Scope and Content Note
The papers of Joseph Roswell Hawley (1826-1905) span the years 1638-1906, with the bulk of the material dated after 1841. The papers include a large amount of correspondence, supplemented by diaries, notebooks , a military file , business papers , speeches and statements , and miscellaneous material. The greater part of the correspondence consists of bound volumes of letters to Hawley from his friends, relatives, and political and business associates. Hawley’s correspondence also includes some unbound letters , 1846-1905, as well as a letterbook, 1889-1892, containing copies of letters Hawley sent during some of his years as a United States senator.
In addition to the correspondence, significant items in the papers include the diaries and notebooks; scrapbooks of the 1876 United States Centennial Commission, of which Hawley was chairman; notes and drafts of speeches, lectures, and other public statements; business papers such as stocks and bonds, bills and receipts, accounts and patent applications; and items such as muster rolls, casualty lists, orders, inventories of captured property that Hawley accumulated while serving from 1861 to 1866 in the Union Army in northern Virginia, the sea islands of South Carolina, and Wilmington, N.C.
The Hawley Papers, especially as represented in the correspondence, constitute an important source on student life at Hamilton College in the 1840s, the growth of the antislavery movement in upstate New York and Connecticut, the formation and early years of the Republican Party, and the secession crisis and the Civil War. The papers from the postwar period cover a wide range of topics from the activities of Union Army veterans groups to the problems of Reconstruction and the financial policies of the Republican Party in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.
The papers also include correspondence of Hawley’s wife, Harriet Foote Hawley, for the years 1856-1886. Her correspondence is mostly with friends and family, particularly her sisters, and relates to family matters with occasional comments about current events. Harriet Hawley’s correspondence with her husband, especially during the Civil War years, is part of Hawley’s bound correspondence described above.
Prominent correspondence in the collection include James Gillespie Blaine, Schuyler Colfax, Richard Henry Dana (1815-1882), Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Benjamin Douglas, Richard S. Ely, William Crowninshield Endicott, Joshua R. Giddings, Francis Gillette, Edward Everett Hale, Hinton Rowan Helper, Joshua Leavitt, Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), Dwight Loomis, Horace Mann, Whitelaw Reid, John Sherman, Gerrit Smith, Leland Stanford, Edwin McMasters Stanton, Charles Sumner, Albion Winegar Tourgée, Amos Tuck, Amasa Walker, Charles Dudley Warner, and Gideon Welles, as well as Hawley’s father, Francis Hawley.