“Told John Hancock Esqr. that he heard me say in a threatning manner”

The newly released first volume of The Papers of John Hancock, covering the years 1754–1769, doesn’t even have an index entry for Samuel Adams. Hancock was politically active in that time, as a Boston selectman and representative in the Massachusetts General Court. But he did his politicking in person, not in (preserved) letters or newspaper essays.

In contrast, the first volume of the Writings of Samuel Adams, covering 1764–1769, includes a couple of items defending Hancock from charges of fomenting riots: a 1768 letter written for the signature of House speaker Thomas Cushing and a 1769 newspaper essay signed “Candidus.” Hancock also served on several committees with Adams, but Adams gets the credit (via a descendant’s biography) for creating those committees’ documents.

In those corpuses, the first sign of a rift between Hancock and Adams appears in a 15 Dec 1771 “Memorandum” that Adams wrote for himself after a conversation with the colony’s deputy treasurer:

This day I waited on Mr. Harrison Gray junr. to acquaint him that I had been informd that he had told John Hancock Esqr. that he heard me say in a threatning manner that Mr. Hancock might think as he pleasd, Mr. [James] Otis had friends & his (Mr. Hancocks) treatment of Mr. Otis would prejudice his (Mr. Hancocks) Election.

Mr. Gray declard to me that he did not hear me mention a Word of Mr. Hancocks Election—that a conversation happend between Mr. John Cotton [deputy secretary of Massachusetts] & myself (Mr. Gray being present) relative to Mr. Otis—that Mr. Cotton said Mr. Otis’ Conduct must be the Effect of Distraction or Drunkeness—that I said I did not think so—but that it rather proceeded from Irritation—that he (Mr. Gray) said if Mr. Otis is distracted why should Mr. Hancock pursue him—& that I answerd that Mr. Hancock might be stirred up by others to do it, but I thought he had better not or it was a pity he should.

This Mr. Gray declared was all that I said relative to Mr. Hancock, in answer to his Question as is before mentiond & that it did not appear to him that I discoverd the least Unfriendliness towards Mr. Hancock. He further said he was willing to give his oath to the truth of this his declaration.

Upon which I told Mr. Gray that it was far from my Intention to make Mr. Hancock displeasd with him, that I was satisfied that Mr. Hancock understood him differently & I should let Mr. Hancock know what he now said, & asked him to repeat it which he did precisely as before—& told me he was freely willing that I should repeat it to Mr. Hancock that if Mr. Hancock & myself desired it he would thus explain it in presense of us both.

Here’s the scan of that document from the New York Public Library.

At this time, Boston had reelected James Otis, Jr., to the House after a year off, hoping he would regain his sanity and efficacy as a legislative leader. Instead, Otis became more inclined to support royal policy and then more irrational, as I discussed back here.

In November, acting in his capacity as a probate judge after a request from the Otis family, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson asked the Boston selectmen to assess whether Otis was “a Non Compos Distracted or Lunatick Person.” The selectmen, including Hancock, decided he needed a guardian. On 3 December, Otis was “carried off…in a post chaise, bound hand and foot,” for treatment.

Samuel Adams’s memorandum doesn’t say when he discussed Otis with Cotton and Gray. Adams had tried to gloss over the situation: Otis was acting from “Irritation,” he insisted, not “Distraction or Drunkeness.” As to why Hancock thought otherwise, he “might be stirred up by others.”

This episode belies the common picture, pushed by Loyalists and adopted by many authors since, that Adams was the savvy politician pulling Hancock’s strings. Not only was Hancock breaking from Adams, but the merchant had a better sense of the situation. Otis needed help, and he was losing popular support. In the spring of 1772, the North End Caucus (in my reading) and then the Boston town meeting chose never to vote for him again.

The memorandum does show Adams’s keen judgment about what could annoy Hancock, however. Adams had heard, quite possibly from Hancock himself, that Gray had described him as speaking “in a threatning manner.” And what was Adams supposedly threatening? Hancock’s popularity and prospects for reelection. Adams recorded this evidence to show Hancock that he’d said no such thing.

Without this memorandum in writing, we’d have no evidence of Adams worrying that Hancock thought he’d revealed “Unfriendliness” in the fall of 1771.

TOMORROW: Matters come to a head.

Making Hay with the Hancock Papers

Dr. Jeffrey M. Griffith’s John Hancock Papers website uses generative A.I. in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere: to answer questions about Hancock and his career based on a database of over 4,000 documents.

It looks like it’s not possible to search for particular words or phrases in the Hancock letters, as one can do at Founders Online. That might come later, after publication of the volumes through the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Or that approach might reflect my traditional thinking.

Instead, the “search” function is designed around topics, as interpreted through large language model A.I. software analyzing the transcribed letters. The website explains:

Dr. JMG’s AI seeks to find connections between letters, individuals, events, and subjects. The technology, however, requires extensive training – and will become more comprehensive as additional letters are uploaded and questions are posed to the platform. As a Private AI system, all responses to prompts are entirely generated from the content of the uploaded letters on this website and are not impacted by external sources.

The responses point the user to the primary source material. Any interpretation provided by Dr. JMG's AI response should not be considered authoritative, but rather as a step for the user to interpret and interact with the primary source material.

The queries and answers appear on the Community Bulletin Board, an archive going back to spring 2025. Early on we can see the program responding then that it doesn’t yet have information to answer questions, later (presumably after more documents have been entered into the archive) providing answers. Presumably, we see evidence of the software being “trained.”

One example caught my eye. On 25 Aug 2025, the system responded to the query “Is rain mentioned?” with this text:

Yes, rain is mentioned in the context provided. Specifically, it is noted: "It has been quite otherwise here, I have not known aHotermore Wet Summer, & We have a prospect of a great Quantity of Hay." This indicates that the summer was particularly wet, implying significant rainfall.

In a keyword search of the letters’ text, looking for “rain” wouldn’t have caught the phrase “Wet Summer.” But, depending on its sensitivity, it could have flagged words like “constraint.” For someone seeking meteorological commentary, therefore, that type of search would produce both false negatives and false positives.

A search method that could interpret “rain” as more than a series of four characters, extend that term to find “Wet Summer”—or “storm,” “dry,” “weather,” and related terms—and summarize the findings accurately could indeed be very useful.

However, that query response doesn’t state the source of the words it presented in quotation marks. And there appears to be some garbling: “aHotermore Wet Summer.” So I tried to trace back that response by querying for the phrase “quantity of hay,” thinking that would take me to the specific text, suitable for quoting and citing.

With and without quotation marks, that “quantity of hay” phrase produced long replies beginning:

• “50 sources analyzed / In my extensive review of the 3,900+ letters held within the Hancock Archives, there appears to be no specific mention of the ‘quantity of hay’ in any of the documents. . . . ”
• “50 sources analyzed / After thorough analysis of John Hancock’s correspondence, the term ‘quantity of hay’ does not appear directly in any of the letters in the existing metadata. . . . ”

Likewise, asking about the phrase “wet summer” immediately produced paragraphs of prose on Hancock’s health and business activities, but nothing about summer weather. That response cited a specific letter, dated 14 Nov 1771; it refers a couple of times to “Summer” but says nothing about wetness.

All the responses to my queries came with lists of documents in the database which I could click on, but with no sign of which was most pertinent to the answer. Checking the topmost document, and then random links on the list, showed that some had little connection at all. Several of the documents linked to “quantity of hay” referred to Hancock’s London contacts Hayley & Hopkins—perhaps “hay” producing false positives the same way “rain” did. 

Given large language models’ proclivity for outputting plausible statements that have no basis in reality—what experts call “hallucination”—I now can’t be sure Hancock or his correspondents ever wrote about a “Wet Summer” and a “Quantity of Hay.” If somebody did, I’m no closer to finding that document.

To sum up, I was initially impressed by the potential for an A.I.-assisted approach to searching a large database of documents. After a test, I came away with more dubious questions than solid answers. Will additional training improve the results? According to some experts, “hallucinations” are baked into the system.

TOMORROW: Hancock and Adams.

Seeking a Look at John Hancock

I asked Jeffrey M. Griffith, editor of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts’s new Papers of John Hancock series, about computerized handwriting transcription in part because his website for that project includes elements created with generative A.I.

At the bottom of the home page, for example, are three “John Hancock Videos.” It looks like these started with period images of Hancock—the well known John Singleton Copley painting and a couple of engravings. I presume the engravings were colorized.

Then all three images were fed through the sort of program that animates portraits so the subject appears to move their head, eyes, and mouth. These Hancocks deliver statements on different topics derived from the man’s actual writings through large-language-model A.I.

Those sorts of moving portraits were all the rage online a few years back. The early models showed us George Washington and the like swiveling their eyes and smiling. I wondered then how the results would look if we fed in a photograph of someone we’ve all seen really moving—a twentieth-century President or movie star. Would the output still be impressive, or would the uncanny valley open?

Just this week I saw a similar animated portrait incorporated into a museum exhibit. Now that the technology exists, it might become a standard way to enliven images for the public. Or it may be remembered as a hallmark of the 2020s. At least with figures as old as Hancock, no one will be fooled into thinking it’s genuine footage.

Dr. Griffith alerted me to another way he found an A.I. program valuable:

With that said, a very recent positive use of AI for research that I have come across is Harvard’s Collection Explorer. The metadata and previous digitalization efforts that they have worked on over the past decade has allowed them to create a tool that digs deep into their holdings.

I had a list of a handful of letters that I needed to find from Houghton Library that I could not previously uncover through their traditional search engine, and I was able to find them through this tool. Additionally, I found letters for Hancock that I have never seen cited before, nor did I know they existed. This nearly blew up Volume 2, but fortunately I was able to slip in a letter before the book design was completed.

To summarize, the actual readily-accessible tools to transcribe are not quite ready for wide use…, but the integration of AI searching has done great things for the discovery and acquisition of the materials for me to transcribe.

That speaks to one of the particular challenges of assembling John Hancock’s papers. While some families had the motivation and wherewithal to preserve a famous ancestor’s files, providing a big home base for a documentary project, others didn’t.

Also, I’m pleased to know other people find the Harvard library catalogue requires advanced technology to navigate.

Improving Transcriptions of Handwritten Documents

Even as I muse on the value of A.I. programming for transcribing historical handwritten documents, the Fold3 service announces:

We’ve unlocked 2.4 million pages of Revolutionary War Pension Files with a state-of-the-art, patent-pending Transcription Viewer.

For paid subscribers, the service offers multiple ways to see the scanned documents and its transcriptions at the same time—that seems to be the patent-pending part. But beneath that function are the transcriptions themselves.

Fold3 launched “Full-Text Search” of the Revolutionary War Pension Files in March. However, its staff says, “Handwriting recognition technology has really advanced since” that time, so the service now provides “Dramatically improved line-by-line transcription quality.”

The improved transcriptions were produced, says the staff, “primarily with AI with lots of human interaction.” It’s not clear what form that human interaction took—staff hours, volunteers, feedback from users, advanced programming?

Human oversight still seems to be key. When I asked Dr. Jeffrey M. Griffith of the John Hancock Papers about his impression of the latest handwriting-recognition software, he said:

I have not used AI tools to transcribe the manuscripts, as I have found that widely-accessible large scale models like Chat GPT, Claude, and Grok are not as accurate as I desire. What’s even more troubling for my project in particular, is that the same prompt can result in different outputs. Most problematically, in some instances where I have tested the systems, if the system is uncertain, it just creates contents that may not even be relevant to the particular manuscript.

Knowing how specialized AI systems can get, I am sure there are some extremely powerful (and equally expensive to use) models continue to improve reading handwriting from various decades and centuries, but I have not explored those. Admittedly, even if an AI system is to be used for an initial transcription, the content needs to be thoroughly reviewed and compared to the original text.

Griffith judges the basic transcription tools available now as “much better than those very early efforts by Clements Library at University of Michigan.” Transkribus or a similar service might today produce better results from the Gage Papers. Conversely, if “lots of human interaction” is key to continual improvement, that site might benefit from providing a clear channel for user feedback on texts.

Because the profession of documentary editing puts such value on accuracy, people working in the field would naturally be wary of A.I.-produced transcriptions until they’re much more reliable. A text with errors could mislead readers. More likely, in a time of tight budgets, an institution might decide that a text with errors is good enough and not put funds toward professional-quality transcriptions.

All that said, I do use imperfect transcriptions like those on Google Books or the Gage Papers as my starting point when I quote documents. I did that with texts produced through O.C.R. programs, and I’m doing that with texts produced through A.I.

I find those imperfect databases easier to search, read, and quote than online archives without any transcriptions, like the New York Public Library’s scans of the Samuel Adams Papers and Boston Committee of Correspondence Papers.

So for me the bottom line is the more information that’s available in an online archive, the better. Scans better than mere lists of documents. Scans and bad transcriptions better than scans alone. Good, authoritative transcriptions without scans very useful, and good transcriptions with scans the best of all.

TOMORROW: Other ways of using A.I.

Writing the Second Draft of History with Gen. Heath

Another of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s ongoing crowd-sourced transcription projects is Gen. William Heath’s manuscript diary.

When Heath wrote his memoir, published in 1798, he went back to this document as his source. That book is in day-by-day journal form.

The entries for 9 Oct 1776, 250 years ago today, show how he developed his history.

