American history to 1900

Personal and public correspondence, drafts of his writings (although not his Federalist essays), and correspondence among members of the Hamilton and Schuyler families.

Diaries and notebooks, 1793-1861, of Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton (ca.1775-1865) document her position at the center of a Washington, D.C., social circle that included George and Martha Washington, James and Dolley Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Margaret Bayard Smith, and the cabinet members, congressmen, and diplomats who constituted the city's entwined social and political worlds.

Selected documents; see also ProQuest Congressional (http://library.princeton.edu/resource/3918)

Available in Footnote.com (Browse -> Revolutionary War)

20 volumes of primary material documenting the actions, debates, and thoughts of the First Federal Congress and its members

Correspondence and other writings of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams (and family), Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison.

The papers of Margaret Bayard Smith (1778-1844), author and leader in Washington, D.C., social and political circles during the first decades of the nineteenth century, span the years 1789-1874, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1796-1840. They include family and general correspondence, diaries, journals, and commonplace books. Most of the papers consist of family correspondence between Smith and her sisters Jane Bayard Kirkpatrick and Maria Bayard Boyd, and her husband, Samuel Harrison Smith (1772-1845), editor of the Jeffersonian National Intelligencer, a banker, and Treasury Department official.

The bulk of the material dates from the 1820s, when Van Buren (1782-1862) was a U.S. senator from New York, through his service as secretary of state and vice president in the Andrew Jackson administrations (1829-1837), to his own presidency (1837-1841) and through the decade thereafter when he made unsuccessful bids to return to the presidency with the Democratic and Free Soil parties. Included are correspondence, autobiographical materials, notes and other writings, drafts of messages to Congress in 1837 and 1838, and other speeches, legal and estate records, miscellany, and family items.

The collection includes correspondence relating primarily to political issues such as slavery, Compromise of 1850, Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Kansas-Nebraska Act, John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and congressional politics. The remainder of the papers consists of a detailed index compiled in 1925 to volumes 1-44 of the main collection of Millard Fillmore papers, held by the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, Buffalo, N.Y.

The papers of three of the most notable Pinckneys: brothers Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1746–1825) and Thomas Pinckney (1750–1828) and their cousin Charles Pinckney (1757–1824). They served variously as young officers during the American Revolution, governors of the state of South Carolina, delegates to the Constitutional Convention, leading lawyers and businessmen in Charleston, and diplomats to England, France, and Spain.

Correspondence, diaries, printed matter, maps, drawings and miscellany. These document Morse's invention of the electromagnetic telegraph, his participation in the development of telegraph systems in the United States and abroad, his career as a painter, his family life, his travels, and his interest in early photography, religion, and the nativist movement. Most are from 1807 to 1872.

Dating from the early 1760s through his death in 1826, the Thomas Jefferson Papers consist mainly of his correspondence, but they also include his drafts of the Declaration of Independence, drafts of Virginia laws; his fragmentary autobiography; the small memorandum books he used to record his spending; the pages on which for many years he daily recorded the weather; many charts, lists, tables, and drawings recording his scientific and other observations; notes; maps; recipes; ciphers; locks of hair; wool samples; and more.

The collection documents Jefferson’s whole life, both public and personal--as a delegate to the second Continental Congress, Virginia legislator and governor, diplomat and residence in France, secretary of state, and president. The purchase of Louisiana, the expedition of Lewis and Clark, the building of Washington, D.C. as the national capital, and Jefferson’s profound engagement with science and technology are all documented here. Jefferson’s family life at Monticello is reflected in correspondence with his daughters, Martha (Patsy) Jefferson Randolph (1776-1836) and Mary (Maria) Jefferson Eppes (1778-1804), and his grandchildren, and in household accounts kept by his wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson (1748-1782). Some aspects of the lives of Jefferson’s slaves, including members of the Hemings family of Monticello, including James Hemings (1765-1821), a brother of Sally Hemings, who trained as a French chef in Paris, can be traced in these papers. The twenty-one volumes of legal and legislative records from colonial Virginia, 1606-1737, that Jefferson collected, are divided between this collection and one held by the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress.