What a Newly Discovered Letter Means to Historians

The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., which depicts Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling freed slave, is being scrutinized and reconsidered these days. But the dispute over the statue (also called the Freedmen’s statue) has had a remarkable result for historians:  An 1876 letter by Frederick Douglass has been found in which he expressed disappointment in the statue.

For me, what is so intriguing is how it was discovered and how that illustrates the wonderful world that digital technology has brought to historians—a world in which artifacts of the past are readily available.

Here’s the story:

Scott Sandage, a historian at Carnegie-Mellon, had heard that although the great orator Frederick Douglass had spoken at the dedication of the statue, he was not happy with its design. The only available source of this information, was a 1916 recollection by someone who had been at the dedication—forty years earlier.

Engaged in a discussion with another historian a few weeks ago, Sandage decided to search for confirming evidence. As Ted Mann at the Wall Street Journal tells it:

“Last Saturday morning [June 27], Mr. Sandage started searching Douglass’s name and the word “knee” in digitized newspaper archives at Newspapers.com. He found no corroborating accounts of the remark, but something better: published blurbs headlined “Frederick Douglass says” that referred to an 1876 letter from Douglass criticizing the monument.”

Douglass’s letter to the National Republican newspaper in Washington, D.C., said in part:

“The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude. What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.”

Wrote Mann:

“Just like that, a document apparently unknown to Douglass’s biographers and not found in the orator’s papers at the Library of Congress had landed squarely in the middle of the debate that has swept the nation and the neighborhood around Lincoln Park where the statue stands.”

Wow! “Unknown to Douglass’s biographers” and “after 20 minutes” of search.

Historians make a very big deal of archival research, which means examining actual sources in a prominent person’s collection of papers, say, or in musty public records in county courthouses, churches, schools, etc. But there is a world out there they may be missing.

In my modest research experience, I have come across unexpected information thanks to the digital age. As you may know, I have studied American correspondence schools in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Ever since a critical book was written about them in the 1920s, historians have disparaged them as mere “diploma mills” (even though they rarely ever issued diplomas) and scams.

But they were not. How do we know this? Through speeches and articles published at the height of their success. For example, the U. S. Commissioner of Education , William T. Harris, wrote about correspondence schools in his 1903 annual report [1]; Thomas Commerford Martin, a biographer of Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison, wrote about them in 1902 [2]; engineering professors Edgar Marburg and George Goodenough spoke about them in 1899 and 1900 [3]. On the 25^th anniversary of the International Correspondence Schools in 1906 Thomas Edison himself sent a congratulatory letter, saying “it is a pleasure for me to assure you of my familiarity with your great and deserving educational work.” [4]

I haven’t seen any historians cite these sources. The dearth of writing about correspondence schools can be traced in part to the absence of archives. Most school records have been lost or destroyed, and the kind of material I discovered mostly (but not entirely) online isn’t really considered up to snuff.

I predict that attitude will change. The exciting discovery of Douglass’s letter through the online resources of newspapers.com will take us a long way in that direction.

[1] William T. Harris,  “Correspondence Schools,” Report of the Commissioner of Education, Vol. 1. 1901-02 (1903): 1069-1094.

[2] Thomas Commerford Martin, “The Educational Value of Correspondence Schools,” Independent (1848) 7 (Aug. 1902): 1896-1898.

[3 ]Marburg, Edgar, “The Correspondence School in Technical Education.“ In Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education Vol. II in Columbus, Ohio, Aug. 17-19, 1899. Lancaster, PA: 1899: 80-92, and George A. Goodenough. “The Possibilities of Correspondence Instruction.” In Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education.New York: Engineering News Publishing Co., 1900, 315-324.

[4]Thomas Edison. Letter in Fifteenth Anniversary Exercises and Banquet, October 16, 1891-1906. Scranton: International Correspondence Schools, 1907, 106.