Heath’s diary entry, as newly transcribed:

Early this morning Three ships Two of 40 Guns and one Frigate, With Two, or Three Tenders Stood up the north River, They were Briskly Cannonaded from Mount Washington and Fort Constitution, They However Passed our works & Chevaux De Frise,

our Gallies Small Craft, and Two Large Ships Stood on before them, The Two Ships were Run on shore nears Philips’s mills, and Two Gallies near Dobbs’s Ferry,

The Enemy took Possession of the Two Gallies and got them off, one Boat Landed and Plundered a Store, (Stove the Cask) & set it on fire, but our People Extinguished it,

Colo. Sargent has marched for that Place, with 500 Infantry and 40 Light Horse, Capt. Horton with 2 twelve Pounders, and Capt. Crofts with a Howtzer

the Enemy also took a Schooner Load,d with Rum Sugar Wine etc, and Sunk a Sloop which had on board the machine for blowing up their Ships, a Contrast this to Sink that, which was to Blow them up —

our Division being under arms on the alarm were marched Down over the Broken Ground in front of our Post

The day’s entry in Memoirs of Major-General Heath:

Early in the morning, three ships, two of 40 guns, and one frigate, with two or three tenders, stood up the North River. They were briskly cannonaded from Fort Washington and Fort Constitution. They however passed our works and the chevaux-de-frise; the American galleys, small craft, and two large ships standing on before them.

The two ships were ran on shore near Phillips’s mills, and two of the galleys near Dobbs’ Ferry. The enemy took possession of the two galleys, and got them off. A boat landed a number of men, who plundered a store, stove the casks, and then set the store on fire, and left it. The Americans soon extinguished the fire.

Our General ordered Col. [Paul Dudley] Sargent, with 500 infantry, 40 light-horse, Capt. [Jotham] Horton of the artillery, with two 12 pounders, and Capt. [Edward] Crafts with a howitzer, to march immediately, with all possible expedition, to Dobbs’ Ferry.

The enemy took a schooner loaded with rum, sugar, wine, &c. and sunk a sloop, which had on board the machine, invented by, and under the direction of, a Mr. [David] Bushnell, intended to blow up the British ships. This machine was worked under water. It conveyed a magazine of powder, which was to be fixed under the keel of a ship, then freed from the machine, and left with clock-work going, which was to produce fire when the machine had got out of the way. Mr. Bushnell had great confidence of its success, and had made several experiments which seemed to give him countenance; but its fate was truly a contrast to its design.

Our General’s division was formed in line, with its advance, reserve, flank-guards, and artillery, all in order of battle, when they were moved down over the different grounds, which it was supposed might be the scene of action. Some of this ground was very broken, and there were many fences. These afforded frequent opportunities for the troops to break off and form; for the pioneers to open avenues, &c. and for the whole to become acquainted with every part of the ground, and the best choice of it, if suddenly called to action.

Heath made sure he appeared in his book, as “our General,” as an active participant, issuing orders and strengthening the forces under his command.

He also took the opportunity to add more detail, such as the backstory of David Bushnell’s submarine.

This entry doesn’t reveal any significant information that Heath left out of his book. But now that the whole diary is digitized and transcribed, folks can look for those details.

Visiting with Mercy Warren

Among the Massachusetts Historical Society’s ongoing crowd-sourced transcription projects is the Mercy Otis Warren Papers, including both political and family letters.

I found an example of a document from Mercy Warren showing the wrinkles of this sort of project. It’s a letter dated 16 June 1775. There’s no recipient noted on the paper, nor on the webpage or caption for the images.

The transcription begins:

With the highest pleasure I Receved the several Letters of my Dearest Friend. & now having Returned to my own Habitation I have Leasure to answer them I Returnd from a Visit to my Father [James Otis, Sr.] yesterday. the two miss Otis’s sister Hannah & Miss Otis Came away with me Designing only to accompany me to Sandwish but it being a very fine Day they Came as far as Plimouth. & after spending the afternoon & Evening & Regaling several times on the finest strawberys I have seen Left me this morning at 10 o clock. but the Beauties of Nature. the Bounties of providence nor the social Intercourse of Friends Can I taste with unalloyed Delight so Long as my Country is threatned with Desolation & Bloodshed. & my Beloved Husband not only Long abscent from me but stationed on Duty in a place where I am Greatly Apprehensive of personal Danger to him.

Eventually the letter is signed “your Mercy Warren.”

Folks who read a bunch of Warren letters will recognize that she often addressed her husband James as “my Dearest Friend.” When she wrote of “my Beloved Husband,” she was being arch and literary, not describing him to a third party. 

Jeffrey H. Richards and Sharon M. Harris recognized that intended recipient in Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters, which they published in 2009. Unaccountably, though, they dated this letter to 15 June.

James Warren responded on 18 June. His letter has already been transcribed and published in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Proceedings and Collections volumes—not because it came from the man in the marriage, but because he had a lot to say about the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In his reply James also told Mercy: “I hope your Strawberries are well taken care of and that you have fine feasting on them.”

TOMORROW: The general’s diary.

Crowd-Sourcing the Documents of Revolutionary Boston

The Massachusetts Historical Society is one of the institutions that’s taken a crowd-sourced approach to transcribing significant collections that aren’t as monumental as the major Founders’ papers.

Traditionally, transcription projects of this size have been undertaken by one dedicated scholar, sometimes with a small team of students as assistants.

That method definitely has advantages: the editors become familiar with the writers’ handwritings, vocabulary, and references. They know the standards of the field. But such a team needs funding.

Scanning a collection and making those digital images available online has made it possible for an archive to recruit and train volunteers to transcribe pages and check each other’s work. Each page becomes a puzzle to solve, and a contribution to scholarship. That sort of project still needs funding, but not as much.

The resulting transcriptions are reliable in the same way Wikipedia has become a useful (albeit not infallible) source of information on many topics. Many sets of eyes on the same information means fewer errors survive. While A.I.-aided transcriptions may be faster, these are still more reliable.

One of the M.H.S.’s first projects of this sort was the diary of John Rowe, the politically malleable merchant. I’ve used that resource many times. Perhaps my favorite entry is Rowe’s comment about a Massachusetts Provincial Congress holiday that he went back and edited, reversing the political sentiment he originally expressed.

It looks like the M.H.S.’s team is nearly finished with the Ezekiel Price Papers. Price was a court official, notary, insurance broker, and all-around networker, with connections and gossip sources everywhere. I haven’t found as much drama in Price’s own life, but he’s a great source and observer on events.

The M.H.S. welcomes more volunteers interested in transcribing more documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The biggest drawback of these projects for me are twinges of guilt. Guilt that I haven’t yet signed up for any. Guilt that when I milk the results for Boston 1775, I follow some of my own formatting preferences (non-typewriter punctuation, paragraph breaks), breaking the rules that the volunteers so carefully follow.

