The library of Lewis Henry Morgan 9780871698469, 0871698463

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Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Volume 84, Parts 6 and 7

TRANSACTIONS of the

American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge

VOLUME 84, Parts 6 and 7

The Library of Lewis Henry Morgan Thomas R. Trautmann and Karl Sanford Kabelac

TIIE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY Independence Square, Philadelphia

Copyright © 1994 by the American Philosophical Society

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 9'r-072123 International Standard Book Number 0-87169-846-3 US ISSN 0065-9746

Volume 84, Part 6

The Library of Lewis Henry Morgan and Mary Elizabeth Morgan

by Thomas R. Trautmann and Karl Sanford Kabelac

CONTENTS Vol. 84, Part 6 Preface ..................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ..........................................................................................5 Lewis Henry Morgan and his library ............................................5 Morgan's life and works ..................................................................9 The library and its contents ..........................................................22 Analysis of the collection ..............................................................32 Explanation of the Inventory, Catalogue, and Register .............54 Bibliography of Morgan's publications .......................................58 The Inventory .......................................................................................62 Vol. 84, Part 7 The Catalogue .......................................................................................99 Register of the Morgan Papers ........................................................324

ILLUSTRATIONS Frontispiece: Lewis Henry Morgan ..................................................vi 1. Morgan's library ...........................................................................24 2. Morgan's library (second view) .................................................25 3. Inventory of the Morgan library .................................................28 4. Morgan's endnotes .......................................................................34 5. Morgan's marginalia ....................................................................35

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THE AUTHORS Thomas R. Trautmann is Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Among his publications are Dravidian kinship (Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Lewis Henry Morgan and the invention of kinship (University of California Press, 1987). He has been doing research in the Morgan Papers since 1982, most recently for research on a paper (with R.H. Barnes) on " 'Dravidian', 'Iroquois' and 'Crow-Omaha' in North American perspective" (for a conference sponsored by the Maison des Sciences de !'Homme, 1993, to be published), based on manuscript schedules of American Indian kinship terminologies collected by Morgan in the 1850s and 1860s. Karl Sanford Kabelac is the Manuscripts Librarian in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Rush Rhees Library, the University of Rochester. Since coming to Rush Rhees Library in 1968 he has worked with the many researchers who have consulted the Morgan Papers. His publications include various articles and reference books on local history, including Index to pictures of Rochesterians and Monroe Countians (1992) and The Genesee region, 1790 to the present, a guide to its history, second supplement (1992).

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PREFACE

After writing an intellectual biography of Morgan (Lewis Henry Morgan and the invention of kinship, 1987) I thought that I ought to edit Morgan's manuscript inventory of his and his wife's library and publish it as an aid to future researchers into the life of the great anthropologist. It seemed important to make Morgan's inventory of books more widely available because of its bearing on questions of his intellectual formation. Had Morgan read Darwin? The British anthropologists? Uncle Tom's cabin?--questions of this kind are difficult and often impossible to answer without the inventory and the catalogue we publish here. Writers on Morgan who have not had the benefit of examining his papers have sometimes fallen into errors that the inventory can help one avoid. For example, a noted anthropologist has argued that Morgan's "conjectural solution" of the origin of the "classificatory" system was inspired by reading J. F. McLennan's Primitive marriage (1865). Morgan, however, purchased the book in February of 1867, as recorded in the inventory (by which time the" conjectural solution" was fully formed), thus making such a theory distinctly doubtful, insofar as facts may influence the fixation of belief. Moreover the inventory has a value of its own, as the record of a private nineteenth-century library. I imagined that the publication of the inventory would be quickly done, but as Peirce rightly says, "Where hope is unchecked by any experience, it is likely that our optimism is extravagant." The inventory entries are cryptic and often opaque, and the task of clarifying them had an iron logic that step by step led me into far more labors than I had anticipated and whose extent I did not realize until I had already put in more work than I was willing to write off to that experience that now checked my hopes. Clearly the publication of the inventory itself was not enough; the result would be simply unintelligible without proper identification of the titles so briefly indicated in its entries. As Morgan had bequeathed his library to the University of Rochester there were accession book records of such of Morgan' s books as had reached the library. From xerographic copies of the accession book passages I entered the Morgan titles into a simple database and sorted them alphabetically by author and title, to make the match-ups between

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THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

accession books and inventory a workable proposition. When the work was done, it was apparent that scarcely half the inventory was represented in the accession book entries for Morgan, and that the rest would have to be tracked down through the National union catalog and other resources. I would need to construct a proper catalogue to accompany the inventory, out of NUC entries and card catalogue entries from the University of Rochester Library for surviving Morgan volumes. At this awful dawning, in early 1987, I sought the collaboration of my friend, Karl Sanford Kabelac, as the only feasible way forward. As the librarian responsible for the Morgan Papers in the Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester, Karl was well known to me from my frequent visits to the collection beginning in 1982 and I had relied on his intimate knowledge of it. Now we formed a team to see this project through. Rochester card catalogue entries of such books as remained there were located one by one and copied. National union catalog entries for titles were also located and copied, making identifications as best we could, with help from standard bibliographical aids and online databases (RLIN and OCLC), often with great difficulty and for a few without success even after years of trying. The results of all the photocopying were masses of paper which had to be edited and typed onto diskettes to form the draft catalogue of books. As the catalogue went through several stages of proofing, addition of newly identified titles and deletion of wrongly identified titles, the mass of paper grew. Finally, once the continual alphabetical reordering to the catalogue had ceased temporary serial numbers were replaced with the final numbers which appear in this book. This describes in a few words what it took us, literally, years to accomplish-although, to be sure, we were working intermittently and outside of official duties that made more insistent claims upon our time. In retrospect it seems clear that without having taken each of these steps the inventory would have remained imperfectly deciphered and incompletely intelligible, and there was no viable way to have simplified that task we took on. Even to have published the bare inventory without a catalogue to interpret it would have required all the labor of identification that settled the reading of many difficult entries in the inventory itself. It is obvious that neither of us could have completed the project without the other, and also without several other good people who gave their help. I am grateful to Vichai Chitvimam and Anjali Pathak who, as my research assistants in the Department of History, University of Michigan, did excellent work in tracking down likely

