Archives, power, and history: Dunbar rowland and the beginning of the state archives of mississippi (1902-1936)

American Archivist

Volumn 69, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 79-116

  Galloway, Patricia ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77249101229     PISSN: 03609081     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17723/aarc.69.1.m462n0564g87jqm0     Document Type: Review

References (113)

1. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1988) provides a fine outline of the intellectual history of modernist historical practice and its origins in document-based research in the German "scientific" tradition.
2. See also William F. Birdsall, "Archivists, Librarians, and Issues during the Pioneering Era of the American Archival Movement," Journal of Library History 14, no. 4 (1979): 457-79.
3. Walter M. Whitehill's standard reference Independent Historical Societies (Boston: The Boston Athenaeum, 1962), essentially a guide to collecting archives of historical manuscripts, is strong on the Northeast but less helpful for other regions or state archives and glaringly uncritical in its author's view of the motivations of historical society founders and archivists.
4. For a contemporary and critical examination of the origins and history of the documentation of one locality, see Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002)
5. which treats the institutional histories of the libraries and archives that preserve Philadelphia history. On a wider scale, Michael Kammen's Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991) places the emergence of archives and other institutions of memory in the context of the construction and modification of an "American" identity from colonial times to 1990.
6. More recently, in the context of decolonization historiography, there has been a vigorous discussion among historians of especially the British Empire about the constraints and constructed nature of archives and archival collections: see Antionette Burton, ed., Archive Stories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005). The strongest current thread of critical evaluations of archives comes from those whose stories have been systematically excluded or expunged from them.
7. In a phrase coined by Verne Harris, we must face the fact that "archives offer researchers a sliver [what archivists choose to keep] of a sliver [what archivists are empowered to choose from] of a sliver [the once-existent documentary record of social memory]" (64-65) of what might at some point have been known about anything in the past: see "The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa," Archival Science 2 (2002): 63-86.
8. This fact is reflected in Richard Cox's aptly named No Innocent Deposits: Forming Archives by Rethinking Appraisal (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004)
9. but its implications have long been part of the postmodern critique of the writing of "true" history: see Keith Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1999).
10. Victoria Irons Walch, "State Archives in 1997: Diverse Conditions, Common Directions," American Archivist 60, no. 2 (1997): 132-51.
11. Note that Kammen, Mystic Chords, considers that during the period from 1870 to 1915 there was a national and more general trend to rescue and create public memory about the American past.
12. William F. Birdsall, "The Two Sides of the Desk: The Archivist and the Historian, 1909-1935," American Archivist 38, no. 2 (April 1975): 159-73.
13. See, generally, Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980).
14. Wilson addresses himself to religious and educational institutions, but does not discuss archives explicitly. Richard Cox has observed more pointedly. The pioneering Southern state archives were part of an effort to re-establish a Southern white hegemony, requiring the re-invention of the past among other things" ("Shifting Strategies in Appraising, Scheduling, and Maintaining Records," in Closing an Era: Historical Perspectives on Modern Archives and Records Management [Westport: Greenwood Press[2000] 91-106) 106.
15. It was the lack of such focused interest that delayed the creation of the National Archives until 1934. See Victor Condos, Jr., J. Franklin Jameson and the Birth of the National Archives, 1906-1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 175-76. Condos's careful exposition of each step taken over twenty years shows just how indifferent essentially local politicians of the U.S. Congress were to the need for a national repository, even as they praised the founding of more local archives; it needed the political pressure of a national grassroots group with similar goals, the American Legion, to bring the task finally to conclusion.
16. For a recent overview of this critical approach to archival history, see Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook, "Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory," Archival Science 2 (2002): 1-19.
17. Wendell H. Stephenson, "Herbert B. Adams: Southern Historical Scholarship at Johns Hopkins," in Southern History in the Making: Pioneer Historians of the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 52-70.
18. See also, Robert Reynolds Simpson, "The Origins of State Departments of Archives and History in the South," PhD diss., University of Mississippi, 1971
19. and O. Lawrence Burnette, Beneath the Footnote (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1969), 50-51.
20. Some of Adams's southern students were of decidedly liberal leanings on the questions of race and the Civil War: see the articles on John Spencer Bassett in Stephenson, "Herbert B. Adams," 93-131.
21. Correspondence between Adams and his students is in W. Stull Holt, ed., Historical Scholarship in the United States, 1876-1901: As Revealed in the Correspondence of Herbert B. Adams (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1938).
22. Franklin L. Riley, Colonial Origins of New England Senates (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1896).
23. Northeastern states' historical societies had begun collecting documentary source materials early in the nineteenth century; see Whitehill, Independent Historical Societies
24. and Burnette, Beneath the Footnote.