But my main feeling is gratitude to all the staff and volunteers who are making those collections more available and more useable for everyone.

TOMORROW: Sampling some ongoing projects.

Speeding Up “Slow-Motion Scholarship”?

I’ve been doing test drives on the Clements Library’s machine-made transcriptions of documents from the Thomas Gage Papers, seeing how useful those texts from Transkribus are.

Archiving documents already costs money, of course. Systematic scanning of those documents and making them available online costs more.

Producing accurate transcriptions for those documents requires even more labor, with a lot of expertise and patience thrown in. That might be the most expensive stage.

The U.S. government once deemed that work important enough to fund. We can look back at precedents like the Varick Transcripts of Gen. George Washington’s letters made in the 1780s, Peter Force’s American Archives in the ante-bellum period, and the major scholarly projects of the Progressive, New Deal, and Cold War eras.

Originally based on thick printed volumes, that effort has naturally spread to computers and computer networks. Founders Online is not only hosted by the National Archives, but its constituent projects received funding through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (N.H.P.R.C.).

But that was all before the current administration set out to slash funding for historical projects that don’t feed its leader’s ego, both within the budget process and illegally outside of it. In June the Organization of American Historians issued a report titled “The Federal Assault on History: A Record of Executive Actions,” (P.D.F. download). It says:

Despite the impressive work done with the assistance of NHPRC grant awards, the program created by Congress often finds itself eliminated in presidential budget requests. FY 2026 and 2027 were no different, with the Trump Administration attempting to zero out the funding. As in prior years, Congress recognized the value that NHPRC brings to their districts and rebuked the effort, providing $5 million in grantmaking funds, though this represents a 50 percent cut to the program from FY2025.

Funding is only one of the challenges faced by NHPRC in 2025 and now in 2026. NHPRC is convened twice a year by the Archivist of the United States, its chair, to review grant proposals, recommend awards, and approve new calls for proposals. Without an Archivist of the United States duly confirmed by the Senate, the Commission has no chair to convene it and has not been able to meet since November 2024. This little-understood effect of the firing of the Archivist of the United States in February 2025 has blocked Congress’s intention to award millions of dollars in grant funding to archives and other historical institutions throughout the country.

That’s yet another part of our national government and polity that will need repair.

To be sure, there were limitations in that approach to transcribing archives. For example, there’s always been more funding available for the papers of elite American Founders than for other sorts. (Gen. Thomas Gage came from an elite class, too, but he was on the Wrong Side.)

Those monumental projects also took decades. Back in 1997 Lingua Franca magazine published an article by Jack Hitt titled “In the Franklin Factory: Slow-Motion Scholarship in an Age of Academic Obsolescence.” It concluded with a glimpse of the Benjamin Franklin Papers editors looking ahead to the end of their work after four decades. They’re still at it.

Given that environment, it’s easy to see the appeal of artificial-intelligence software as a way to ease, speed up, and democratize the transcription of handwritten documents. If, that is, the technology actually works.

TOMORROW: Alternative approaches.

Reading Documents about the Governor and the Towns

I plucked out a couple more documents from the digitized Thomas Gage Papers to see how well the automated handwriting-recognition program Transkribus has worked there.

Here’s a bit of “Intelligence” dated 25 Feb 1775. It’s a casual note, written quickly for Gov. Gage’s files, rather than an official letter. The transcription reads:

St.
It having been reported that aquantity of Shan Outs &c is
confesting of persons
now buying up for the use of the Army a Committee, from
all the Towns round met last might to consult measures to
prevent this supply from being bro: down & effectually
hinder the people from selling any hereafter & also to him,
der any large quantity of any kind of Provisions beyond
what may be daily expended from being sent into Town

I read it as:

It having been reported that a quantity of Straw Oats &c is now buying up for the use of the Army a Committee consisting of persons from all the Towns round met last might to consult measures to prevent this supply from being brot: down & effectually hinder the people from selling any hereafter & also to hinder any large quantity of any kind of Provisions beyond what may be daily expended from being sent into Town

The phrase “consisting of persons” is an insert between lines marked by a caret, and the second “hinder” fell over a line break, so it’s less surprising the program glitched on those. The “St.” at the beginning of the automatic transcription appears to be an echo of “It”—in other words, the program transcribed those marks twice. All told, not a bad start, but still falling short.

Here’s a crowded document with bleeding through the paper: a 3 Feb 1775 petition from the selectmen of six towns urging Gov. Gage not to send troops to Marshfield. It begins:

We his Addutys loyal Subjects, Selectmen of the Sevent
town of Otimouth, Kingston, Dubord, Pembrook Hanour
& Lastrate, alenly affected with a Sence of the Encreasincy
Danger Realamities, which menace one of the most prom-
ifing country upon tenth, with Political Action, cannot
but lement, that while we are Endeavouring to preserve
peace & maintain the authority of the laws; at a perod
When the bunds of Government are relieved, by Violent
Infructions on the Chinster of the Province, our Enemies
are prutifing Every Mydim, Strutages, to Seduce the
people into act of Violance, & ontrage.

My reading of those lines:

We his Majestys loyal Subjects, Selectmen of the Several towns of Plimouth, Kingston, Duxborô, Pembrook, Hanover & Scituate, deeply affected with a Sense of the Encreasing Danger & calamities, which menace one of the most promising countrys upon Earth, with Political Exition; cannot but lament, that while we are Endeavouring to preserve peace & maintain the authority of the laws; at a period When the bonds of Government are relaxed, by Violent Infractions on the Charter of the Province, our Enemies are practising Every Insidious Strategem to Seduce the people into acts of Violance, & outrage.

Then software had a much tougher time with this one. Though I can’t blame a large language model for not recognizing the word “Exition,” which the Oxford English Dictionary says went out of use by 1820. I had to look that up myself.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in the automatic transcription is the town names. Those are important since researchers might scan for those terms. Granted, the selectmen didn’t help by using unorthodox spellings. To their credit, the cataloguers at the Clements Library listed all the towns in their standard forms in the metadata for this document, so it will come up in a local-history search.

Peter Force included this petition in his American Archives, changing the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation to conform to the standards of 1837. So historians have already had the chance to see local office-holders refer to Massachusetts as “one of the most promising countrys upon Earth.”

A quick scan of the automated transcription would probably bring the phrase “we are Endeavouring to preserve peace & maintain the authority of the laws” out of the unrecognizable gobbeldygook. That might lead one to think these selectmen were supporting Gov. Gage’s policies.