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candidates in the pages of the National union catalog and other sources. Julia Routson of the Department of History staff typed, corrected and printed the catalogue through what must have seemed an endless series of recensions, and I thank her for her good work and patience. For specific bits of information I am obliged to the Schaffer Library of Union College, Schenectady, and in particular to Ms. Betty Allen, Assistant Archivist there (to do with Morgan's two years of schooling at Union); to Dr. William C. Sturtevant of the Smithsonian Institution (information on the stereoscopes of Morgan's library), and to Professor Elisabeth Tooker of Temple University (on the 25th anniversary meeting of The Club of Rochester in Morgan's library). Professor Tooker and Professor James C. Turner of the University of Michigan were kind enough to give drafts of the introduction the benefit of very close readings. Their expert and unstinting criticisms saved me from several embarrassing errors and otherwise greatly improved the text, and I am much in their debt. I am grateful for financial assistance from the Horace H. Rackham Graduate School, and the Faculty Fund of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, both of the University of Michigan. Thanks also go to the staffs of the Rush Rhees Library of the University of Rochester and the Harlan Hatcher Library of the University of Michigan for assistance at many points. Finally, on behalf of both of us I should like to record our thanks to the University of Rochester for permission to reproduce the Morgan inventory and the photographs which illustrate this book. Thomas R. Trautmann

INTRODUCTION Lewis Henry Morgan and his library Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) was America's leading ethnologist in his day, and his scholarship played a role of exceptional importance during the critical period of the eighteen sixties, seventies and eighties when anthropology was beginning to crystalize as a specialized field of research. The central issues around which the new discipline formed (leaving aside physical anthropology, in which Morgan displayed little interest) were of culture and social structure. In Morgan's day these two issues presented themselves in a particular form, as the problem of primitive religion and the problem of primitive social organization, in their relations to nineteenth century Euroamerican civilization. For reasons that were deeply personal Morgan dealt little, and gingerly, with religion; but his contributions to the study of social structure were outstanding, and fundamental to all that anthropology has since become. Practically the whole of social structure for small-scale is resolvable into what anthropologists designate as kinship; and Morgan, so to say, invented kinship by delimiting it as a field of study and devising the technical means of operating upon the facts to be found within it, means which are very much in use to this day. It was an improbable accomplishment for a lawyer from Rochester, New York, which had not long since been a frontier town and, as far as the life of the mind is concerned, was still rather underdeveloped. The storm center of the controversies in which his work was caught up and through which anthropology came into being lay far away, in Europe, more especially in Britain. At a time when American scholarship was beginning to have something of its own to contribute to the human sciences, Morgan was practically alone among Americans whose works in this area were widely read and discussed in Europe (the linguist William Dwight Whitney would be perhaps the only other). The British anthropologists, John Lubbock, Henry Sumner Maine, John Ferguson McLennan and E.B. Tylor, whose criticisms ranged from mildly to warmly hostile, paid him the compliment of attacking his work while appropriating his results and methods. Darwin referred to some of his writings in The

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THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

Descent of man (1871), on the all-important question of the sexual relations of primitive man. Marx took extensive notes on Morgan on matters of the greatest technical complexity such as the exquisite algebra of Australian section systems, and after his death Engels used the notes in writing his, or their, Origin of the family, private property and the state, in the light of the researches of Lewis Henry Morgan (1884) to political ends quite different from those that Morgan had in mind. The American Association for the Advancement of Science made him its president, and the National Academy of Sciences a member. Quite apart from his historical significance as a participant in the formative conflicts ("discourse" is the currently fashionable word, but seems far too tame for the cut and thrust of the controversies of the day) of anthropology's axial age, Morgan's work has an enduring value that reveals itself once one looks past the Victorian pieties that are its rhetorical matrix. Among the many subjects on which he had, and has, things of importance to say are: the varieties of political forms among non-European peoples and their relation to kinship (or "the family organization" as he called it); naming systems among American Indians and their relation to clan membership and office; the varieties of kinship terminologies world-wide, and their relation to family organization and marriage; the relation between different forms of domestic architecture and family organization, principally among American Indian societies; the structural and evolutionary relation between systems of clanship among Native Americans and the ancient Greeks and Romans; and the evolution of subsistence techniques, and social and political forms. Morgan's work begins with The League of the Iroquois, a monograph on the social organization, religion and material culture of the Iroquois of his native New York State, which appeared early in 1851, based on fieldwork, principally among the Seneca-Iroquois of Tonawanda Reservation, and a close collaboration with Ely S. Parker (Hasanoanda) and others of the Parker family there. Morgan's sense that Iroquois life followed a cultural logic that was at once internally consistent and yet very different from that of his own culture informs the central theme of that book, which is devoted to the structure of the Iroquois league. He shows that the structure of the league is built upon the anterior structure of the system of matrilineal clans and family organization. He sensed that the patterns he had discerned in Iroquois culture might be more widely spread among Native American groups and in the Old World, and wondered what might be their relation to those of European culture. To answer these questions he embarked upon a comparative

