we ought to be grateful for what he has given us. But probably most persons have felt quite as much exasperation as gratitude at the thought that our sole record of those interesting, momentous, and formative discussions should come to us from the sullen, mean, and envious mind of Senator William Maclay. "All things look yellow to the jaundiced eye." Discussion of materials that do not exist was from the beginning ruled out of this paper; but it may be pardonable to express a devout and earnest hope that somewhere there exists another journal of those Senatorial proceedings and that in the future it may be laid before the world. It can hardly fail to be a fairer as well as a more generous record.

In the documentary material for the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, that age of copious print, it would be vain to pretend that there are gaps of the greatest magnitude to be signalized. To enumerate a great number of small deficiencies would be tedious. It may suffice to speak by way of specimen of two or three episodes in our history on which more light might well be shed. For one, and an extremely interesting one, there is the history of the striking process by which South Carolina, from being in the last years of the eighteenth century a Federalist state, came by 1830 to be the leader of the extreme state-rights school and the protagonist. of sectional interests. The process remains an obscure one. The theory that Calhoun, disappointed in his ambition for the presidency by reason of his quarrel with Jackson, persuaded his whole state into the new path, is now well seen to be untenable; for it is plain that South Carolina led Calhoun rather than Calhoun South Carolina. For the same reason, there is equally little disposition to adopt Mr. Henry Adams's view, in accordance with which Calhoun was beguiled by the fitful ignis fatuus that rose from the decaying brain of John Randolph as he inflicted his wayward harangues upon the Senate, while the impassive Carolinian sat in the Vice-president's chair and transmuted the hectic utterances into the cold logic of the nullification theory. Failing such theories as these, we are forced to ask for more light, for more ample publication of Carolinian resolves, speeches, editorials, and private correspondence in the years between 1790 and 1830.

For a second instance, though the national government has put forth abundantly the documents of its own civil and military history and of the military history of the Confederacy, the stores of documentary material of the civil government of the Confederacy to which it fell heir at the conclusion of the struggle still for the most part await publication. The Journals of the Confederate Congress

are indeed being laid before us. But we need to know more of the history of Secretary Benjamin's diplomacy, of the struggle for recognition, of the operations of the treasury, and of its relations to the economic life of the seceded states.1

Lastly, it may be permissible to say a few words respecting possible further publications of the private correspondence of eminent public men. Perhaps we are hardly warranted in speaking of gaps here, at least in the sense in which we can use the phrase when speaking of a governmental office or a legislative body which maintains a continuous record of its proceedings, so that if any part of it is not present in the printed series we allege a gap in the literal sense of the term. Yet there are some statesmen whose position is so important or so peculiar that if we lack their correspondence or memoirs we feel that we lack the key to many of the chief transactions of their age. Of all the Americans of the earlier period, there are perhaps none whose correspondence we so distinctly need as the two Adamses. From the elder we have a ten-volume edition of his Works. But it contains after all very little of his correspondence, and those letters are so vivacious that they shine out in a formal age, and compel us to wish eagerly for more. Of the younger Adams, while we have the invaluable Memoirs, surely one of the most remarkable of political diaries, we have almost no letters, though he wrote well and often, during a long and varied public career. In both cases, too, we should find our profit quite as largely in the letters written to the two Presidents, and preserved in the same repository, as in the letters which they themselves wrote.

Aside from John Adams, the chief desideratum for the period of the Revolution might seem to be a new edition of the letters of Richard Henry Lee, for the man was of high abilities and undeniably interesting, while the existing edition of his Life and Correspondence is one of the most preposterous, disorderly, and unusable of books. In the next period, we really suffer much from the lack of any full body of material on the Southern Federalists. We have only Iredell, and he was a judicial character. For lack of a full disclosure, such as the papers of James A. Bayard might afford us, many have been obliged to persist in the misrepresentation that the Federalist party was an aggregation of New-Englanders, although it is probable that, if the whole story were before us, we should perceive that the Middle-state and Southern Federalists had furnished the party with most of that ballast of moderate wisdom which its heady North

1 Mr. J. D. Richardson's Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy (Nashville, 1905) has now partly filled this gap.

ern leaders so much needed, and with much of the momentum which enabled it to do its great work.

The list might readily be carried down to more modern times. It is needless to say with how much delight we shall all greet the publication of the papers of Andrew Jackson; but of this we are already certain. The papers of Van Buren and Polk are already assured of preservation. Their publication will surely illuminate many obscure places in our political history. In the period of the Civil War it is chiefly the papers of the principal Southern leaders, and above all of Davis and Stephens, that we most need in order to complete our materials; and on the Northern side those of the dissentient radicals like Wade and Thaddeus Stevens and Henry Winter Davis.

