“For the Use of the State”: Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan and the Work of New York’s Archives
By Derek Kane O’Leary
In mid-winter of 1847, Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan was a historian with an unfinished book manuscript who needed a decent-paying job. He was hip deep in his two-volume History of New Netherland; or, New York under the Dutch (1846-1848), the first major historical account of the state’s Dutch colonial period aside from Washington Irving’s satirical History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809) — which O’Callaghan and many other history-conscious New Yorkers were keen to forget.[1] A year earlier, Secretary of the Navy — and prominent historian — George Bancroft had procured for O’Callaghan a clerkship at the US dry dock in New York, where the Irish and Canadian expatriate was sifting through Dutch colonial documents in Long Island and Manhattan. For both Bancroft and O’Callaghan, political patronage served to subsidize their private historical research, which they felt would in turn redound to the public’s benefit.
By O’Callaghan’s reckoning, however, the pay was pitiable. It was scarcely enough to sustain his family or, more important, his research. Writing from Brooklyn in January of 1847 to Senator John Adams Dix, a New York Democrat, O’Callaghan complained that the $600 salary “paralyzes, I am sorry to say, all my efforts, in a measure to accomplish the purpose I have in view.” Having failed to negotiate a higher salary, he now had a better post in mind: the New York Custom House. The 1846 Warehousing Act, pushed by Senator Dix and others, helped propel New York’s rise as the nation’s most important port, and O’Callaghan hoped to turn federal support for commerce into support for his book project.[2] By nudging New York’s representatives in DC and influential contacts in Albany who were sympathetic to his research into the state’s past, O’Callaghan sought a sinecure where he “could command leisure (untrammeled by pecuniary difficulties) to perfect my researches and bring my historical labors to a close.”[3]
By and large, the collecting, preservation, and use of historical materials remained the private undertaking of historical societies and well-resourced individuals in the antebellum US — albeit often bolstered by some modicum of public support and always acting in the public’s name. At a moment when the United States, unlike many contemporary nation-states in Europe, did not formally support the writing of history, such a back channel through a patronage posting was about as close as O’Callaghan could get to publicly funded research. Yet, beginning in the late 1840s, his work on New York’s colonial papers signaled a change in the relationship between elected government and the nation’s historical record. Under O’Callaghan’s purview, New York’s colonial archive became the first in the 19th-century United States to receive serious state funding for its modern preservation, expert arrangement, and mass publication. This brought New York much closer to contemporary state-led archival practices in Europe, and it would soon influence how other states in the United States treated their own archives.
National Portrait Gallery sketch; O’Callaghan is the figure on the far left amid the group of Patriot reform leaders in Lower Canada in the 1830s
O’Callaghan was neither the first nor the last American man of letters — or, in his case, man of papers — to seek a public post so as to keep his literary dreams afloat. In 1846, Nathaniel Hawthorne was appointed surveyor at the Salem Custom House, which became the site of the opening vignette in his Scarlet Letter (1850); Herman Melville became a customs inspector in New York in the wake of the Civil War.[4] Others, including Hawthorne, snagged comfortable diplomatic and consular postings abroad. Writing to Senator Dix, O’Callaghan was well aware of the intersection between government patronage and history writing in particular. Concluding his appeal, he pointed to two outstanding examples of historians who were favored with federal postings: Washington Irving, who had recently returned as US Minister to Spain, where he had previously researched and wrote his Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), and Bancroft himself, then serving as US Minister to the UK, where he would continue archival research for his famous History of the United States of America (1854-1878).
Born in Ireland, trained as a doctor in France, in exile from Lower Canada following his role in the failed Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837, an Albany newspaper man and minor political appointee in New York, O’Callaghan knew he had less leverage than an Irving or Bancroft. But he did have an argument about the relationship between literature and the state that he believed compelling. To Senator Dix, he reasoned:
I trust, Sir, that the honorable and commendable object which I have in view—to rescue from the obscurity and oblivion in which they have too long lain the records of the infancy of our State—will be a sufficient apology for this application. Under no other circumstances, I am sure, would I be an applicant for office.
O’Callaghan summoned the most common trope of historical collectors and historical societies in the early United States: valuable historical materials were shrouded in darkness and must be salvaged before it was too late.[5] The living had a civic duty to preserve historical materials, which at once would illuminate the past and guide Americans into the future. Without a federal infrastructure for collecting and preserving the nation’s historical record, many influential figures and institutions deemed it the duty of their individual state to rescue its archive. Although O’Callaghan’s History of New Netherland was meant mainly to move and inform New Yorkers like Senator Dix, he packaged it as a contribution to the nation, worthy of the public’s support.