INTRODUCTION

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study of world-wide scope, resulting in many publications, including his two most significant books: Systems of consanguinity and affinity of the human family (1871), which effectively created kinship studies, and Ancient society (1877), his grand synthesis of social evolution. Of the many intellectuals of his generation who participated in the debates around which the modem discipline of anthropology coalesced, Morgan is perhaps the one whose intellectual development can be known in the greatest detail, thanks to the unpublished papers he left to the University of Rochester, and whose contents are outlined elsewhere in this volume. Of these the most telling are surely the six bound notebooks of his fieldwork among the Iroquois and among other American Indian groups he studied in the course of annual business trips to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan beginning in the eighteen fifties, and four lengthy field trips to the American West in 1859-62. It is devoutly to be wished that the Morgan Papers will one day be published; and in such a consummation the notebooks will take pride of place, both because of the centrality of fieldwork to Morgan's oeuvre, and because of the ethnographic importance of their content.I While Morgan's actual encounters with Native Americans recorded in his notebooks are of premier importance in the development of his ideas, it is scarcely less important to know what prior intellectual formations he brought to these encounters, from his education and upbringing, his reading and his intellectual interactions with others. Here we are aided by a manuscript inventory which he made of his library, included in the Morgan Papers, and the contents of the library itself, which also was bequeathed to the University of Rochester. In this volume we publish the manuscript inventory, a catalogue of the books and bound volumes of pamphlets in Morgan's library, and a list of the contents of the Morgan Papers (principally his manuscripts) for availability to researchers. Personal libraries were essential for scholars in an age when public libraries were small and research libraries few and far between, outside of Boston, New York City and Philadelphia. The library of the Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics' Association was hardly adequate, and Morgan's main resource outside his own library and perhaps those of his friends in Rochester was the New York State t Selections from the Western journals have been published by Leslie A. White: Lewis Henry Morgan, tM Indian journals 185~2, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1959. Elisabeth Tooker is preparing an edition of Morgan's notes on Iroquois material life. William C. Sturte-

vandt, Elisabeth Tooker and Sally Mclendon are working on a catalogue of the collections of Indian material objects that Morgan made.

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THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

Library in Albany (whose catalogues he assiduously purchased), which in 1857 contained 43,634 volumes making it the largest of the state libraries. At that time there was no library in the country with 100,000 volumes, which would be the size of a liberal arts college library today, and all Europe had only a dozen libraries with more than 150,000 volumes. Book production the United States in Morgan's time seems small by today's standards. In the eighteenthirties, for example, the annual production of books, pamphlets and broadsides averaged a scant 6,000 titles. Many of them were American editions of European works, made attractive to publishers by copyright laws that secured the rights of royalty payments only to authors who were resident in the United States.2 Out of this comparatively small universe of books Morgan collected a library that was among other things a tool of his research. As the inventory title makes plain, it was jointly the library of him and his wife Mary, and her interests and tastes are clearly visible among the titles in the inventory. We find in it many of the works that were common in American homes of the Victorian age, including gift books, devotional literature, books of moral instruction for the young and popular novels of the type called sentimental. In these respects the library appears to be fairly representative of the Morgans' era and social circumstances. Works of high literature seem to be much as we would expect for the time and place: the Greek and Latin classics; plenty of the British standard authors, with noticeable Protestant and Scottish preferences; lots of the great Victorian novelists, especially the immensely popular Sir Walter Scott, but few from the Continent; of American writers some Hawthorne and Bret Harte, too much Longfellow and no Melville-who was, after all, a nearly exact contemporary, living in Albany, and one of literature's great ethnographers. History was well represented, notably by Francis Parkman (who of course also wrote on the Iroquois, at about the same time) and Prescott on Mexico and Peru, of American authors, and of course Macaulay. In all these respects it seems to be typical of American tastes of the period. It is in the ethnological elements of the library, rather, that it bears the personal stamp of Morgan and no other. Comparison with other private libraries of the period that are devoted to ethnological interests is revealing. Thomas Fields' 2,000-some titles on American Indians is larger and better of its kind, but it is essentially the work 2Statistics on libraries are from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8th ed. (1857), vol. 13 pp. 432-434 (s.v. "Libraries"). On American book production we have a total of 59,415 titles for the decade in A checklist of American imprints (various compilors), Metuchen, N.J., The Scarecrow Press, 1972-88 (volumes for 1830-39).

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of a collector and bibliographer rather than a practitioner. Sale catalogues for the libraries of two contemporary ethnologists, the Mexicanist Brantz Mayer and the archaeologist E.G. Squier, describe libraries that are also larger than Morgan's, and better stocked with books in French, German and Spanish. The overall orientation of both is strongly toward histories of the New World including, in Squier's library, a full run of the Jesuit relations, which was the principal source for the early volumes of Parkman's histories and which appear to have been largely unknown to Morgan. They are the libraries of scholars cast in the literary-historical mold of the era.3 Morgan's ethnological acquisitions begin in much the same "antiquarian" style but take on, in his maturity, the character of the tools of a problem-driven program of ethnological research. We can see this through the carefully dated inventory entries, making it easier to study the emergence of that program in the late eighteen fifties, as he undertakes the comparative studies that are the late fruit of his Iroquois book. We attempt such an analysis further on in this Introduction; but to prepare the way we must first give a sketch of Morgan's life and works. Morgan's life and works Lewis Henry Morgan was born in 1818 on a farm in the Finger Lake region of New York State, to Jedediah Morgan and his second wife Harriet Steele Morgan. From this farm, on which his ancestors' graves may still be found, Jedediah Morgan retired and moved to the nearby village of Aurora on the eastern shore of Lake Cayuga, not far from the site of the old Peach Tree Village of the Cayuga tribe of the Iroquois, with his younger children, Lewis among them. Morgan's older half brothers took over the farm and he was given an education, leading to a career in law, though a lifelong interest in agricultural matters is evident in his library and his writings. 4 l'Jhomas W. Field, An essay towards an Indian bibliography, being a catalogue of books, relating to the history, antiquities, languages, customs, religion, wars, literature, and origin of the American Indian, in the library of Thomas W. Field, New York, Scribner, Armstrong and Co., 1873; Brantz Mayer, Catalogue of a choice collection of books, in various departments of literature, including the entire library belonging to Col. Brantz Mayer, of Baltimore, Md. ... sold at auction, on Monday, Sept. 26, and five following days, by Bangs, Merwin & Co .. . , New York, J. Sabin&: Sons, 1870 (2,452 items, but evidently not all of them Mayer's); E.G. Squier, Catalogue of the library of E.G. Squier, edited by Joseph Sabin, to be sold by auction, on Monday, April 24th, 1876, and following days, by Bangs, Merwin & Co. ... , New York, Charles C. Shelley, 1876 (1,748 items, including bound pamphlets and newspapers on Central America, but omitting maps, drawings and so forth). 4for more extended treabnent of the themes of this section, see Thomas R. Traubnann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the invention ofkinship, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987. Carl Resek's earlier biography continues to be of value: Lewis Henry Morgan, American scholar, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1960.