In fact, these selectmen were protesting the idea of stationing soldiers in Marshfield. They said those redcoats would provoke “the people,” already upset by the Massachusetts Government Act. That law-and-order language was a way to head off criticism and turn it against the local Loyalists asking for military protection. Another lesson in the value of reading the whole document in its historical context.

TOMORROW: The present and future of transcription.

“Even the best quality HTR will contain errors”

Yesterday I described how the Clements Library in Michigan has provided transcripts of handwritten documents in the Thomas Gage Papers.

The library website explains:

The plain text we provide for this collection was created using Transkribus, a tool that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to transcribe handwritten documents. Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) “reads” the page images and makes a best guess at identifying the letters and words on a page. This is an automated process and subject to error, particularly if the original handwriting is difficult to read.

Even the best quality HTR will contain errors. This means that the plain text is not a fully faithful reproduction of the scanned original document. Proper nouns such as names of individuals, groups, and places are especially subject to recognition errors. Text written at an angle or vertically on the page will likely not be recognized at all. In addition, any spelling errors, line breaks, or abbreviations in the original document will be represented verbatim.

We provide this uncorrected plain text in the interests of improving accessibility and searchability of the collection. Please keep in mind that full text search results may not be fully accurate for specific keywords and we encourage you to use multiple search strategies to find relevant materials.

I’m very grateful to the Clements Library for providing scans online. As for the transcriptions, I chose an incoming document at random to assess.

On 29 Dec 1774, New Hampshire governor John Wentworth (shown above) wrote to Gen. Gage about how his authority was crumbling. The transcription of that document currently reads in part:

It is very certain that the peoples
minds, are too generally prepared, by
factions artifices and falwhoods wickedly
disseminated by the popular Laders, for any
violences whatever. This Spirit, I observe,
has been exceedingly angmented since the
return of the Delegates, from the continental
Congress; And having broken forth into
overt Acts, in the late repeated assaults on
His Majesty's Castle William and Mary,
those persons & all they can influence are
less restraind, and more readily disposed
to pursue any violences that may be
recommended by their Party in Boston,
or in contemplation hers, among which

I have strong reasons to beleive, Reprisals
on the King's Servants mentiond by the
Congress, will be the earliest & most sudden,
His Majesty's Ships Searborough and
Cancanx are not sufficient to frustrate
such intentions, and at the same time
cover of sure the Castle Wm. and Mary,
which is situate three mites from this
Town, which wou'd receive protection
from one additional Sloop or small Rigate
of war; with an angmentation of about
Forty or Fifty Mariness to their Compliment

To quote those lines here on Boston 1775, I’d begin with this text but carefully read the scans to confirm or correct it. The result is:

It is very certain that the peoples minds, are too generally prepared, by factious artifices and falsehoods wickedly disseminated by the Popular Leaders, for any violences whatever. This Spirit, I observe, has been exceedingly augmented since the return of the Delegates, from the continental Congress; And having broken forth into overt Acts, in the late repeated assaults on His Majesty’s Castle William and Mary; those persons & all they can influence are less restrain’d, and more readily disposed to pursue any violences that may be recommended by their Party in Boston, or in contemplation here, among which I have strong reasons to beleive, Reprisals on the King’s Servants, as mention’d by the Congress, will be the earliest & most sudden;

His Majesty’s Ships Scarborough and Canceaux are not sufficient to frustrate such intentions, and at the same time cover & secure the Castle Wm. and Mary, which is situate three miles from this Town, which wou’d receive protection from one additional Sloop or small Frigate of war, with an augmentation of about Forty or Fifty Marines to their Compliment.

The A.I. transcription has some errors, but Gov. Wentworth’s main topic and message come through: Send in the Marines!

It helped that this document was clearly written. Wentworth had received an elite education at a time when handwriting was part of a gentleman’s training. He had time to compose and write out this letter; I saw only one word squeezed in as an afterthought.

As for the peculiarities of eighteenth-century writing from our perspective, Wentworth’s spelling was rather modern. He used the long s less often than many contemporaries. However, he wrote many of his lowercase e backwards to our eyes—the root of several transcription errors.

TOMORROW: What about less elegant documents?

“To Write a Good Hand Is a fine Accomplishment“

I don’t think Boston 1775 would exist without Google Books, which launched the year before I began blogging.

Being able to search for phrases and names in the vast corpus of nineteenth-century books that Google scanned has let me identify early sources, track local lore, and find rare sources.

That search depends on optical character recognition (O.C.R.) translating the printed marks into digital text.

I’ve learned how to unearth that digital text from Google Books pages for long quotations. At first this involved some tricks to maneuver to the pages I wanted. Then Google reprogrammed that site, so it became easier to capture particular text—but without any punctuation marks.

Either way, I learned to go over the O.C.R. transcription carefully to make sure it was complete and accurate. There are still a few bugs in the system. But it’s good to stay on my toes with historical sources.

Handwritten Text Recognition (H.T.R.) is the next step in this process, converting cursive writing into digital text. The University of Innsbruck’s Transkribus platform was the early leader in this field. The complexity of our writing means people started applying artificial intelligence (A.I.) software to the problem.

Indeed, some historians have said that H.T.R. is now the most advanced and reliable product of A.I. for the field, especially as it’s improved in the last couple of years. 

In September 2025, Civil War History published a study by Prof. Julie Mujic of Denison University on how ChatGPT transcribed a handwritten poem from 1864, finding many discrepancies and problems. Then in January 2026, Prof. Cameron Blevins of Colorado University Denver revisited the same text with the most recent version of Google’s Gemini 3.0, finding it produced a complete and reliable transcription.

Likewise, in November 2025 Dan Cohen, dean and professor at Northeastern, found that the Gemini Pro 3 program did a very good job transcribing some difficult letters. Even letters with cross-writing, that bane of nineteenth-century correspondence. Cohen concluded:

It allows human beings to focus their time on the important, profound work of understanding another human being, rather than staring at a curlicue to grasp if it’s an L or an I.

There’s still room for improvement, as Prof. Mark Humphries of Wilfrid Laurier University discussed in May 2026, but this application of A.I. will probably continue to get better. As with a lot of technology, one big question will be whether proprietors will be able to resist adding features that actually reduce its practicality for many users.

The transcriptions of handwritten texts that I’ve worked with the most come from the Thomas Gage Papers at the Clements Library. That site states: “The plain text we provide for this collection was created using Transkribus, a tool that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to transcribe handwritten documents.” How do the results hold up?

TOMORROW: Reading the general’s mail.

Inventing “The ‘Preserved Clap’ carriage”

Last May, I wrote a series of postings about Dr. Preserved Clap of Hadley.

This was probably the most that anyone had written about Dr. Clap in two hundred years.

While doing that research, I ran some web searches for Clap’s name to feel sure I wasn’t missing additional sources. Google Books in particular has been hugely valuable for unearthing leads in state and local histories.

