Douglas L. Wilson

Thomas Jefferson's library and the French connection

WHEN THOMAS JEFFERSON SAILED FOR FRANCE as an American diplomat in 1784, he was fulfilling a life-long dream. As a young man he had projected for himself a Grand Tour of Europe which, though never taken, was real enough to complicate his courtship of the woman he hoped to marry. Not long after drafting the Declaration of Independence in 1776 he declined an appointment by the Continental Congress as commissioner to France, but he did so regretfully and mainly because of family circumstances. But after the emotionally shattering loss of his wife in 1782, the prospect of realizing his life-long ambition to visit France was decisive in breaking the hold of Jeffersons bereavement and effectively bringing him out of political retirement. His previous attachments to France had been considerable. One of the first books he ever read, if we may credit the tradition in his family, was a notable history of England by a Frenchman, Paul de Rapin. 1 Because he began to learn French in school at the age of nine and was acknowledged on all sides an exceptional and prodigious student, we can be certain that he was able read the language from a very early period. In order to become a learned man, which was

Sowerby Revisited: The Unfinished Catalogue of Thomas Jefferson's Library

N July I942 the Library of Congress appointed a bibliographer to prepare a descriptive list of the books that had been sold to the Congress of the United States by Thomas Jefferson in i8I5, a collection that formed the basis of what was to become a great national library. The work was to be completed and printed in time for the 200th anniversary of Jeffersons birth, some nine months later. But what was begun as a modest tribute finally emerged seventeen years later in I959 as a bibliographical monument in the form of five large volumes entitled Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson.1 The presiding genius of the project from first to last was E. Millicent Sowerby. Though not a Jefferson scholar at the time of her selection, Miss Sowerby turned out to be an interesting choice for this venture. A British subject and a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, she had established herself as a rare-book bibliographer in the early years of the century against great odds, mostly stemming from the undisguised prejudice against professional women in the rare-book trade. She spurned a career in libraries, after a brief stint as librarian at Birbeck College, London, when she discovered that it was not readers she wanted to work with but rare books, which had held a great fascination for her since childhood. Her autobiography, Rare People and Rare Books (i967), describes the struggles and humiliations she had to endure to learn her trade and simply hold a job. Though Sothebys was willing to

Abraham Lincoln and the Shaping of Public Opinion

December 1862 marked a low point in the administration of Abraham Lincoln. Not only had his party lost ground in the elections the month before, and his army been humiliated on the battlefield at Fredericksburg, but the president was also beset by leaders of his own party, who believed the desperate situation indicated that high-level changes were needed in the cabinet. In the Senate, the Republican caucus sent a deputation to the White House to demand the resignation of the secretary of state William H. Seward, but Lincoln so arranged things that Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, who had been secretly promoting Seward’s ouster with the Republican Senators, was forced to admit to the Senatorial deputation that matters in the cabinet were not as he had represented them. When Chase subsequently offered to submit his own resignation, Lincoln fairly snatched it out of his hand. Not, as it turned out, for the purpose of getting rid of him, but as a way of resolving the crisis. In spite of the president’s pleas, Seward had insisted on resigning, but now with Chase’s resignation in hand, Lincoln saw a way out of his difficulty. By refusing both resignations, he could defuse the explosive situation and at the same time emphasize that the attention of all sides should be focused on the primary task of putting down the insurrection.