Scope and Content Note
The collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) in the Library of Congress represents only a small part of the enormous library that is reputed to have held the largest accumulation of manuscripts ever collected by a private individual. Phillipps’s biographer, Alan Munby, estimates that the Bibliotheca Phillippica contained around sixty thousand manuscripts when Phillipps died in 1872. The story of how Phillipps acquired his library, a description of the publication of his catalog of manuscripts and printed books, and the history of the subsequent dispersal of the collection by his heirs, is chronicled in Alan Munby’s Phillipps Studies, no. 15 (Cambridge University Press, 1951-1960). These volumes also contain valuable provenance information on the various manuscripts formerly a part of the Phillipps library.
The Phillipps manuscripts in the Manuscript Division, acquired individually or in groups and cataloged by subject as unrelated acquisitions, were reassembled as a collection in 1969. The collection dates from the early fifteenth century to 1857, and is strongest in the area of colonial history of North America and the West Indies. It is arranged according to the numbering system used by Phillipps, who assigned numbers in sequence to the manuscripts as they were cataloged. As a consequence, related manuscripts may be separated in the collection, and one should consult the index at the end of the register in order to identify manuscripts concerning a particular person or subject.
Although the collection follows a numerical arrangement, it encompasses several distinct groups of papers. Foremost among these are the papers of the British government dealing with the administration of the colonies. The documents, some of which predate the formation of the Board of Trade in 1696, include the journals of the Lords of the Committee for Trade and Plantations and its predecessor, the Council of Foreign Plantations, for the period 1670-1686, noting all transactions relating to the colonies and plantations; the original office book of the Committee for Trade and Plantations for the years 1683-1688, kept by William Blathwayt as secretary, listing all matters coming before the committee; and the accounts of revenues in America for 1701-1712, kept by William Blathwayt as surveyor and auditor general of plantation revenues.* For later years the collection contains a group of papers pertaining to land disputes and other cases in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia that were probably a part of the records of the solicitor of the treasury, Joshua Sharpe, and some miscellaneous papers of the colonies of Maryland (1696-1709), Massachusetts (1695-1700), and Virginia (1686-1707). Official records relating to the West Indies include a volume of administrative forms and four volumes of letterbooks of George Macartney, kept while governor of the Caribbean Islands, which, in addition to administrative matters concerning the islands of Grenada, Tobago, and the Grenadines, portray the American Revolutionary War from the perspective of its effect on life in the islands. Some papers concerning the maintenance of troops in the American colonies and a few letters of Lord Frederick North in which he makes recommendations for governing the remaining American colonies in 1783 complete the segment of British administrative manuscripts in the collection.
Another group of important papers in the collection are those of Jean Louis Berlandier, the Swiss historian and naturalist, who came to Mexico to work with the Mexican Boundary Commission, which surveyed the boundary between the United States and Mexico as defined in the Adams-Onís treaty of 1819. Berlandier remained in Mexico, made his home at Matamoros, and amassed a huge collection of papers relating to the natural history of the region. The Berlandier papers in the Phillipps Collection include his journal recording his observations on the land, people, and plant and animal life while accompanying the boundary survey commission, a journal describing his travels during the war between the United States and Mexico, and several miscellaneous manuscripts concerning Lower California, Texas, and Matamoros, including maps of the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Parma.
The Phillipps Collection also contains several manuscripts touching on the administration of the Spanish colonies in America and one document relating to the government of the French West Indies. The Spanish documents include “Varinas sobre las Indias,” “Testamentos y Sueño de España,” file copies of royal orders issued by monarchs from Philip II to Charles V, and a copy of Hernando Cortés’s letter of October 15, 1524, to Charles V reporting on his exploration in Mexico and Central America. The one French document is Michel Bégon’s journal describing his observations and official activities while intendant of the French isles in America, 1682-1685.
Other significant manuscripts in the collection pertain to European history and include four volumes of legal cases in Great Britain from the reigns of Henry VI to Elizabeth I, a cartulary of the monastery of St. John at Beverly containing charters of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, a microfilm of letters of the poet John Gilbert Cooper, genealogical records of Yorkshire and Middlesex Counties collected by the antiquarians Richard Gascoigne and Edward Ironside, and genealogies of the Zarbarella family and notable families of the city of Lucca, Italy.
*In accordance with cataloging rules, dates from 1582 on are given in terms of the Gregorian calendar.