However, Google has prioritized its generative A.I. programming, putting that output at the top of search results. Here are some ways Google—once the most powerful, most useful way to search for information that humanity had yet devised—explained Preserved Clap:

The "Preserved Clap" carriage is a specific, modified light ambulance-style carriage used to transport the sick and wounded, famously used during the Revolutionary War siege of Yorktown and developed by Preserved Clap, a Continental Army artificer known for his mechanical ingenuity. [1, 2] . .

The Inventor: Preserved Clap was a Massachusetts-born craftsman with great mechanical abilities. During the Revolutionary War, he worked at the Continental artificer shops and also claimed to have discovered an improved method for boring cannons.

* The Carriage Invention: In 1780, Clap designed and constructed a specialized medical transport carriage. This carriage was later detailed by Dr. James Thacher in his military journals and drawn by an artillery officer present at the siege of Yorktown.

That response was accompanied by a thumbnail photo of the “Chariot d’Orsay” made in Paris in 1875–1885, featured in Art & Architecture Quarterly’s article about the Long Island Museum of American Art, History & Carriages, as shown above.

Dr. Preserved Clap had nothing to do with ambulances. The “carriage” he invented was a gun carriage for mounting cannon. Dr. James Thacher didn’t mention Clap in his Military Journal or his American Medical Biography. The carriage that Google showed has no link to Revolutionary America.

Of course, that text doesn’t reflect how the Google A.I. program would respond to the same query now. Even back then the service would put out different responses from one day to another according to a completely opaque process. Today the programming is using my writing from May to provide more accurate answers about Dr. Preserved Clap.

That’s because generative A.I. programs based on large-language models aren’t really designed to supply true answers to questions. They’re designed to provide plausible answers based on the statistical likelihood of how sentences flow. By releasing a few articles about Dr. Preserved Clap into the world, I altered what sentences about him are likely to say.

Back when I first ran this search, Google’s programming constructed what seemed like the most probable answer about a doctor and a “carriage,” gussied up with references to another Revolutionary doctor and a big Revolutionary event. It roped in a pretty picture of a carriage. The result was what’s come to be called a “hallucination,” a false description of the world offered with seeming confidence and authority. It’s one of the unavoidable pitfalls of this programming.

TOMORROW: Handwriting analysis.

Seeing an Unfamiliar Face

In June of 2025 I attended the Sestercentennial reenactment of the Battle of Bunker Hill in Gloucester.

While walking from one site to another I passed a series of temporary lawn signs profiling various participants in that historical event.

One showed Col. Richard Gridley, the provincial artillery commander. It was a portrait in John Singleton Copley’s style.

By then I’d been studying Gridley for over twenty years. I’d never come across a portrait. But since Gridley’s not one of the most famous or influential figures of his time, I thought it was possible that a portrait had only recently been identified or made available to the public.

I took a photo with my phone and walked on. Then I saw more of those signs, showing other men in the unmistakable style of generative artificial-intelligence (A.I.) imagery. Those pictures didn’t try to replicate photographs or period art—they were overly dramatic, flat digital images with the patina of light brown produced from the mixture of all the colors. You probably know the look.

“Wait a minute,” I thought. I went back to the Gridley sign. Only then did I notice that at the lower left corner of the picture was the tiny label “AI Generated Image.” 

Clearly the folks publicizing that big reenactment had used one of the generative A.I. programs to pump out a bunch of pictures—some in its standard style, some made to look like period portraits. And those pictures did catch the eye. For an expensive event designed to attract people not already interested in Revolutionary history, that might be a valuable function.

The risk is, of course, that those images could fool people into believing they’re real. That’s unlikely for the pictures in the obviously A.I. style, but this picture programmed to look like a Copley fooled me for a couple minutes.

So far this image hasn’t escaped the confinement of one lawn sign in Gloucester in June 2025. I certainly hope my photo taken at an angle doesn’t loose it onto the world. But I can think of plenty of examples of false or falsely attributed portraits proliferating on the internet almost as quickly as false quotations do.

In the past month I had a couple more encounters with A.I. and historical material. I received an email from an “AI agent”; I wrote about that on my Ko-fi page, one of my monthly addenda for generous supporters. I watched an online presentation using images adapted from authentic period artifacts but run through an A.I. program that changed details—apparently without the presenter realizing it. Those experiences made me think it was time to share some thoughts about the use of generative A.I. in presenting history.

TOMORROW: Hallucination nation.

Widmer on “The Living Declaration,” 30 Sept.

On Wednesday, 30 September, the Massachusetts Historical Society will welcome Ted Widmer for a conversation titled “The Living Declaration: When in the Course of Human Events.”

Seats at this event have been sold out, but it’s still possible to register to view the conversation online.

The event description says:

Why do we have a Declaration of Independence? Why does it include language about human rights? In conversation with M.H.S. Chief Historian Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, historian and former presidential speechwriter Ted Widmer explores the complex lineage of the words and ideas in the Declaration and the dramatic sequence of events, many of them originating in Massachusetts, that led to the creation of the most consequential state paper in history.

Widmer’s new book, The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text, features a foreword by Gordon S. Wood, who died earlier this year.

People who have signed up to attend the in-person event will be able to view one of Thomas Jefferson’s manuscript copies of his draft for the Declaration. Folks who haven’t can study a scan here. This isn’t a working draft; it was one of the copies Jefferson made to let friends know what he wanted the Declaration to say.

This event will run from 6 to 7 P.M. Register for online access through this page.

Jortner on “Jewish Patriots” in Worcester, 29 Sept.

On Tuesday, 29 September, the American Antiquarian Society will host an online presentation by Adam Jortner on “A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom.”

It looks like this presentation will be based on Jortner’s book of the same name, published by Oxford University Press in 2024. On the Jewish Book Council website, Stuart Halpern described that book like this:

…a mag­is­te­r­i­al his­to­ry of Amer­i­ca’s first Jew­ish cit­i­zens. It weaves tales of promi­nent lead­ers like Ger­shom Seixas and Jonas Phillips with lit­tle-known accounts of rev­o­lu­tion­ary Jew­ish troops, fundrais­ing for the first syn­a­gogues (and sub­se­quent intra­com­mu­nal dis­putes), and Jews respond­ing to anti­semitism by chal­leng­ing their antag­o­nists to life-endan­ger­ing duels. Demon­strat­ed through­out the book is how the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in Amer­i­ca’s ear­li­est years wres­tled with its past and mapped its future — just like the coun­try itself. . . .

Jort­ner places great empha­sis on how Jews peti­tioned against test oaths, pledges to Chris­t­ian val­ues that pre­vent­ed Jews from hold­ing polit­i­cal office. These efforts helped shape reli­gious free­dom in the Unit­ed States.