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THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

He attended Cayuga Academy in Aurora, which prepared him for entry into Union College in Schenectady in 1838, where he completed his junior and senior years. Union, whose name indicated its non-denominational character, was growing rapidly and was then, with Harvard, Yale and Princeton, one of the largest colleges in the country.s It was under the vigorous but sometimes unwise direction of the Rev. Eliphalet Nott who brought to its classical curriculum a strong infusion of science, and to its finances a lottery scheme which made him the subject of bitter controversy and a protracted official inquiry by the state legislature (aired in pamphlets Morgan bound under the title, Dr. Nott and U. College, item C665 in the Catalogue below, and in John Canfield Spencer's Argument in defence of the Rev. Eliphalet Nott, item C954). Morgan graduated in 1840 and "read law" with a lawyer in Aurora whereupon, in 1842, he was admitted to the bar. But the Panic of 1837 had deepened into a depression, and the young lawyer could find no clients. He was obliged to sit it out at home in Aurora, and find other ways to fill the time. The enforced idleness was perhaps a godsend, for it allowed him the freedom to explore the various avenues of scholarship and public service to which his energy and ambition impelled him. Morgan's early writings, published and unpublished, show the range that as yet incohate impulse took. He was raised a Presbyterian in an age when evangelical revivals (especially those of 1830-31) energized a surge of moral reform activities in the interests of the abolition of slavery, temperance, sabbath observance and the creation of Sunday schools. We see one of these concerns expressed in three unpublished speeches on temperance preserved in the Morgan Papers. His education in the classics led to his unpublished "Essay on the history and genius of the Grecian race" (1841) and his first published article, "Aristomenes the Messenian" (written in 1842; published in The Knickerbocker, January 1843 under the pen name Aquarius). Other early writings are the unpublished "Essay on Geology" (1841) which contains an interesting passage on the reconciliation of the long chronology of the geologists with the book of Genesis, and a patriotic reflection called "Thoughts on Niagara" (The Knickerbocker, September 1843, also signed Aquarius) which makes the differences between the Canadian and the American Falls a metaphor, flattering to his countrymen, showing the differences between British and American civilization.

'Codman Hislop, Eliphaltt Nott, Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan UniveJSity Press, 1971, p. 230.

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In retrospect none of these early, tentative forays are unambiguous signposts to the future writings for which Morgan has become famous. Two articles of this period, however, are the exception. "Mind or instinct, an inquiry concerning the manifestation of mind by the lower order of animals" (The Knickerbocker, NovemberDecember 1843, signed Aquarius) looks back to annotations he made on the mental powers of animals in Georges Cuvier's Animal kingdom (C247, probably one of his college textbooks), and forward to his book, The American beaver and his works (1868) and a couple of minor writings on the subject. The other article, "Vision of Kar-ista-gi-a, a sachem of Cayuga" (The Knickerbocker, September 1844) is a first try at ethnology in which the author delivers a lecture deeply disquised under the device of a discovered manuscript and the pen name Aquarius. The circumstances under which the ethnologist in Morgan first appeared are curious. In the schools and colleges of that day it was customary for students to organize themselves into literary societies, with a slate of officers, dues, fines, meetings, speeches and debates. Morgan was an avid participant in such activities, from his Cayuga Academy days. During his rustication after graduating from Union he joined a secret society called the Gordian Knot, "made up of a few thorough going young m~n"; but the group decided, as he tells us, to "cut this knot," and tum the organization into an Indian society, the New Confederacy of the Iroquois, or Grand Order of the Iroquois as it was variously called, on a plan that recalls features of the literary society and the Masonic lodge.6 The aim, however, was to structure the society upon the pattern of the Iroquois league. The Grand Order of the Iroquois, on the face of it, was a society of young bachelors who from time to time set aside the proprieties of nineteenth century Protestant white America to take on "Indian" costumes and names (Morgan's was Shenandoah), hold secret initiations and feasts around campfires, and deliver speeches in a peculiar form of English that was supposed to stand for the Indian manner. At their annual conclave they would parade down the main street of Aurora, to the Aurora House (which still stands, since renamed the Aurora Inn) for a banquet. The playful aspect of the Order of the Iroquois, however, gave Morgan a cover under which 6Morgan's autobiographical statement on the subject is published in Leslie A. White, "How Morgan came to write Systems of consanguinity and affinity," Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and l.Lttm 42 1957, 257-268; it comes from the manuscript volume, Record of In-

dian Inters.

