The papers of Joseph Stanley-Brown (1858-1941) span the period 1730-1941, with the bulk of the material concentrated in 1890-1899. The collection consists largely of notes, correspondence, reports, briefs, and newspaper articles relating to Alaskan fur sealing and to Stanley-Brown’s service in the Pribilof Islands as a federal treasury agent and as superintendent of sealing operations for a commercial company. Many notes and documents and much correspondence relate to Stanley-Brown’s family and his genealogical interests. The collection is organized into five series: Family Papers, Agency Files, Arbitral Files, Superintendency Files, and Miscellany.

When tradesman Nathaniel Stanley fled indebtedness in London, arriving in Baltimore in 1819, he adopted the name Joseph Brown. His grandson Joseph Stanley Brown, was an avid genealogist and changed his own surname to Stanley-Brown after discovering the circumstances of his family’s emigration from England. Though Stanley-Brown suspended his genealogical activities as he entered his career, he resumed those activities in the 1920s as he neared retirement. The Family Papers in this collection include Stanley-Brown’s correspondence with relatives and friends, including explorer and journalist George Kennan (1845-1924), and with officials and a professional genealogist in England, annotated engravings of churches in London, documents and copies of documents substantiating Stanley-Brown’s eighteenth-century ancestry, and a Bible printed in 1823 in which have been entered items of the Brown’s family’s history.

Many papers in the collection are wholly or partly written in shorthand. Equipped with this proficiency, Stanley-Brown became secretary to James A. Garfield in 1878, then private secretary after the congressman was inaugurated president in March 1881. After Garfield died in September, Stanley-Brown remained at his post until President Chester A. Arthur accepted his resignation in January 1882. The Family Papers include newspaper articles and a few other papers concerning his career as private secretary, mounted on pages disassembled from a scrapbook apparently kept by Stanley-Brown in the 1880s.

In 1891, Secretary of the Treasury Charles Foster requested that Stanley-Brown be sent as a special agent to the Pribilof Islands to observe sealing and seal life and he spent the summers of 1891-1892 on the rocky islands of St. Paul and St. George. The knowledge he acquired led to his appointment in 1892 as secretary to the American and British commissioners examining further the conditions of seal life in the Bering Sea. Among the Agency Files in the collection are Stanley-Brown’s notes, his official correspondence and that of other federal agents, Russian records gathered in Alaska, sealer’s depositions, government officials’ reports, and papers relating to the joint investigative commission.

When the British and American governments could not agree on the causes of the seals’ precipitous decline in population, its remedy, or the extent of American rights, the two nations decided to submit to the arbitration of an international tribunal sitting in Paris. At Secretary of State John W. Foster’s request, Stanley-Brown was named secretary to the American commissioners. The Arbitral Files include notes by Stanley-Brown and others, correspondence, extensive briefs prepared for American and British commissioners, transcripts of their actual agreements, and various American experts’ criticisms of British arguments. An unusual “Souvenir of the Arbitration” is a loose-leaf book containing comic illustrations by Robert Lansing, associate counsel for the United States, and mounted photographs of several of the principal participants in the arbitration.

“Then came the question of what next,” wrote Stanley-Brown in 1927. “There were three little ones to be taken care of and a brilliant financial offer made by the corporation which leased the sealing rights on the Pribilof Islands was accepted and this meant six more trips to inhospitable but most interesting Alaska, going up in May and returning in August.” [1] The Superintendency Files include notes, correspondence, and other papers from Stanley-Brown’s tenure as superintendent in the North American Commercial Company, as well as a manuscript describing the wildlife of St. Paul’s Island, written in Russian about 1845.

The Miscellany series in the collection largely contains clipped newspaper and magazine articles treating fur sealing and its attendant controversies and developments. The collection contains almost no papers relating to Stanley-Brown’s later career as an investment banker, from which he retired in 1929.

1. Joseph Stanley-Brown to J. Eliot Wright, May 17, 1927, Family Papers, Corresondence, 1880-1929, Container 1.