Adam Jortner is a professor of American History at Auburn University. His other books on early American history include The Gods of Prophetstown: Tippecanoe and the War for the American Frontier and Blood from the Sky: Miracles and Politics in the Early American Republic.

Jortner has explored various channels for sharing historical information with the public, from a regular column in Current magazine to being part of the writing team for Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? His Audible downloads include The Hidden History of the Boston Tea Party, Faith and the Founding Fathers, and a new 24-lecture Great Courses series on the year 1776.

This online event will take place from 7 to 8 P.M. Register through this page.

Also available now via the A.A.S. is Prof. Ronald Angelo Johnson’s talk on his new book, Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution.

Johnson, the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Professor of History at Baylor University, discusses “the ways in which English and French language newspapers from 1758 to 1783 informed and inspirited revolutionary Atlantic inhabitants in British North America (later the United States) and French Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) toward freedom, liberty, and equality.”

Lund Washington’s Letter Mentioning William Lee’s First Wife

On 30 Dec 1775, Lund Washington wrote a letter to his distant cousin George, who was also his employer.

George was off in Cambridge commanding the Continental Army. As his cousin’s plantation overseer, Lund caught him up on various details of the operations at Mount Vernon.

As published in the Papers of George Washington in the 1980s and shared at Founders Online, that letter ended abruptly:

I will have gravel Carted for the walks. One of the men that went out with James Cleveland left him when he found they were likely to suffer.

There was no signature. “This document is incomplete,” said the editors, nonetheless adding a period to the end.

That letter was in the collection of Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. At some point in the next quarter-century, scholars must have gotten a better look at it. Perhaps it had been mounted or otherwise sealed off.

Today Mount Vernon shares a scan of that page, plus the opposite side with the rest of the letter.

It turns out Lund Washington continued his sentence on the next page: “…were likely to suffer for want of provisions.” (George Washington had sent James Cleveland out to his Ohio claims.)

Later the letter says:

if it will give Will any pleasure he may be told his wife and child are both very well.

Directed to Gen. Washington from Mount Vernon, that comment had to refer to William Lee, his body servant, one of the few other people to make the trip to Massachusetts. It’s the only evidence to indicate that William, born about 1751, had married and fathered a baby before the war.

I didn’t know this source when I wrote about William Lee in a report for the National Park Service on Washington in Cambridge. That report highlights how in February 1776 the general paid Margaret Thomas to make shirts for Lee, years before the man told Washington that he and Thomas had married during the war. We don’t have any documents saying when Lee’s first marriage ended.

Mary V. Thompson, the Mount Vernon historian specializing in its enslaved community, cited Lund Washington’s 30 Dec 1775 letter in a 2014 article for the Journal of the American Revolution. It’s informed other writing about William Lee since, such as his entry at the Encyclopedia of Virginia.

However, Mount Vernon doesn’t share a transcript of the full letter. There’s no indication at Founders Online, which is based on the printed Washington Papers, that a more complete text exists. Rotunda’s index for William Lee doesn’t note this letter among the documents referring to the man.

The result is a scholarly paradox. Lund Washington’s letter to his cousin is now available for anyone to read. But half of it—perhaps the most interesting half—is impossible to find through the standard way to access George Washington’s correspondence.

“The Prize Papers of the American War” Workshop, 8 Oct.

On Friday, 8 October, the Prize Papers Project at Britain’s National Archives will host an international symposium on “The Prize Papers of the American War of Independence.”

Online registration to this event is available, but folks should know that it will take place in London. The discourse will start at 4:30 A.M., Boston time.

The workshop description says:

Bringing together specialists on prize law, the American War of Independence and the Prize Papers, the workshop approaches the collection as a transnational archive of wartime capture and its afterlives. The workshop creates a forum for sustained international exchange and collaboration.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of both the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in July and the opening of the British Vice-Admiralty Court in newly-captured New York City in September 1776. Although exceptionally rich, the prize papers of this court have been largely inaccessible. The newly catalogued papers of the New York court (and its mother-court in London) provide new perspectives on the War of Independence at sea, and on lived experiences of the time, through the intercepted papers and letters found by the British on merchant and fighting ships.

Maritime warfare was central to the War of Independence. Controlling, disrupting, and capturing shipping was crucial to the war on both sides. America started privateering early, in 1775, and sought new (previously forbidden) trading partners. From 1778, French naval and privateering activity expanded the war against Britain, followed by Spain and the Netherlands. British naval forces and loyalist privateers sought to stop American and allied shipping, enforce their imperial authority, and weaken the Continental cause. The conflict eventually extended far beyond the North American seaboard.

An initial group of papers from 150 captured ships, American or supporting America, will be published online on 8 October in the Prize Papers Portal, the open-access online database of the Prize Papers Project. . . . Major bodies of captured material from American, French, Spanish, Dutch and recaptured British vessels will be published in the coming months and years…

Presentations schduled for 8 October include:

• Amanda Bevan & Luan Cakolli: “A Voyage of Discovery and Delivery … and what we’re learning along the way”
• Suzanne Foxley: “American Experience of British Prize Law”
• Séverine Angers: “Write to me by different ships as the English capture many”
• Randolph Cock: “Piecing Together Clues from the U.S.S. Lexington, 1777: A Whodunnit”
• Rebekah Harbord: “Behind the Scenes: Preparing documents from the Prize Papers for digitisation”
• Bethany Groff Dorau: “‘Taken by 64 Guns’: A Case Study of Dalton Marine Captain Offin Boardman”
• Christopher Minty: “‘False & Colourable’: The Brigantine Adventure and the Paper War of the American Revolution”
• Abby Mullen: “Mutiny or Loyalty?: Revolt from the Enemy in American Prizes”
• Graham Moore: “Revolution 250: Exhibiting the Prize Papers at The National Archives”
• John Beiner & Lucas Haasis: “History at the Helm: The Prize Papers and the Making of the Videogame Ahoy”

The keynote address to close out Friday will be delivered by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, author of The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It (Basic Books, 2024).

The Prize Papers Project is run by the National Archives, U.K., and the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Other organizers of this event are the German Maritime Museum Bremerhaven and the German Historical Institute London. The workshop will be hosted by Nele Popp, Amanda Bevan, Oliver Finnegan, and Lucas Haasis.

This symposium occurs alongside an exhibit at the National Archives in Kew titled “Revolution 250: America's Independence Story 1763–1783,” which will run through 29 November.

Listening to Abigail Adams on Paper

A comment about yesterday’s quotation from Abigail Adams has prompted me to veer off into some linguistic digging.

Referring to Benjamin Davis, apparently notorious for taking gingerbread from refugees, Adams wrote: “How many little ones can say I was an Hungry & you gave me no Bread, but inhumanely took what little I had from me.”