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THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

he could try out and deepen his more serious interests in public service and scholarship. And that he did. Morgan's researches into Iroquois life in the 1840s under the auspices of this secret society culminated in his book, The League of the Iroquois, published in 1851. This classic work is still in print, and remains the best overall ethnography of the Iroquois. The title of the book recalls the initial concern with which he embarked on these researches, the need to understand the constitution of the Iroquois league in order to fashion a constitution for his secret society. He turned at first to the existing literature on the Iroquois, principally the works of William Stone. When on business in Albany in 1844 he took the opportunity to research some of the old treaties with the Cayugas (treaties of New York State Iroquois had been made with the state government and its colonial precedessor), and met, in a bookstore, a young Seneca whose English name was Ely Parker, then serving as translator to a delegation from Tonawanda reservation in their talks with the governor. This meeting led to a series of visits to Tonawanda and other reservations by Morgan and some of his friends, during which he filled several notebooks with material on Iroquois social structure, religion and material culture. These were later bound and are now in the University of Rochester Library. The Tonawanda Seneca were then under threat of removal to the West because of the depredations of the Ogden Land Company, and Morgan and his friends offered the services of their organization for their defense. They also supported the education of Ely Parker and of two Seneca girls, one of them Ely's sister Caroline. The direct encounter with the Tonawanda Seneca made it plain to Morgan that the existing writings on the Iroquois were filled with errors and lacunae, and proved decisive in turning him toward fieldwork in preference to library research. The Grand Order of the Iroquois provided Morgan his first forum for his Iroquois research, and some of his earliest papers on the subject were delivered as speeches before it. Some of them were turned into papers which he delivered before the New-York Historical Society as his interest deepened. When a decision was taken to add a "Historical and Antiquarian Collection" to the New York State Cabinet of Natural History (which later became the New York State Museum) Morgan donated objects of Iroquois material culture, and then undertook to collect items systematically for the state. Many of the Iroquois items he collected were made for him on commission by members of the Parker family, especially Ely's sister Caroline. Morgan's illustrated reports on these items were woven into his book, to which were added full length engravings of

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Caroline and her brother Levi Parker in Seneca dress. The Grand Order of the Iroquois (G.0.1). also provided a means by which to come into contact with the two leading ethnologists of the older generation, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (who accepted an honorary membership in the G.0.1. under the Indian moniker Alhalla, from his 1843 poem of that title) and Albert Gallatin, a former Secretary of the Treasury under Jefferson, president of the American Ethnological Society and of the New-York Historical Society, and one of the country's leading scholars on Indian languages. In the late fall of 1844 Morgan moved to Rochester which became his home for the rest of his life. He established there the Turtle tribe of the Seneca nation of the G.0.1. which by then had spread to several towns each of which had its own chapter, though his interest in the organization soon waned as he applied himself to the business of establishing a legal practice, in which he became very successful. The publication of the League of the Iroquois in 1851, the harvest of a decade of research and collection, was to have been the summation and conclusion of his ethnological scholarship. The same year he married Mary Elizabeth Steele of Albany, to whom he presented a deluxe edition of the League to mark the occasion. (Mary was in fact his mother's brother's daughter-his cross cousin as later anthropologists would say.) He also drew up a will, and commenced the inventory of his and his wife's library, published in this volume, which he continued with dated entries for later purchases to the end of his life. The League, as the dedication makes plain, is the fruit of a collaboration between Morgan and Ely Parker, a remarkable man who would go on to serve during the Civil War on General Grant's staff, and in the Grant administration as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Parker had been his principal informant on Iroquois matters, and his translator during visits to Tonawanda. He had supplied written translations of the speeches of Jimmy Johnson which are the core of the Handsome Lake relgion, and members of the Parker family had supplied articles of material culture. But the concerns which motivated the book were Morgan's, and they are very much a lawyer's concerns. The League contains sections on Iroquois religion and material culture which are certainly significant contributions, but the heart of the book is the elucidation of the structure of the league itself. At the bottom of the league of Iroquois "nations" (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca, from east to west, plus the later addition of Tuscarora) lay "the family relations" which differed profoundly from that of Morgan's culture. For the nations were composed of "tribes" (or clans) that were matrilineal, extended segments of which (rather

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TIIE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

than nuclear families) lived communally in longhouses; and the chiefships which constituted the leadership of the league were the property of the matrilineal tribes. Moreover, "the father's brother is equally a father," the mother's sister a mother, and so on through a series of "classifications" or mergers of relationships. Thus as he delved more deeply into the structure of the league he was brought face to face with a kinship system, matrilineal and "classificatory," of a most unfamiliar kind. The ethnological career upon which (although he did not know it at the time) the publication of the League had launched him had a very modern profile, of a kind that became normative for anthropologists of the twentieth century: an initial period of fieldwork on a particular society, followed by comparative studies that seek a wider frame of understanding for the first intense, baffling encounter with the cultural other. The second phase of Morgan's ethnology revolved round the problem of explaining the two features of the Iroquois social structure that he had found so astonishing: the matrilineal clans, and the merger of collateral relationships (such as father's brother) with lineal ones (such as father). He embarked upon a vast comparative study of "systems of consanguinity and affinity" or "systems of relationship", or as we would say, kinship systems, seeking a global context for his problem. This phase saw a flurry of field research and an abundance of publications. The grand design of his thinking in this period is best seen in his masterwork, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1871, Systems of consan-

guinity and affinity of the human family. Morgan did not immediately take up the kinship project, however, and there was a period of several years after his marriage during which his ethnological interests lay dormant. He applied himself to the task of raising a family, a son and two daughters. His legal career prospered as he joined forces with Rochester businessmen who were developing railroads and smelting works in the iron district of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and his success was such that in the 1860s he was able to retire from practice altogether and to devote himself fully to scholarship. He was active, too, in the First Presbyterian Church of Rochester, whose minister, the Rev. Joshua Hall Mcilvaine, an Old School Presbyterian of a scholarly bent of mind, became his closest friend and intellectual companion. Mary Morgan, who had prepared herself for the life of a missionary before her marriage, was a member of the church; Morgan was a churchgoer and participant in church activities, but to the end of his life he was unable to make the public profession of Christ that was necessary for full membership.