O’Callaghan, in short, wanted a piece of this pie for the public service he was delivering. He urged Senator Dix to relay his request to Treasury Secretary Robert Walker, who was behind the Warehousing Act. He left Dix with something of a threat, too, writing, “but when I look on the arduous labors I have already undergone, without a cent of remuneration, and contemplate the difficulties that are before me, I have cause to fear that the undertaking I have in hand will prove utterly abortive.”[6] In doing so, O’Callaghan used his political connections and a resonant argument about Americans’ duty to their imperiled historical record in order to secure this enviable new posting.
O’Callaghan completed his History in 1848, and with the help of prominent figures in Albany, he generated a subscription base in both New York and neighboring states. Solomon Alofsen, a Dutch-born diplomat who settled in New York and delved deep into its history, wrote to O’Callaghan, “Really you have put every lover of the early history of New York under many obligations, and the Hist. of N. Neth. Has been much admired by some of my friends in Holland.”[7] The work was not roundly celebrated, but many like Alofsen did praise it, elevating O’Callaghan as both the preeminent historian on New Netherland and leading authority on its historical record.
New York State Library
Yet, the federal appointment that helped him complete his work was tenuous patronage, and such employment often came and went with the tides of politics. Looking forward, he realized that the State of New York itself — rather than Washington, DC —would be the most stable backer of his historical work. In 1848, the new State Library at Albany was completed, including a record office that would require a historical clerk, O’Callaghan learned. The state legislature called for someone to sift through, arrange, and translate the state’s colonial manuscripts held in the Secretary of State’s office. The state legislature planned that these published volumes would be distributed to state politicians and other employees and dispersed to other states, libraries, and learned societies throughout the United States. O’Callaghan thought himself just the man for the job.
He got the gig, and by the spring of 1848 began working on what would become the four-volume Documentary History of the State of New York (1849-1851), which combined colonial and national records in Albany with others obtained from international archives, as well as additional records that individuals hoped to include for publication. The work only enhanced O’Callaghan’s reputation as the gatekeeper of New York’s archives for the American public. Writing to O’Callaghan in 1852, historian Francis Parkman applauded the work, which he had drawn on in his Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada (1851), calling the fourth volume one of the richest and most interesting in the whole series — "a work which does honor to all concerned in it. I wish the example of New York might inspire all the legislatures with a similar spirit.”[8]
Perhaps O’Callaghan also imagined that other states would emulate the Empire State’s archival spirit, but his salary continued to aggrieve him: $600 a year, with a possible raise to $700 or $800. Writing to Robert Pruyn, an influential New York state Whig assemblyman, O’Callaghan made his case for more pay on the basis of his special expertise:
The person to be charged with those Historical papers must be a thorough master of the Dutch, French and English languages; he must also be a Latin scholar, for there are some documents in archives in the Latin tongue, which are translated to this day. He will have to translate such of the above documents as may be required; transcribe others and prepare the whole for the press and superintend their printing.
Arguing for his own salary, O’Callaghan pointed out that Canada’s government had recently provided more generous funding for the transcription of some of its historical manuscripts; he might also have known about state-funded historical research and archival preservation in Europe. But he could not reference any such project in the United States, because nothing existed on that scale.
Nonetheless, he pushed for a new relationship between his state and the historical labor he hoped to perform
I am very desirous to see this work go on and would willingly make a responsible sacrifice for that purpose; but I do not think the state of New York has a right to claim the services of any of its citizens without giving him, in return, a fair compensation for his labor. And I am sure, there is no friend who would wish to see me, at my time of life, and after having labored so honestly in rescuing our early history from oblivion, go into the Secretary’s office as a third or fourth rate clerk, at six or seven hundred dollars a year.[9]
The stakes mounted for O’Callaghan with the legislature’s passage of a second law in 1849 calling for the arrangement, translation, and publication “for the use of the state” of the eighty volumes of copied manuscripts yielded from British, Dutch, and French archives during John Romeyn Brodhead’s historical agency to Europe earlier in the decade — an ambitious trip funded by Albany with surplus federal funds from the Deposit Act of 1836.[10] Thanks to his reputation and political connections, O’Callaghan secured this long-term position, which would continue beyond the Civil War.[11] Beginning in 1853, his ten-volume Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York began to appear, which would encompass the Dutch, British, and French manuscripts copied by Brodhead in Europe — a sweeping archival panorama of the state’s colonial period, available in many hundreds of volumes to the state politicians and employees in New York, as well as across the United States.