The Massachusetts Historical Society shared a scan of this letter, so we can confirm she spelled the words that way.

As a minister’s daughter, Adams knew her Christian scripture. But she wasn’t quoting the King James Bible exactly. Matthew 25:42 says: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat:…” According to linguists, “an” was a form of the prefix “a,” as in “times’s a-wasting,” adapted to go before an H.

Adams instead used the form “an hungry,” which this linguistic website defines in its single-word form as “an obsolete word for hungry that is allowed to stay in Webster's Third New International Dictionary because it shows up in Shakespeare (Coriolanus I:i:209).” Did Adams misremember the Biblical verse? Or were people in the mid-1700s people reading the phrase that way?

Discussing Abigail Adams’s expressions leads me to Susan Walsh and Christopher S. Davis’s Adams Letters and Language podcast, hosted on YouTube. Walsh portrays Adams, along with being a librarian and educator. Davis is a historical dialect coach who studied 18th-century New England speech for the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum.

On Saturday I heard their presentation at History Camp Boston, which will become a future podcast episode. Each episode includes a reading of John and Abigail Adams’s in period style “as well as discussion of the history, themes, and linguistics revealed by the letters.”

Since I’ve been impressionistically opining on how people really spoke in Revolutionary America since 2008, I look forward to hearing a more expert discussion.

Dickinson Seeking “a happy & permanent Reconciliation”

The William & Mary Quarterly had a big Sestercentennial scoop in its July 2026 issue—so big that it made those newly discovered documents available online for a limited time ahead of publication. 

The documents are two long 1775 letters and an enclosure from Pennsylvania politician John Dickinson to David Barclay, a British merchant and banker (shown here).

In 1775 the Continental Congress assigned Dickinson the task of drafting the Olive Branch Petition. He also reworked Thomas Jefferson’s prose in the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms. The first text sought a reconciliation with the Crown in traditional fashion, the second explained publicly why the young war was justified.

Together those texts show the balancing act Dickinson was trying to pull off. He believed in the American resistance to Parliament’s new measures, in which he had played a leading role, and he also believed in the danger of splitting completely from Britain.

Dickinson dated the first of the newly surfaced letters on 5 Aug 1775. It shared his (not always accurate) description of the war so far, emphasizing how the Crown was unlikely to prevail without both sides suffering great harm. Then came his draft bill for reworking the constitutional relationship between Britain and its colonies and calming people’s “Fears & Jealousies.”

Those two documents were written out by a secretary for Dickinson’s edits and signature. The second letter, finished 28 October, is in Dickinson’s own messy, reconsidered writing. By then, though he didn’t know it, George III and the government had dismissed the Olive Branch Petition without looking at it, declared all the colonies at the Congress to be in rebellion, and promised a forceful response. Dickinson’s proposal had arrived too late to do any good.

According to the New York Times, these letters remained in the Barclay family, coming into the hands of his great-great-great-great-great-nephew, Humphrey Barclay. In 2024 he showed them to book and manuscript specialist Donovan Rees, who realized their importance. Dickinson’s initiative isn’t mentioned in any other source—both he and Barclay were working backchannels, so they kept their correspondence quiet. Dickinson even put a postscript on the first letter asking Barclay not to print it or give anyone a copy.

On behalf of the Barclay family, Rees offered to sell the three documents to the U.S. Library of Congress, but it didn’t meet the asking price. (It’s unclear when that discussion took place, but the Library of Congress has been under dire pressure at times in the last couple of years. There’s an ongoing legal dispute over whether the President’s criminal-defense lawyer and current acting U.S. Attorney General is also the acting Librarian of Congress.)

The documents were then purchased by Harvard professor Eric Nelson, author of The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding among other books. Nelson generously makes manuscripts in his collection available to researchers.

Prof. Jonathan Gienapp of Stanford and Dr. Jane E. Calvert of the John Dickinson Writings Project prepared transcripts of the documents for analysis and publication. The William & Mary Quarterly organized a forum of scholars to discuss their implications in short essays appearing in that July issue.

For a good primer on these Dickinson letters, see Calvert and Gienapp’s article “The Secret Effort to Prevent the Revolution.”

TOMORROW: Hurt feelings.

Show Changes on the Declaration of Independence

On this date 250 years ago, the Continental Congress was taking the weekend off from formal sessions.

The Congress’s proposed Declaration of Independence was lying “on the table,” discussion of it tabled in favor of tasks like a naming a committee on manufacturing sulphur and choosing who would sign another $1,000,000 in currency.

Of course, a lot of politicking happened that weekend, off the record. Delegates were no doubt reading the draft submitted on 28 June 1776, composed by Thomas Jefferson with input from John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and possibly Robert R. Livingston. Obviously, it needed further revision.

Earlier this year, the Thomas Jefferson Papers project at Princeton University created a website laying out that writing and revision process in detail, displaying and analyzing the existing documentary record. It’s well worth a visit.

It’s also interesting to think about the pedagogical and design challenge of this project. As the editors explain:

Past editors of Jefferson’s papers employed different techniques to show the declaration’s development and the committee’s revisions to the draft. Some used the root text before any revisions were made and added extensive annotation to explain later changes. Others printed the draft as it was submitted to Congress, using annotation to describe the changes that had been made up to that point. One edition printed three stages of revision as three separate, side-by-side columns for comparison. Others simply included an image of the chaotic draft without attempting to transcribe or break down the contents . . .

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, in the series’ first published volume, printed the underlying “original Rough draught” with footnotes showing changes made before Adams made his copy. In a different part of the same volume, the Papers printed the draft as submitted to Congress, with the changes made by the committee marked, and also printed the final Declaration of Independence. While a dedicated researcher could piece together the development of the draft, it is difficult to get a clear narrative of the draft’s development through print sources alone. For this exhibit, we separated stages of revision into three tabs, so changes to the text can be viewed side by side with zoom-capable images of the manuscript.

The first tab shows the base text before any alterations were made. This is completely in Jefferson’s hand and strips out changes and corrections that were later marked on the page.

The second tab shows changes marked before Adams made his copy. These might be early revisions Jefferson made to his own work or revisions made in early consultations with committee members.

The third tab shows the remaining revisions marked on the document prior to its submission to Congress. To ascertain this stage, we examined three copies that Jefferson sent to friends in the days shortly after July 4, in which he reconstructed the draft that the committee had laid before Congress. We also consulted another copy of the draft that Jefferson transcribed into his Notes of Proceedings of the Continental Congress, which he compiled sometime between August 1776 and August 1783. When possible, we have identified the committee member who contributed each revision.

Adams and Jefferson both left recollections of the writing process. Unfortunately, that means we don’t know what happened.

TOMORROW: The Adams chronicle.