25. For the early history of the Mississippi Historical Society, see Charles S. Sydnor, "Historical Activities in Mississippi in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Southern History 3 (May 1937): 139-60.
26. For an overview of Riley's activities in Mississippi, see Conrad W. Gass, "Franklin Riley and the Historical Renaissance in Mississippi, 1897-1914," Journal of Mississippi History 32 (1970): 195-227.
27. During the years just after the University of Mississippi's reopening, most of the faculty consisted of veteran Confederate officers, including L. Q. C. Lamar. The classes of the late 1860s included future MDAH board members R. B. Fulton, Charles B. Galloway, Edward Mayes, and R. H. Thompson. See Warren A. Candler, Bishop Charles Betts Galloway (Nashville: Cokesbury Press, 1927), 17-20.
28. Herbert Baxter Adams, "The Study and Teaching of History," Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society (hereafter PMHS) I (1898), 74-84.
29. Franklin L. Riley, School History of Mississippi for Use in Public and Private Schools (Richmond, 1900).
30. For its relation to his longer unpublished history, see, "The Report of the Mississippi Historical Commission PMHS 5 (1901) , 282.
31. See Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 12-14, chapter 7.
32. Simpson, "Origins of State Departments of Archives," 94-100. Rowland's correspondence as MDAH director during the early years is rich in letters from veterans seeking to tap these vital records. This was a significant need for them and their families: even the youngest Civil War veterans were by that time in middle age, and the oldest were beginning to die.
33. Much information about Riley's motivations is revealed in Charles S. Sydnor, ed., "Letters from Franklin L. Riley to Herbert B. Adams, 1894-1901," Journal of Mississippi History 2 (1940): 100-110. But this correspondence stops with Adams's death in 1901.
34. At Washington and Lee, appropriately enough, he researched and wrote General Robert E. Lee after Appomattox (New York: Macmillan, 1922). Note that Wilson characterizes Washington and Lee as one of the Lost Cause universities.
35. The PMHS, edited by Riley, were published almost annually from 1898 to 1914, and consisted mostly of essays by amateur historians about issues connected with the Civil War. Riley aimed for coverage of the whole of Mississippi history, but dominating the series toward the end were reviews of Reconstruction in individual counties of Mississippi, consisting mostly of anecdotal reports of atrocities against innocent whites, written by former officers, by women active in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and apparently by Riley's students. Riley was credited with encouragement of the Reconstruction articles by fellow Johns Hopkins alumnus St. George L. Sioussat in "Historical Activities in the Old Southwest," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 1 (December 1914), 400-417;
36. See Foy Lisenby, Charles Hillman Brough: A Biography (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996), 13. The legal profession was extremely influential politically in Mississippi at this time, with a significant proportion of legislators and many members of the Mississippi Historical Society having legal qualifications.
37. See Willie D. Halsell, "The Bourbon Period in Mississippi Politics, 1875-1890," Journal of Southern History 11 (Nov. 1945), 519-37.
38. When Brough did not get the department directorship, Riley was one of several Mississippi academics who wrote testimonials of high praise for him to assist him in obtaining an academic job outside the state. See Lisenby, Charles Hillman Brough, 14.
39. PMHS 2 (1899), 113-24.
40. PMHS 3 (1900), 317-40.
41. PMHS 4 (1901), 357-400.
42. The MHS meeting took place on January 9 and 10, and Brough and Rowland read their papers in the first and second sessions, respectively; see Riley, "Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Mississippi Historical Society," PMHS 6 (1903), 9-13. Brough was serving that year as chair of the MHS Nominations Committee and served as well as the official responder on behalf of the society to the opening address of welcome from the state superintendent of education.
43. PMHS 6 (1903), 79-90. This paper consisted of transcriptions of two documents and admiring thumbnail sketches of the major participants, but it foreshadowed Rowland's later arguments about the constitutionality of secession.
44. Rowland, A Mississippi View of Race Relations in the South (Jackson: Harmon Publishing Company, 1903), 4. Published as a pamphlet.
45. As Riley outlined the scheme to the American Historical Association's Conference of Historical Societies in 1904, he envisioned a partnership between the historical society, dominated by academics and devoted to research, and the archives, a government agency open to the public that would be responsible for collecting historical materials. Both were to be state supported (Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1 1904, [Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1905], 229-32). But state support would prove easier to advocate than maintain.
