James McCune Smith Biography and Works Projects: An Update
Dear friends,
Just a little update and summary of the progress and status of my ongoing work on James McCune Smith. I’ve been extremely busy since I’ve returned home from my research trip to New York. Among other things, I had a huge number of new findings from the various archives I visited (especially from Syracuse University’s Gerrit Smith Papers) to process - titling the hundreds of photos of sources so I could easily find them when needed, entering more notes into my research documents, and adding myriad entries to my document of things to add to or clarify in the manuscript for my biography of McCune Smith.
As to the biography - with advice from my editor and readers, I’m again editing down the manuscript to a more manageable size, both for the sake of readers and for publishing constraints - it’s very involved and expensive, for example, to publish a book of nearly 1,000 pages which, if published as-is, that it would be! For the biography I want it to be, the trick is to include enough of the vast array of details from McCune Smith’s incredibly interesting life of action and thought to evoke its rich texture, while not being so crammed with detail as to make the story just too hard to get through for everyone other than those who obsess over and delight in details. (I happen to be one of those who tend to do so. For example, I love that McCune Smith’s friends teased him for being bad at dancing, and that he was a bit of a dandy who wore kid gloves and a mustache, that he was a teetotaller who nevertheless smoked pipes and excused people for indulging in alcohol in certain circumstances and in certain ways, that he was incredibly generous donating his time to causes but not so much his money, that he was an indulgent father and soft-spoken man with loads of friends who was also prone to lose his temper and write and say really mean things about people - even his friends - only to make up with them later, and so on and so forth. And sometimes, these tiny details are incredibly useful for scholarship purposes: for example, McCune Smith always spelled develop as ‘develope’, with two ‘e’s (including derivative words, such as ‘developement.’ This comes in handy when analysing anonymous works to help determine that they’re really his.
And this gets to another thing - the collected works project. I have this level of detail in my head not only because of the approximately 5,800 sources I’ve consulted and/or cited (according to Zotero, the program I use for organizing, citing, and storing copies of my sources) in my work on McCune Smith - including the biographical thesis and now the biography - but because of the over 540 works by McCune Smith that I’ve now identified and compiled. The vast majority are transcribed now and a majority are at least partly annotated. (Thanks to my British Academy postdoc and extra project funding from Northumbria University, and my wonderful mentor Clare Elliott’s support.) For this project, I use the word ‘works’ broadly. I discovered early on in my work on this project that if I and other McCune Smith scholars want to follow the ‘developement’ (heh!) of his thought over time, reporting on and summaries of his speeches and other spoken words also needed to be included along with the surviving full texts of his works. While the original wording of many of his speeches don’t survive, summaries and reports of many of them do, and convey many of the key arguments he was making. This is the case also for things McCune Smith said in conventions, other meetings, conversations, and so on. Because I included these as well, I was also able to trace the origins of many of his most important and influential ideas further back in time than previously known, and therefore better understand the contexts in which he formed them. Also, my McCune Smith compilation project includes other prosaic items such as receipts, ads he placed in newspapers, little notes, even his calling card. That’s because they provide important information about McCune Smith’s doings, priorities, beliefs, interests, daily life, and so on.
Occasionally, this absolute wealth of sources I’ve been able to find and access (thanks in large part to the work of countless people who have digitized vast numbers of previously hard-to-find original and secondary sources and make them available in searchable databases - numerous archives at universities and public libraries, Internet Archive, Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com, Chronicling America and other Library of Congress online archives, and so many others) I sometimes find myself losing track of them all in my memory. For example, an interested reader recently wanted to know more about why I wrote that Gerrit Smith and his wife visited McCune Smith at his home in New York. I couldn’t for the life of me remember just then how I was quite sure they did, though I clearly remembered McCune Smith and his wife Malvina’s invitation to the Smith family to come over to their Leonard Street house for tea in January 1847. I had made a note to myself to double-check this but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. And then, when I was looking through my collection of images for one to illustrate this post with, there it was. As luck would have it, I had previously cropped an image from the last lines and signature from one of McCune Smith’s letters to Smith to illustrate another piece. The last line of that letter, written 22 September 1860, had the information I was planning to track down. It reads: ‘Our best regards to yourself and family: there are two Smiths (boys) added to our family since you visited our house.’ This means that Gerrit Smith’s family visited McCune Smith’s family at their home at least once sometime between the end of summer 1855 (when their daughter Mary Maude was born) and early 1858. The ‘Smith boys’ McCune Smith referred to here were Donald Barnett Smith (born ca. February-April 1858) and John Murray Smith (born April 1860). And because McCune Smith’s greetings in his letters to Smith included remembrances to his family all the way back to one from 27 July 1847, it seemed likely to me that the Smiths had accepted that invitation to their house as well.
More anon…