Books, Maps, and Politics: A Cultural History of the Library of Congress, 1783-1861

Conclusion: The Library before and after the Civil War

210 conclusion g The Library before and after the Civil War After the Civil War, the Library of Congress entered a period of unprecedented growth under the leadership of Ainsworth Rand Spofford, who joined the institution in 1861 as Assistant Librarian, became Librarian of Congress in 1864, and continued in that position until 1897. By virtue of his encyclopedic knowledge of books and dynamic personality, Spofford usurped many of the functions that had previously been duties of the chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library, such as guiding purchases and formulating the rules of the Library. Unlike his predecessor, John Silva Meehan, Spofford was an experienced book dealer, writer, and bibliophile who harbored ambitious plans to turn the Library of Congress into a national library, comprehensive in its acquisitions of American books, useful to scholars across disciplines, and available to the general public. Spofford was inspired largely by the example of European institutions such as the Bibliothèque Nationale and particularly the British Museum Library, where Antonio Panizzi had pressed for more effective copyright deposit, through which he had expanded that library’s collections to half a million volumes by the 1850s.1 Spofford presided over dramatic changes in acquisitions and thephysical plant of the Library. He orchestrated the removal of the Smithsonian the library before and after the civil war 211 collections to the Library of Congress in 1866 and purchase of the Peter Force collection of Americana in 1867, and he lobbied Congress to centralize copyright deposits at the Library of Congress in 1870, a law that made additional space for the Library a pressing need. Atwenty-sixyear campaign by Spofford resulted in the completion in 1897 of a new building for the Library, the structure now known as the Jefferson Building , across the east plaza from the Capitol. These developments made it possible for the Library of Congress to become physically,institutionally, and intellectually a modern national library.2 The shift in orientation of the Library of Congress is evident in the architecture of the building for which Spofford campaigned. Spofford insisted in the 1870s that design submissions for the new Library building include a circular readingroom one hundred feet in diameter, an architectural feature modeled on the British Museum Library which presupposed public use of the collections as a principal function of the Library. The architectural beauty of the Library in the antebellum era had been strictly symbolic and intended for visual consumption; the architecture of the Library that Spofford oversaw retained and magnified this symbolism but was also designedfor public use. These post–Civil War developments were in sharp contrast to the limited functions the Library of Congress had served in its first six decades of existence. The history of the Library in this period shows a consistent pattern of congressional resistance to the idea that it was responsible for creating a national library or intervening in any other material way to further the cause of letters in America. Many individual members of the Joint Library Committee, including New Englanders Edward Everett and Rufus Choate and South Carolinian William C. Preston, as well as Smithsonian librarian Charles Coffin Jewett, agreed with culturally nationalistic critics that a Library of Congress expanded on the model of European national libraries could become both a practical aid to American writers and a potent symbol of the country’sdevotion to culture. But political trends generally made such views impractical; opposition could always be mounted on ideological grounds. In the era of the early Republic, the ideology of classical republicanism meant that a national library faced charges of luxury, charges that retained their potency in the atmosphere of populist anti-intellectualism associated with Jacksonian democracy. The example of European national libraries 212 conclusion was mostly lost on legislators who brought to Washington attitudes of ambivalence toward European cultural riches and distrust of an activist federal government. Despite these limitations on its growth, the Library nonetheless provided important services to government officials. The most significant of these functions, of course, was providing legislators with the books and maps they needed to govern effectively. Encoded in the early book lists and catalogs of the Library, therefore, is a record of the primary intellectual sources from which late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century lawmakers derived their knowledge and authority. This record shows that in carrying...