Changing one’s mind can be difficult, but it is often rewarding. My recent JER article (“Building a Proslavery Lobby: The Domestic Politics of the Encomium Case”) grew directly out of my work as director of the Papers of Andrew Jackson (PAJ) project—and a fortuitous decision to reconsider a document for printing in Volume XII: 1834 of The Papers of Andrew Jackson.

The PAJ’s task is to collect, annotate, and publish Andrew Jackson’s entire extant written record. We have completed the first twelve of our seventeen projected volumes. Each one includes around 500 full-text documents as well as brief calendar descriptions of those not selected for full printing. Because we only have space to print a fraction of the tens of thousands of documents in our archive, we must make careful decisions about selection. Sometimes these are easy: drafts of presidential speeches, letters from prominent figures like Martin Van Buren or John Ross, and memoranda on major policy questions are readily picked for full printing. But other documents are trickier.

Andrew Jackson. President of the United States / from the original painting by W.J. Hubard ; drawn on stone by A. Newsam ; printed by Childs & Lehman Philadelphia, 1834. From the Library of Congress.

As associate editors Laura-Eve Moss and Tom Coens and I do our first pass through each volume’s material, we often flag borderline documents for later review. Early in our work on Volume XII, for instance, we read a letter to Jackson penned by a trio of now-obscure Wilmington, North Carolina, residents in March 1834. Microfilmed by the National Archives as part of the Miscellaneous Letters of the Department of State (M179) series, the brief note didn’t make our initial cut, but we wanted to give it a closer look before we prepared the final manuscript for submission to our publisher. Since some sources catch the eye only on a second reading, we always review the calendared items to make sure we haven’t overlooked any hidden gems.

Upon a second glance, the Wilmington letter piqued our interest. Its vague but tantalizing allusion to “a matter in which the whole Southern country is most deeply interested” suggested that that the document related to a fascinating larger story. But what was it? The letter’s opening line referred to “enclosed proceedings,” but our photocopy included no enclosure.[1] We hypothesized that the enclosure had been separated from the letter during processing at the National Archives. To find it, we scanned through reel 77 of M179. Sure enough, we discovered the enclosure a few frames away from where it should have been located.

Gabriel Holmes, Alexander Anderson, and William Belvidere Meares to Andrew Jackson, Mar. 29, 1834.

The enclosed document contained handwritten resolutions adopted at a mass meeting held in Wilmington’s town hall in response to an international incident that is familiar to many historians interested in slavery, diplomacy, and international law. In February 1834, the brig Encomium, en route from Charleston to New Orleans with scores of passengers, including forty-five enslaved people, wrecked in the Bahamas. Over the protests of several enslavers, British officials emancipated most of the enslaved passengers. Since the late nineteenth century, historians have regularly returned to this and related incidents to understand how slavery and emancipation shaped U.S. diplomacy, how enslaved people used international borders to secure freedom, and how U.S. officials developed a proslavery foreign policy.

But the more I dug into the Wilmington resolutions and the people who wrote and sent them to President Andrew Jackson, the more I became interested in a domestic story that has received comparatively little attention. In early April, Jackson forwarded the letter and enclosure to secretary of state Louis McLane, but U.S. diplomats made no formal protest to the British government until September. Meanwhile, outraged white North Carolinians kept pressing for redress, including through their state legislature and their governor, David L. Swain.

Louis McLane, painted by Charles Bird King, c. 1820. From National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

As I read the impatient Carolinians’ letters and reports, a key phrase kept leaping off the page: they insisted that they “know no difference, nor will we recognise any distinction, between property in persons . . . and property in things.”[2] This was a stark assertion of the chattel principle, to be sure. But it was also a new phrase, not previously in common usage. And it first appeared in the resolutions adopted in Wilmington. In my article, I call it the “Wilmington Doctrine.”

As I traced the story, I realized that the Wilmington Doctrine could serve as a marker of the political influence of the powerful Wilmingtonians who crafted the phrase and urged state and federal officials to embrace it as well. Much like physicians use barium solutions to trace the workings of the digestive system, I could use the Wilmington Doctrine to trace the upward political pressure on legislators, State Department officials, diplomats, and others who transformed localized outrage into national policy. In other words, I could use it to illuminate the Encomium incident’s comparatively unexplored domestic political history. In turn, this approach could demonstrate one way in which proslavery politics worked from the ground up, through the actions of a pressure group or political lobby. That revelation is, I hope, a key contribution of the article.

Of course, none of this was on my mind when I first read the letter or its prodigal enclosure. But it is a humbling reminder of the importance of changing one’s mind—and of following hunches that can point us to hidden archival gems.

Endnotes

[1] Gabriel Holmes, Alexander Anderson, and William Belvidere Meares to Andrew Jackson, Mar. 29, 1834, Miscellaneous Letters of the Department of State, National Archives, RG 59 (M179-77).

[2] “Town Meeting,” People’s Press and Wilmington Advertiser (NC), Apr. 2, 1834.