46. Dunbar Rowland, First Annual Report of the Director of Archives and History (Jackson, 1902), 14-15.
47. In Rowland's correspondence with board members about elections to complete their number, apparently existing members suggested names, Rowland approved them, and a vote was taken 47 Dunbar Rowland, Fifth Annual Report of the Director of the Department of Archives and History of the State of Mississippi (Jackson, 1907), 17. The connection with the original private society was not severed. The director of the MDAH became the permanent secretary-treasurer of the Mississippi Historical Society, which permits the close collaboration of the two entities and provides the department with a permanent lobby, dominated by academics and elite lay members. Members of the board of trustees of the MDAH have also at different times held office in the society.
48. For the persistent political influence of the planter class in Mississippi, see James Tice Moore, "Redeemers Reconsidered: Change and Continuity in the Democratic South, 1870-1900," The Journal of Southern History 44 (1978): 357-78. Moore argues that the agrarian Redeemers were not replaced by urban businessmen, as C. Vann Woodward argued, but in some instances became them, taking along "their personal values and intellectual heritage." The example here shows that many also became attorneys and ("activist"?) judges, adept at crafting a legal regime that suited continued white control of the political process.
49. Rowland, First Annual Report, 15.
50. Dunbar Rowland, Eleventh Annual Report of the Director of the Department of Archives and History of the State of Mississippi (Jackson, 1913), 25.
51. Rowland thanked Chase and Walthall in Eleventh Annual Report, 12, for their "zeal, earnestness and intelligence." Eron Opha Moore Gregory Rowland was his unpaid assistant in much of his work but carried out her own historical work, chiefly documentary editing, along similar lines to Rowland's.
52. He had written about this in his presentation to the International Congress of Archives in 1910: Rowland, "The Importance of the Concentration and Classification of National Archives," in Acts of the International Congress of Archives, ed. J. Cuvelier and L. Stainier (Brussels: CAIB, 1912), 565-72; see pp.565-66.
53. Rowland, Eleventh Annual Report, 12.
54. Rowland, "The Adaptation of Archives to Public Use," 269-72
55. the Report of the Fourth Conference of Archivists, Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1912.
56. Dunbar Rowland, Third Annual Report of the Director of the Department of Archives and History of the State of Mississippi (Jackson, 1905), 23. Rowland clearly admired this practice enough to emulate it: his own official correspondence consists of copies bound into volumes chronologically.
57. In 1905, that requirement would be extended to include the records of Mississippi soldiers in the War of 1812, Indian wars, and the Mexican War. Rowland, Fifth Annual Report, 18.
58. Dunbar Rowland, Second Annual Report of the Director of the Department of Archives and History of the State of Mississippi (Jackson, 1903), 8-9.
59. Rowland's obituary in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review 24 (1937-38), 609, notes that he was "author of the national law that opened the Confederate archives in the Department of War.. . . ".
60. Dunbar Rowland, Fourth Annual Report of the Director of the Department of Archives and History of the State of Mississippi (Jackson, 1906), 18. The battle flags are now preserved in the Old Capitol Museum of Mississippi History, a division of the department. This observation brings up the museological activities that Rowland conducted from the beginning, now viewed by his successors as a bad old "cabinet of curiosities," but in its day, as especially through professional archaeological excavations during the twenties and thirties, rather innovative.
61. Eron O. Rowland, Varina Howell, Wife of Jefferson Davis, 2 vols (1927-31).
62. Dunbar Rowland, Ninth Annual Report of the Director of the Department of Archives and History of the State of Mississippi (Jackson, 1911), 14.
63. This was already accepted practice in the United States; the Library of Congress had begun giving money to states to obtain copies of unpublished colonial-period manuscripts from the English archives in 1902. When in 1909 the AHA's Conference of Historical Societies urged states to contribute to a fund to help the Carnegie Institution create a calendar of French archival documents pertinent to American history, Rowland's MDAH contributed $250, the largest sum from any state (Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1909 [Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910], 290).
64. This work, supervised by Waldo Leland, would be published as Nancy M. Miller Surrey, Calendar of Manuscripts in Paris Archives and Libraries Relating to the History of the Mississippi Valley to 1803, 2 vols. (Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Historical Research, 1926), and the original volumes are in MDAH's collections today.
65. Rowland, Second Annual Report, 13-14.
66. Interestingly, this is not how he presented the case in a short paper, "The Importance of Preserving Local Records, Illustrated by the Spanish Archives of the Natchez District," at the annual AHA meeting to the Conference on State and Local Historical Societies (Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1905 [Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1906], 204-9), in which he said that the forty-one bound volumes of Spanish records had been deposited with the MDAH on 1 May 1905!