We are not infrequently invited to take a gloomy view of the future of the historian. We are told that the economist and the sociologist are steadily plucking away his most valuable feathers, and that our venerable muse is losing the fairest portions of her domain to far younger sciences, of which Herodotus and Thucydides never heard and to which, indeed, they might not have felt attracted. But at least it will be clear that in America the purveyor or editor of documentary materials for history has sufficient occupation for the immediate future, and much opportunity to persevere in the endeavor to secure for his science at least a broad and solid basis.

J. FRANKLIN JAMESON.

DOCUMENTS

1. Letters of Gideon J. Pillow to James K. Polk, 1844

THE following letters, written by Gideon J. Pillow to James K. Polk immediately before and during the Democratic national convention of 1844, are a part of the collection of Polk Papers recently acquired by the Library of Congress. The letter from Jackson to Butler is among the Van Buren Papers, also in the Library of Congress.

Van Buren's letter stating his position in opposition to the annexation of Texas appeared April 20, 1844. It was in complete antagonism to the expressed opinion of Jackson upon the same subject according to his letter to A. V. Brown, possibly written in 1843 but not made public until the spring of 1844. Jackson, of whose sincere desire for Van Buren's nomination there can be no question, attempted to neutralize the impression caused by Van Buren's attitude by a letter to the Nashville Union dated May 13, 1844, in which he stated that Van Buren's opposition to the annexation of Texas proceeded from a knowledge of the question only as it had existed in 1841. The communication to the Union was followed the next day by a confidential letter to B. F. Butler, chairman of the New York delegation at the Baltimore convention and Van Buren's personal manager. This was given to Donelson, Jackson's nephew, to deliver at the convention. After Van Buren's name had been withdrawn by Butler, he referred to Jackson's letter as the "prayer of Old Hickory for a re-united Democracy".

Donelson, was accompanied to Washington by Laughlin and Pillow, both of them intimate friends of Polk. At Washington they met the other delegates from Tennessee. The delegation consisted of Pillow, the chairman, Donelson, Laughlin, Alexander Anderson (senator in 1840-1841, and a stanch Calhoun man), John Blair (representative from Tennessee from 1823 to 1835), Taylor, Childress (Polk's brother-in-law), Powell, and five congressmen from Tennessee: Blackwell, Cullom, Andrew Johnson, Cave Johnson, and George W. Jones. Pillow's letters show that Polk's ambition was limited to the vice-presidency. In the convention of 1840 Polk had received the vote of one delegate for the second place on the ticket. He had reason to hope for better support at the Baltimore

convention. The Tennessee state convention, which had expressed no preference for the presidency, indorsed Polk for the vice-presidency. In Arkansas Van Buren and Polk had been selected as the choice of the state convention which met in December, 1843. The same preference was shown in the vote of the Mississippi convention held in January, 1844. Polk's name was therefore coupled with Van Buren's, but Van Buren's attitude on the question of Texas had wholly changed the complexion of affairs. Polk was taken up by the Van Buren faction after their candidate had been cut off from the nomination by the adoption of the two-thirds rule in order to defeat Cass, whose strength was increasing with each ballot. JESSE S. REEVES.

1. ANDREW JACKSON TO B. F. BUTLER of New York.

Confidential.

My dear sir,

HERMITAGE,
May 14th. 1844.

This will be handed to you by my Nephew Major A. J. Donelson who goes on to the Baltimore Convention to whom I refer you for the political news of the west, and the great excitement, Mr. V. Burens letter has created, and I fear it will be dificult to allay, and reunite the democracy in his favour. Clays letter had prostrated him with the Whiggs in the South and West, and nine tenths of our population had declared in favour of Mr V. Buren and annexation of Texas-when this, illfated, letter made its appearence, and fell upon the democracy like a thunderbolt. Had it have been in accordence, with the editorial of the Globe, all would have been well. All the democrats believed that Mr. V. Buren, under the present curcumstances, would have been in favour of annexation, but from the present excitement, it will be dificult to reconcile those southern and western democrats, all in favour of annexation, to Mr. V. B. You might as well, it appears to me, attempt to turn the current of the Miss [iss]ippi, as to turn the democracy from the annexation of Texas, to the United States, by Joint Resolution, Act of Congress, or by Treaty. Had Mr. V. B. and Benton taken a view of the population of Texas, where from, and the places of the birth of the Texian prisoner [s] at Perote in Mexico, the [y] might have judged of the feelings of the South and West. If they had taken into view the exposed Situation of Neworleans, with Texas in the hands of Great Britain, added to the danger of British influence upon our Western Indians, on the event of war, and the dreadful scenes apprehended from a servile war, with the Indians combined, on our South and west,-the In a letter written after the Tennessee convention, Polk took pains to assure Van Buren that he and eleven of the thirteen delegates selected for the Baltimore convention were favorable to Van Buren's candidacy, notwithstanding the silence of the state convention. Polk to Van Buren, November 30, 1843, Van Buren Papers, Library of Congress.