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Though his ethnological work lay dormant, however, his scholarly aspirations did not. In 1852 he gave a major address before the Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics' Association, published under the title Diffusion against centralization, the expression of a "Whiggish" faith in the ability of American capitalism to spread wealth to all classes, preventing the formation (as in Europe) of privilege and obviating the need for socialism. The Athenaeum and Mechanics' Association, however, was perhaps too large and popular in character to serve as the vehicle for Morgan's purposes. In any case he soon formed yet another literary and scientific association with Mcilvaine and a number of other Rochester intellectuals, including the Rev. Martin B. Anderson, the president of the newly formed University of Rochester, a Baptist institution. The Club, or the Pundits (as the wives called it), met alternate Tuesday nights, fall through spring, and many of the papers Morgan read before it are preliminary versions of works he later published. Martin B. Anderson was made president, and Morgan secretary. Anderson had been corresponding secretary of the American Ethnological Association before coming to Rochester, and we may therefore assume that he was instrumental in rekindling Morgan's interest in ethnology.7 Shortly thereafter Morgan joined the premier national scientific society of that age, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, following the lead of two of the Pundits, Chester Dewey and Anderson. He became an ardent participant in the AAAS, before which he gave many ethnological papers and to whose presidency he was elected toward the end of his life, in 1879. Morgan's kinship project developed in the following way. At the 1857 meeting of the AAAS he gave a paper, "Laws of Descent of the Iroquois." In this treatment there is some attention to Iroquois kinship terminology, but the bulk of the paper is devoted to the features of Iroquois matrilineal clans, and develops some evidence (which was in fact mistaken) tending to show that the system is or had been 7We are obliged to Elisabeth Tooker for bringing this to our attention; see her "Lewis H. Morgan and his contemporaries", American anthropologist 94 1992, 357-375 which throws much new light on the period of dormancy and the circumstances of Morgan's return to ethnological research. The third meeting of The Club was devoted to a general discussion of ethnology, and Anderson gave papers on the ethnology of Britain, France, the Celtic races, and on "The objections urged against the unity of the human race"-this last being a favorite for the members of The Club, who unanimously opposed the polygenist thesis. Anderson published a paper, "Language as a means of classifying man," in the Christian review (vol. 24 1859, pp. 337-367) and lectured on European ethnology to the University of Rochester students. The Rev. Dr. Asahel C. Kendrick, as well as Morgan's close friend J.H. Mcllvaine, gave papers on current developments in philology, the importance of which in Morgan's work is very great.

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THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

universal among the Indians and constituted proof of their historic unity. His subsequent work led him to downplay matrilineal clans, and to concentrate on kinship terminology, as the proof of Indian unity. The following summer, when he went on the second of what were to become more or less annual business trips to Marquette in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, he interviewed some Ojibwas as to their clan system, and in spite of his best efforts he could not get them to say that it was matrilineal. He found, however, that their kinship terms had the same "classificatory" character as that of the Iroquois, and took this as proof of a common historical origin. Since the Ojibwa and Iroquois belong to different language families, he believed that the comparative study of kinship terms provided a proof, which philology could not, of American Indian unity, and constituted therefore "a new instrument for ethnology" more powerful than the philological study of American languages. The following summer (1859) he attended the annual meeting of the AAAS at which he had presented a paper outlining his new conception of his kinship project: "System of consanguinity of the red race, in its relations to ethnology" (unpublished). Upon his return he sought out a missionary who had recently come home on sick leave from South India, the Rev. Henry M. Scudder, to acquire information on the kinship terminology of the Tamil language. Much to his delight he again found the "classificatory" features of Iroquois and Ojibwa. Here, he believed, were the beginnings of a proof that the American Indians had come from Asia. Morgan's project, then, was to use his "new instrument for ethnology", the comparative study of systems of consanguinity and affinity or kinship, to prove the unity and Asiatic origin of the American Indians (and indeed of the whole human race) against competing hypotheses that they had come, via Europe, from the Lost Tribes of Israel or, as the polygenists such as Gliddon, Nott and Agassiz were arguing as the country moved toward Civil War, that they and the blacks were separately created races. The particular variety of historicism in which the project unfolded came from the work of comparative philologists, who had a genealogical conception of the historical relations among languages, as in a family tree, an idea ultimately rooted in the biblical account of the descendants of Noah and the ramification among them of the languages and nations of mankind. But language study had so far failed to unite the many Native American languages into one family, and to show its relationship to an Asian language. The comparative study of kinship systems, Morgan believed, could succeed where philology had fallen short.

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Morgan proceeded to put his tremendous idea into execution with the energy and dedication for which he was admired by his contemporaries. He had prepared himself for his Ojibwa researches with a standardized philologist's list of words, but while working with his informants he soon realized its inadequacy to capture the semantic structure of their kinship vocabulary. Returning with a notebook filled with kinship terms he revisited Tonawanda to collect Seneca words for several dozens of kin relationships, and then further extended his "schedule" or questionnaire of kinship terms to over two hundred relationships. He printed this schedule and sent it to missionaries and American consuls around the world. Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, provided a printed cover letter_ from himself and from Lewis Cass, the Secretary of State. Later the Smithsonian Institution reprinted the schedule with cover letters and disseminated it at Morgan' s direction. The returns were entered into large synoptic tables which became the core of his book, the Systems of consanguinity and affinity. He also made four field trips to the West during which he personally gathered kinship terminologies and other information from the Indian tribes there, and indeed the greater part of the data that went into the Systems had been gathered by Morgan himself. As he did so his vision of the "new instrument" broadened to include, besides kinship, the comparative study of other features of Amerindian life as indicators of historical relationship, including naming customs, the dance, and the communal forms of domestic architecture which expressed the distinctive character of family structure. Early versions of the work in progress were reported in papers given to The Club. The manuscript of the Systems was complete by January of 1865, at least its kinship portion, and might have burned up in the fire which swept through the brick castle that housed the Smithsonian Institution had he sent it then. Alarmed by what he considered a near miss, he carried it personally to the Smithsonian later that spring to be considered for its Contributions to knowledge series. The fire and the inflation in printing costs that followed the Civil War made Joseph Henry concerned about its great bulk, and as a physicist he was inclined to view it as a general treatise rather than one of the lean monographs he had in mind for his series called Contributions to Knowledge. These doubts led to considerable delays as Henry submitted it to two review panels, the first composed of Morgan's friend the Rev. Mcilvaine, who had since become a professor at Princeton, and a Princeton Semiticist, William Henry Green, the second an ad hoe committee of the American Oriental Society headed by the country's leading Sanskritist and linguist,