67. Rowland, "Concentration and Classification."
68. The three others who attended the congress representing the AHA were Gaillard Hunt, Waldo Leland, and Arnold J. F. van Laer. Van Laer would subsequently promote the Dutch view of provenance in the U.S.; see Marjorie Rabe Barritt, "Coming to America: Dutch Archivistiek and American Archival Practice," reprinted in S. Muller, J. A. Feith, and R. Fruin, Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, trans. Arthur H. Leavitt, reprint edition (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2003), xxxv-l.
69. Rowland's essay was used as ammunition in the AHA efforts to campaign for a National Archives; see Condos, J. Franklin Jameson and the Birth of the National Archives, 28.
70. Rowland, Ninth Annual Report, 16.
71. Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual, 65.
72. W. B. Murrah, W. T. Ratliff, Edward Mayes, and R. H. Thompson [members of the MDAH board of trustees] to Sons of Confederate Soldiers in the Mississippi State Senate, 18 February 1914. Rowland Correspondence. In letters to people who volunteered to donate money toward his salary, he referred to a "rough political storm" and "a cunning trick of Vardaman to bring about my resignation. . . ." Rowland to Hunt, 15 April 1912.
73. For a general reference to the "documentation strategy" of appraisal and collection building, see Helen Willa Samuels, "Who Controls the Past," American Archivist 49 (1996): 109-24. It should be observed that this appraisal strategy in its contemporary context has its own anti-elitist bias.
74. Rowland, Twelfth Annual Report, 34-36.
75. This is a little odd, since in the First Annual Report (p. 62) Rowland listed fifty items from Ames and fifty from Alcorn-though in also listing 500 each from Clark, Sharkey, and Humphries, he remarked, "The official correspondence of Govs. Clark, Sharkey and Humphries is full of interest, as all the questions of reconstruction are discussed therein."
76. Dunbar Rowland, Sixth Annual Report of the Director of the Department of Archives and History of the State of Mississippi (Jackson, 1908), 26.
77. That the MDAH holdings Rowland secured from the hated Reconstruction governor Adalbert Ames are very rich is shown by their frequent use in documenting white rioting during the mid-1870s by modern historians. But the history of their acquisition is clouded, since in 1913 Rowland states (Eleventh Annual Report, 29) that "Governor Ames returned the executive archives of his office, consisting of letter books, reports, orders, etc., to the Historical Society about the year 1900, and these are now on file in the Department." Although the society's collections all eventually came to the department, these differing statements imply that they did not all come at once.
78. Dunbar Rowland, Biennial Report of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (Jackson, 1936), 5.
79. William D. McCain, "History and Program of the Mississippi State Department of Archives and History," American Archivist 13 (1950): 27-34. Further research in the archives, including records of senate confirmations, has shown that indeed there was a functioning board between 1912 and 1936, but particularly in the 1920s it apparently met no more than annually, as the law required.
80. Edmund Brunini to Rowland, 1932, MDAH Private Manuscripts Collection Z0051.000, Dunbar Rowland Papers. To be fair, the state was near bankruptcy in 1932, and the legislature was looking for anything they could cut.
81. Brunini to Rowland, 3. He celebrated this in vain and rather disingenuously. From the time he died until the 1980s, when the Mississippi Attorney General's lawsuit removed current elected officials from service on boards and commissions, the department would have influential elected officials on its board, some of whom, like Stone and Sillers, Rowland had a hand in placing. In view of his struggles, this was clearly done in self-defense.
82. Ernst Posner, American State Archives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 160;
83. see also T. R. Schellenberg, The Management of Archives (1965; repr., Washington, D.C.: NARA, 1988), 57, who points out its firstness as a guide to public records.
84. Dunbar Rowland, ed., Mississippi Provincial Archives: English Dominion, vol. 1 (Jackson: MDAH, 1911)
85. was the first collection, consisting of the letters of Farmar and Johnstone. Eron Rowland edited documents of British governor of West Florida Peter Chester for the PMHS Centenary Series, vol. 5 in 1925.
86. Rowland and A. G. Sanders, ed. and trans., Mississippi Provincial Archives: French Dominion, 3 vols. (Jackson: MDAH, 1927, 1929, 1932).
87. An additional projected volume of French documents was nearly completed but not published, and was only substantially published in 1984 as Mississippi Provincial Archives: French Dominion, vols. 4 and 5, ed. and trans. Rowland, A. G. Sanders, and Patricia Galloway (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984). A translation of Spanish colonial materials was prepared under Rowland's supervision but never published.
88. Dunbar Rowland, ed., Official Letterbooks of W. C. C. Claiborne, 1801-1816, 6 vols. (Jackson: MDAH, 1917).
89. Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist, His Letters, Papers, and Speeches, 10 vols. (Jackson: MDAH, 1923).
