Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884

Note on Primary Sources

note on primary sources For a historian, the early stages of research are a particularly exciting time, filled with a frenetic kind of activity—reading what has already been written on your topic, visiting archives, and writing letters of inquiry to anyone who might be able to help you locate the sources you need. It is also a period filled with a heightened sense of anticipation and with the feeling that there are no limits to what you can find out about your subject. Each small discovery—sometimes only a scrap of paper or an indirect reference—can lead to a much bigger one. And each new discovery provokes more questions than it answers. Under such circumstances, a comment like the one that follows can bring the period of excitement that sometimes spills over into euphoria to a screeching halt: ‘‘I . . . burned the private journal kept in girlhood, and the letters received from my brother, mother, sister and other friends. . . . At the office I had received, read and burned, without answer, letters from some of the most prominent men and women of the era; letters which would be valuable history to-day [and] therefore [have] no private papers.’’ Jane Grey Swisshelm wrote those words on page 164 of the memoir she published in 1880, shortly before her death. She claims to have destroyed her diary and family letters to preserve her privacy from the prying eyes of the ‘‘female help’’ and ‘‘farm laborers’’ with whom she lived. She does not explain why she destroyed her professional papers and correspondence. The destruction of such documents does not make a researcher’s life easy. It requires the casting of an extremely wide net in order to compensate . For me, the working assumption was that if ‘‘some of the most prominent men and women of the era’’ wrote to her, she must have written to some of them. And if they were prominent enough, they probably kept those letters, and someone else probably preserved them by depositing them in an archive or library. This proved to be the case. Over a period of about eight years, I found references to and/or letters from Jane in the Horace Greeley Papers (New York Public Library), the Pickard-Whittier Papers (Houghton Library, Harvard University), the Joshua Giddings and George Julian Papers (Li- 200 note on primary sources brary of Congress), the Mann Family Papers (Antioch College Library), the Zabina Eastman Papers (Chicago Historical Society), and the HoltMesser Papers and the Jane G. Swisshelm Papers (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study). Other references and letters appear in the microfilm collections of the Stanton-Anthony Papers (ed. Patricia G. Holland and Ann D. Gordon, Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1991) and the Charles Sumner Papers (ed. Beverly W. Palmer, Alexandria, Va.: Chadwyck-Healey, 1988). The largest number of primary materials relating to Jane is to be found at the Minnesota Historical Society. The William B. Mitchell Papers include a few letters to and from Jane, her sister, and her other relatives as well as a variety of family legal documents and a number of short original manuscripts. Miscellaneous references to Jane and her activities are contained in the Ignatius Donnelly Family Papers, the John Gillan Riheldaffer Papers, the Sylvanus Lowry Family Papers, the Mortimer Robinson Family Papers, the Alexander Ramsey Family Papers, and the Minnesota Republican Party Papers. The Minnesota Historical Society also has census data, a collection of newspapers, and a collection of photographs of Jane and members of her family as well as typescripts of articles written by Jane and published in the Woman’s Journal, the Boston Daily Journal, the Massachusetts Ploughman, the Boston Evening Traveller, the New York Daily Tribune, and the Chicago Tribune. The Stearns County Historical Society in St. Cloud, Minnesota, has a collection of newspaper clippings relating to the Mitchell family. And the Consolidated Correspondence of the Quartermaster General in the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., has a small file relating to her appointment as a clerk during the Civil War. Although the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh has no original papers relating to Jane, references to her can be found in the Pennsylvania Room. The most useful was a folder of clippings consisting primarily of George T. Fleming’s twenty-article series on Jane as a Pittsburgh author that appeared in 1919 in the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times. Much of the material in the articles was taken from Jane’s autobiography, but Fleming does include...