contained. The photocopies of letters from the files of Dun & Bradstreet (Series 2) are useful for this purpose and so, to a lesser degree, are transcripts and references (Series 3) to Arthur papers in other collections.

An example may be cited of what is known to have existed. Arthur kept journals while on a trip with Henry D. Gardiner in 1857. The two young men spent 4 months touring the West as far as Kansas and Minnesota. Ward Burlingame, a Kansas newspaper reporter, interviewed Arthur 26 years later when he was about to depart for the West again, this time to Yellowstone Park. The published interview records all that has been found with reference to the journals: "The travels of the two extended over some four months, and the president could not recall, without access to his papers, packed away in his New York house, the names of all the places at which they stopped. By the way, it occurs to me that the complete journals of this trip, carefully kept by the principal traveler, would prove a veritable bonanza to the writer fortunate enough to get hold of them." [4]

Inasmuch as many of President Arthur's papers have been destroyed, searchers may wish to examine the personal papers of his contemporaries in the Library of Congress and elsewhere for information about him and his times. The personal papers or autograph collections in the Library of Congress listed below contain varying numbers of letters by, to, or relating to President Arthur:

Other libraries known to possess one or more Chester A. Arthur manuscripts include the New-York Historical Society in New York City, which has eight letterbooks dating from 1868 to 1878 and other materials dated for the most part prior to 1880; the New York State Library in Albany, which has nearly 200 items, for the most part in the Edwin D. Morgan Papers; the Boston Public Library; the William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Mich.; the Rutherford B. Hayes Library, Fremont, Ohio; the New Jersey Historical Society in Newark; the Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C.; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; the United States Naval Academy Museum, Annapolis, Md.; and Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn. A Guide to Archives and Manuscripts in the United States, edited by Philip M. Hamer (New Haven, 1961), which includes entries indexed under "Presidents, U.S.," may lead a searcher to other Arthur manuscripts. The National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections now being assembled at the Library of Congress also may eventually reveal the whereabouts of other Arthur manuscripts.

Note: The Library of Congress acknowledges with gratitude the assistance of Chester A. Arthur III, grandson of the President, and George F. Howe, the latter's biographer, each of whom read a draft of this essay and provided valuable comment and suggestions. Mr. Howe's interest goes back to 1926, when he selected President Arthur as the subject for his doctoral dissertation.

1. Except as specified, letters cited are in the files of the Manuscript Division.

2. June 26, 1924.

3. The Arthur collection, including the deposited documents, was evacuated to Charlottesville, Va., in 1941 and returned to the Library of Congress in 1944. A statement concerning this evacuation appears in Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress, 1945, p. 59. See also the article by Robert Penn Warren, "The War and the National Muniments," Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions, 2 (November 1944), 64-75.

4. Leavenworth [Kans.] Times, July 29, 1883; a shorter revised story appeared in the New York Times, August 1, 1883.