90. Compare Isaac Joslin Cox's review of Rowland, ed., Official Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 1801-1816 in the American Historical Review 23 (January 1918): 404-7, which found his editing rather sloppy but complimented the MDAH as a model institution.
91. L. B. Shippee, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 10 (1924): 470-72;
92. William E. Dodd, American Historical Review 29 (1924): 352-56;
93. Anonymous, Journal of Negro History 9 (1924): 237-38.
94. Dunbar Rowland, Mississippi, 4 vols. (Atlanta: Southern Historical Publishing Association, 1907);
95. Dunbar Rowland, History of Mississippi: The Heart of the South, 4 vols. (Chicago and Jackson: S.J. Clark Publishing Company, 1925).
96. Proceedings of the Reunion of the Survivors of the Constitutional Convention of 1890 on the Twentieth Anniversary of the Adoption of the Constitution (Jackson, 1910)
97. and Proceedings of a Reunion of the Survivors of the Constitutional Convention of 1890 on the Thirty-Seventh Anniversary of the Adoption of the Constitution (Jackson, 1927).
98. MDAH Private Manuscript Collection Z 0051.000, folder 32.
99. Both men sought out professional apprenticeship and education. Ford's 1936 "Analysis of Indian Village Site Collections from Louisiana and Mississippi" is reprinted along with other publications and biographical material in Measuring the Flow of Time: The Works of James A. Ford, 1935-1941, ed. Michael J. O'Brien and R. Lee Lyman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999). Chambers excavated at Chickasaw village sites and at the Natchez Grand Village, among other places;
100. see Patricia Galloway, "Archaeology from the Archives: The Chambers Excavations at Lyon's Bluff, 1934-35," Mississippi Archaeology 35, no. 1 (2000): 23-90.
101. See Margaret F. Stieg, The Origin and Development of Scholarly Historical Periodicals (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 1986), especially 82-102.
102. For a one-sided view of this incident that nevertheless provides a detailed account of the events from primary sources, see Ray Allen Billington, "Tempest in Clio's Teapot: The American Historical Association Rebellion of 1915," American Historical Review 78 (April 1973): 348-69.
103. Billington's account is replete with cruel portrayals of Rowland as a figure of ridicule, drawn almost exclusively from the papers of those who opposed Bancroft and Rowland, to which he had privileged access: Billington was Frederick Jackson Turner's student, who in turn was Jameson's student. A more balanced account appears in Stieg, Origin and Development, 70-76. An extensive correspondence from Bancroft on this matter exists in MDAH Private Manuscripts Collection Z51, Rowland Correspondence.
104. Robert V. Haynes, "Historians and the Mississippi Territory," Journal of Mississippi History 29 (1967): 409-28. Of course, bombast and documentary paraphrase characterized much historical writing of the time.
105. For example, in 1911 Rowland and Thomas Owen of Alabama wrote a memorial to the U.S. Congress in favor of a building for a national archives (Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1911 [Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1912], 324-25).
106. Donald R. McCoy, The National Archives: America's Ministry of Documents, 1934-1968 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978).
107. Rapalje/Rapalji (George) Notebook, MDAH Private Manuscripts Collection Z0580.000.
108. Charles S. Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi (New York: Appleton-Century Company, Inc [American Historical Association], 1933).
109. See the bibliography, 255-62. Today the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, one of the most voracious of these collecting archives, contains hundreds of collections with a Mississippi provenance.
110. Dunbar Rowland, Courts, Judges, and Lawyers of Mississippi, 1798-1935 (Jackson: MDAH and MHS, 1935).
111. American Historical Review 43 (1937-38): 484.
112. And an ironic one, too, since McCain proved a staunch segregationist who twice left the department in the hands of others during World War II but did not allow it to be handed over to a permanent director, and then abandoned it without a qualm when he was offered the presidency of the University of Southern Mississippi. McCain painted a picture of Rowland as defaulting in his work that has not been borne out by research, especially since McCain did little to change the system that Rowland had created and that was brought to modern standards only in the early 1970s under Charlotte Capers and Elbert Hilliard. It is worth noting that the obituary that appeared in the MVHR (24 [1937-38], 609), in spite of Rowland's withdrawal from the association, portrayed him as both "author of the national law that opened up the Confederate archives in the Department of War, and one of the early leaders in the movement for constructing the National Archives building in Washington."
113. Linda Henry has observed in her 1988 essay "Schellenberg in Cyberspace," American Archivist 61 (1998): 569-88 that archivists tempted to "postcustodial" solutions should take heed of the experiences of those who had to pick up the pieces after years of "noncustodial" regimes.