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THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

William Dwight Whitney. Both endorsed the scholarly importance of Morgan's manuscript and the book was published, but not without undergoing a substantial revision and abridgement at Henry's insistence. Morgan completed the revision in 1867, but the state of Smithsonian finances was such that the composition had to be spread over several annual budgets, and it did not appear until 1871. The first version of the Systems, that of 1865, argued for thesemantic, and therefore the historical, unity of the kinship systems of the Americas and of the majority of peoples of Asia and Oceania, under the name of the "artificial or classificatory" system, thus offering the desired proof of Indian unity and Asian origin on the basis of the classification or merger of collateral with lineal relationships. Opposed to this was the "natural or descriptive" system of the peoples of Europe and the Middle East. This way of dividing the world was an expression of a "Whig or Protestant" anthropology, to extend Herbert Butterfield's notion of "Whig history," the view of history dominant in nineteenth century Britain and America, combining ideas of liberty, progress and Protestantism. For the natural or descriptive system united the biblical peoples-Christians, Jews and Muslims-in opposition to the rest of the world.B Morgan regarded the descriptive system as a natural one, in the double sense of being "true to the nature of descents" or the natural facts of intercourse and parturition, and of being scientifically sound, and the system toward which all others will eventually develop. The classificatory system, in contrast, is the artificial product of invention, admirable in its complexity and logical integration, but ultimately untrue to nature. At the heart of this interpretation lay an unresolved paradox: savage intellectualism facing civilized naturalness. The revolution in the scope of human historical time broke in upon Morgan's consciousness as he was revising the first version of the Systems, and offered him the key by which to unlock the paradox. Hitherto biblically-based chronologies allowed that human history was about 6,000 years long. In 1858, human artifacts found in the same strata as those of long extinct animals in Brixham Cave assimilated human history to the long chronology of the geologists, and these results were widely publicised the following year by Charles Lyell, speaking before the British Association for 80n this concept see Trautmann, "Whig ethnology from Locke to Morgan", fournal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 22 1991, 208-218. Herbert Butterfield's book is The whig interpretation of history, G. Bell and Sons, London, 1931. In this paragraph we also draw upon Trautmann, "The revolution in ethnological time," Man 27 1992, 379-397.

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the Advancement of Science. Thanks to this and other contemporary excavations the long prehistory of man expanded; the bottom dropped out of "recorded" history. The effect of this on Morgan's thought was to promote an evolutionary kind of historicism, and to attenuate the genealogism with which he had set out. Morgan now temporalized the relation between his two kinship systems, the classificatory system becoming the earlier, and the descriptive the later and higher stage of development. Both systems now became natural or "true to the nature of descents" in that they were interpreted as the reflections of an evolutionary series of marriage forms and concomitant family structures, from the zero of "primitive promiscuity" to the monogamy of civilized countries. Morgan, fearful of being forestalled by other scholars as the publication of his great work dragged on, published this evolutionary scheme in "A conjectural solution of the origin of the classificatory system of relationship" in 1868. The same year he published another book, The American beaver and his work, based on the study of beaver during his many business trips to northern Michigan. This study continues his interest in the animal mind, and his attack upon the concept of instinct as an evasion of the continuities between human and animal mental operations. In the meantime, there had emerged a body of works, including Sir Henry Maine's Ancient law (1859), Fustel de Coulanges' La cite antique (1864), J.J. Bachofen's Das Mutterrecht (1861), and J.F. McLennan's Primitive marriage (1865), around which there crystalized a debate about whether the primitive form of human social organization was patriarchal or matriarchal. Morgan's work entered immediately into this controversy, favoring the matriarchal side, and Darwin's Descent of man which appeared the same year reviewed the literature including Morgan's "Conjectural solution" article, but opted for patriarchy. For us, a century later, the substance of the controversy is of little enduring value. Its importance lies in that it focused and energized an emergent discourse and community of scholars and so marks the starting point of anthropology as a discipline with a distinctive set of problems and methodologies. Morgan's Systems in particular bequeaths to the nascent discipline the delineation of kinship as a field, and a whole array of descriptive and analytical devices for its study. Its technical apparatus is its enduring contribution, long after the governing question of Indian unity and Asian origin and the patriarchy/matriarchy debate in which it participated have lost their interest. The third and final phase of Morgan's work in ethnology filled his last decade, from about 1870 to his death in 1881. It was charac-

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THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

terised by the writing of his evolutionist synthesis, Ancient society (1877), and his contributions to the development of American archaeology including his last book, Houses and house-life of the American aborigines (1881), and a number of lesser pieces. Both were further extensions of the kinship project of the preceding phase, and further contextualizations of his originating research on Iroquois family relationships. Ancient society was Morgan's "final conclusion and philosophical treatment" of the matters taken up in the Systems.9 In his ethnology as in his zoological works his subject was mind and its development, and in the book we find it worked out in four parts: the "growth of intelligence through inventions and discoveries"; the "growth of the idea of government"; the "growth of the idea of the family"; and the "growth of the idea of property." It is a work of high evolutionism, and of Whig anthropology, though at the Protestant American summit of the story of human progress he looks beyond: A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man's existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes. 10

Thus in a sense the future would recapture on a higher level the features in the structure of the Iroquois clans (or gentes as he now calls them) that Morgan had found admirable. Morgan's work on domestic architecture of the Native Americans was originally intended for the concluding section of the Systems in which various features of Indian life were to be examined as further proofs of Indian unity, but had to be excluded because of the alarming size of the manuscript. A fine polemic entitled "Montezuma's dinner" (1876) lays out Morgan's conceptualization of the task very well. He attacked the Spanish annalists' treatment of Aztec society via the European categories of mon9J.W. Powell, "Sketch of Lewis H. Morgan, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science" (The popular science monthly 18 1880, 114-121), p. 117. 10Ancient society, p. 552.

