James Duncan’s Diary of the Yorktown Siege

Last month Sotheby’s sold the diary that Capt. James Duncan kept of the Yorktown campaign, as reported by the Washington Post.

The 23 pages dated 2–15 Oct 1781 are part of a 110-page notebook that Duncan later used as a commonplace book, copying in the music and lyrics of the “Duke of Gloustr March” and lines from such literature as John Trumbull’s M’Fingal and James Thomson’s Seasons.

The notebook was originally up for auction, but the bidding didn’t reach the set minimum. The next day, some institution or collector reached a deal with Sotheby’s and the owner to purchase the document for over $300,000.

Duncan was a Pennsylvanian, twenty-five years old, who had left Princeton College early in the war to join the Continental Army. Afterwards he became a court official in Adams County, Pennsylvania, which contains Gettysburg.

The Post article quotes a fair amount from Duncan’s description of the siege, including criticism of Col. Alexander Hamilton: “Although I esteem him…I must beg leave in this instance to think he wantonly exposed the lives of his men.”

Duncan finished his 15 October entry near the top of one page and then stopped writing. That leaves us without his account of Gen. Cornwallis’s surrender just four days later.

The article doesn’t report that this diary was transcribed and published as “A Yorktown Journal” in the Pennsylvania Archives, second series, volume 15, in 1890.

Sotheby’s page on the document did report that fact and added: “Unfortunately, the editor, William Henry Egle, through silent emendation and ‘correction,’ introduced hundreds of discrepancies from the manuscript in spelling, capitalization, punctuation, contraction, paragraphing, and other matters.” But Egle didn’t remove significant historical information, or the auction house would have proudly noted that.