History & the U.S.

"Your observations," wrote the President of the U.S. to an ambitious Army captain named Meriwether Lewis, "are to be taken with great pains and accuracy . . . and are to be rendered to the war-office ..." With that letter, in 1803, Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and William Clark off on their famous expedition. True to their instructions, the captains did put down their observations, and most of these have been carefully preserved and published. Then, in 1953, additional documents were discovered in the attic of an old house in St. Paul, Minn. Last week those papers were the subject of a lawsuit that had many a U.S. scholar, collector and librarian on edge.

A General's Desk. The papers were found after the death of the daughter of Civil War General John Henry Hammond. Just how the general came by them, no one was quite sure. But there they were, all wrapped up in old newspapers and tucked inside his desk and under another desk top. The Minnesota Historical Society authenticated them, found that they covered the entire formation of the expedition. With the permission of one heir, the society took them over and began to edit them. But when the news broke that they might be worth $20,000, other heirs filed suit to get them back. At that point, the U.S. Government decided to sue for the papers itself.

Long concerned over the proper preservation of federal documents, the Government felt that it had a good case. These papers, it maintained, had once been Government property. Therefore, the Government was still their owner and had the duty to protect them. But to private collectors across the U.S., the Government's claim on the Lewis and Clark papers had far-reaching implications. If the Government won, did that mean that the National Archives could go around claiming all documents that had once been Government property?

Real & Immediate. A group of scholars representing the Yale, Harvard, Princeton, New York Public and Morgan libraries felt so strongly about the matter that they formed a Manuscripts Emergency Committee. "The threat to the integrity of existing collections," said the committee, "is real and immediate. We believe that the position taken by the Government is untenable." Other bookmen began to ask all sorts of dire questions. Would the New York Public Library, for instance, have to give up Washington's Farewell Address? And what about the Adams papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society--and the Hoover papers at Stanford University? Said Librarian William Lingelbach of the American Philosophical Society : "Every library as old as ours has materials that would be affected."

Last week, as the case went on. U.S. Archivist Wayne C. Grover spoke up to reassure the alarmists. "No one at the National Archives," he said, "has any inclination or intention whatsoever of attempting to gain physical possession of those historical documents currently in the possession of such responsible institutions as the great university libraries and the widely respected historical associations." Yet Grover was in fact warning those collectors and dealers to whom federal documents are merely items for private profit. If the archives has its way, it will no longer permit such papers as those of Lewis and Clark to be parceled up and "dispersed as fragmentary items for commercial purposes."

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