Frontispiece of O’Callaghan
While working on the Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, O’Callaghan became, to my knowledge, the first and the best-paid state employee in the United States to focus exclusively on superintending the state’s historical papers. By 1857, half-way through the project, the state’s comptroller reported that O’Callaghan had been paid almost $11,000 in annual salary for his work on the state’s historical papers, in addition to the twenty-five cents he was paid for each folio page he translated in the Dutch and French volumes.[12]
His continued appeal for better pay reflected the self-interest of a government employee, surely, but also his sense of the project’s significance, which he shared with Parkman and the many other historians who used these volumes. In his annual reports to the state, O’Callaghan argued about the importance of translating and publishing the Dutch, British, and French documents in the State Library, which in his eyes traced the rise of New York from humble origins as a Dutch colony through the epic contest between the British and French empires for the region, to independence and prosperity. He imagined that this would inform the colonial histories of Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan, and that Americans as a whole would finally appreciate the preeminent place of New York’s history within the nation’s.
He — like the New-York Historical Society members, the state politicians, and the historical agent Brodhead — insisted that this important work merited more pay because of its civic function. Closing his 1855 report to the state, when he was in the midst of the project, O’Callaghan wrote:
If you desire its citizens to be justly proud of this state; if you wish the fact to be everywhere known that yours is a state not only older than Vermont, but actually planted before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, and that in point of antiquity it yields precedence only to the Ancient Dominion, you will concur in the propriety of completing this work, as originally designed; for it will afford a monument more permanent than brass, of the labor, the hardships, the suffering, and patience your ancestors endured in founding, fostering, and building up the noble structure beneath which we now enjoy life and Liberty and are protected in the Pursuit of Happiness.[13]
In the antebellum United States, many shared O’Callaghan’s belief that Americans should venerate the nation’s history. Typically, this meant tracing their own state’s rise from its humble colonial beginnings, through the Revolution and into independence. In this way, residents of that state could make a case for its exceptional place, and for their own, within the nation’s grander history. Historians like Parkman could analyze these records and weave them into narratives. But O’Callaghan also echoed a common vision of the archival record not as myriad manuscripts — carefully preserved and arranged, one by one — but as a unified monument, “more permanent than brass.” This monument in fact crushed the many peoples whose history it did not represent, but for the citizens who O’Callaghan had in mind, it could be gazed upon and celebrated.
In New York, the work of historical preservation and the curation and publication of the state’s archives became absorbed by the state and institutionalized by the eve of the Civil War, a major shift in the relationship between government and the historical record in the 19th-century United States. O’Callaghan fought and maneuvered to place himself in a key role in that newly created archival structure. As Parkman had hoped, in the coming decades other states would follow New York’s lead, during the very years when the Civil War ruptured not just the republic but its sense of shared historical identity.
Derek Kane O’Leary is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the History Department at the University of South Carolina. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2020.
[1] Although Irving’s History was widely appreciated and reprinted during the antebellum US, those New Yorkers who were eager to tell a triumphant story of the colony’s founding, progress, and independence often bristled at the burlesque treatment of the Dutch period by Irving.
[2] For a discussion of the Warehousing Act, see Gautham Rao, “Cities of Ports: The Warehousing Act of 1846 and the Centralization of American Commerce,” Thresholds, no. 34 (2007): 34-37,https://www.jstor.org/stable/43876586.
[3] Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan to Senator Dix, 28 January 1847, Volume 4, Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan Papers, Library of Congress, D.C.
[4] For an overview of Hawthorne’s and Melville’s experience, see “Did You Know...Thomas Melvill, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne All Are Part of CBP History?,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, https://www.cbp.gov/about/history/did-you-know/melville.
[5] For the most recent examination of historical societies and practices of collecting, see Alea Henle, Rescued from Oblivion: Historical Cultures in the Early United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020).
[6] O’Callaghan to Dix, 28 January 1847.
[7] Solomon Alofsen to O’Callaghan, 25 October 1850, Vol. 5, O’Callaghan Papers.
[8] Francis Parkman to O’Callaghan, September 3, 1852, Vol. 6, O’Callaghan Papers.
[9] O’Callaghan to Robert Pruyn, May 11, 1848, Vol. 3, O’Callaghan Papers.
[10] I discuss Brodhead’s work at some length in "New Netherlands, Archival Deficiency, and Contesting New York History in the Antebellum U.S," Dutch Crossing, 43:3 (2019): 252-269. John Romeyn Brodhead provides a first-hand overview of this history in the “Introduction”, which he was invited to write, to the Volume 1 of Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York.
[11] “An Act to Provide for the Publication of Certain Documents Relating to the Colonial History of this State” is reproduced in Brodhead’s “Introduction” to Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, xliii.
[12] This was just a fraction of the huge state expenditures for the publishing of the management and publishing of the whole project. “Report of the Comptroller in reply to a resolution of the Assembly relative to the printing, &c., the Documentary and Colonial Histories,” Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York, vol. 2 (New York: 1857), 1-5.
[13] O’Callaghan, draft letter to New York State Comptroller, December 28, 1855, Volume 9, O’Callaghan Papers.