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archs, empires, vassals and palaces which was perpetuated by American historians such as Prescott and Bancroft, and proposed rather that the Aztecs were to be understood within the Amerindian categories of sachems, confederacies, (matrilineal) tribes or clans and the longhouses of the Iroquois or the "joint-tenement" houses of the Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest. Although he was mistaken in taking the Aztecs to be matrilineal, this and his other works on domestic architecture were important in taking the subject away from the historians, and in developing a program for Americanist archaeology that would be based on fieldwork and the comparative study of Indian forms. The central conception here is that domestic architecture is determined by family structure. We find this vision and the program that follows from it clearly delineated in a piece published in the first annual report of the Archaeological Institute of America, "A study of the houses of the American aborigines; with suggestions for the exploration of the ruins of New Mexico, Arizona, the valley of the San Juan, and in Yucatan and in Central America, under the auspices of the Archaeological Institute" (1879-80), which came about when the director of the Institute, Charles Eliot Norton, solicited his recommendations for archaeological work. In the summer of 1870 as Morgan was entering the third phase of his ethnological career and while the Systems was in the final stages of publication he took his wife and son to Europe for a year-long tour. He has left us a journal of that tour (as has Mary Morgan). He met a number of leading lights associated with the formation of anthropology: Maine, McLennan, and Lubbock (later Lord Avebury), and also Max Milller and Darwin. Europe fared poorly by comparison to America in his journal: on the Continent one could only deplore the effects of Catholicism, in England, class privilege. In its attitudes it reads like the travelogs of Mark Twain, without the humor. But it also has aspects of pilgrimage guided by the Whig or Protestant view of history. He paid his respects at the Dissenters' Cemetery at Bunfield. And he journied to Abbotsford, the estate of Sir Walter Scott. Toward the end of his life he set about to build a library on a plan that incorporated a feature of Abbotsford, as an extension on the rear of his modest house on Fitzhugh Street. It was one of the few forms of display in which he indulged himself in his prosperity. Another was the building of an imposing mausoleum in Mount Hope Cemetery where his daughters, who had died of scarlet fever while he was far away on fieldwork in the West in 1862, were buried, and where he, his wife and his son were later interred. The library was

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THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

an object of considerable pride and satisfaction to him. Its opening for the 25th anniversary meeting of The Club on 4 November 1879 was an object of interest to the local press, suggesting that it was a notable landmark of Rochester (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle 5 Nov. 1879). The Morgans served dinner to forty members and friends, followed by a meeting at which memorials of members who had since died were given. Only one other meeting of The Club was held in this library before Morgan's death, and in it members of The Club and others gathered on 21December1881, for Morgan's funeral. Surrounded by Morgan's books and collections of Indian artifacts, his good friend, the Rev. J.H. Mcilvaine-to whom he had dedicated Ancient Society-delivered the funeral address.11 The library and its contents Morgan's home in Rochester has long since been demolished, and with it the library he added to it in 1879 to house his books, manuscripts and collections of artifacts. The library however was captured in photographs for viewing in a stereopticon, taken from both ends of the room, giving us a record of the whole which, moreover, may be seen in three dimensions (see Figures 1 and 2). These photographs were made to order for Morgan by George Hibbard Monroe, a leading photographer of Rochester, to be given to friends. Morgan sent a set of these stereoscopic photographs to Lorimer Fison, the pioneer anthropologist of Australian kinship who, with the Americanist archaeologist Adolph Bandelier, may be called Morgan's student; and in the accompanying letter he gives Fison, and us, a description of the library. That Morgan had the photographs taken, and from the details of the library's construction, it seems clear that it was meant to be seen as well as to be worked in. The pleasure Morgan took in his library is evident in his letter t0Fison:t2 I did not intend to fill this letter with discussion, but to make it gossipy. I send you a stereoscopic glance at my work shop or library. The picture is not perfect because of the strong sky light 12 feet square in the centre which makes a dark carpet whitish and a black walnut table the same. The room llThe Rev. J.H. Mcllvaine, 0.0., "The life and works of Lewis H. Morgan, LL.0., 1881." Reprinted in The Rochesttr Historical Society, Publication Fund series, vol. 2, ed. Edward R. Foreman and Charles H. Wiltsie, Rochester, by the Society, 1923; pp. 48-a>. t2Morgan to Fison, 14 May 1880, Morgan Papers.

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in the clear inside is 36 ft 4 by 24'-6" without including the bay or the recess for the mantel. From the folding doors to the end of the bay is 44 feet and the extreme width 26 ft. View no 1 is towards the bay. The white chair in front is one of my mothers chairs of 50 years ago. On the table are two quartos. That on the left contains your letters and that on the right Mr. Bandeliers. The ceiling is a copy from a room at Abbotsford from a stereoscope I brought away with me. The ground is of birdseye maple from lake Superior, of a yellowish color, and the ribs of black walnut. These are our finest American woods, and make a fine ceiling. The case on the right contains my Indian collection. In one section of it is my beaver collection, with a mounted beaver in the comer, facing another on the opposite side not seen. The Indian water jars on the top are from Taos, New Mexico. On the other side of the mantel not seen is my classical library. No 2. is from the bay looking the other way. It shows a little more than half of my main book cases. In the vestibule at the end hangs a whole length painting of Governor Blacksnake, one of the two head warchiefs of the Iroquois confederacy, the prototype of our modem chief executive magistrate, but the edge of a part of the frame only is seen. This is quite enough on my working room, which I built only two years ago but which I enjoy very much. The carpet is a rug-outside of it is a border of hard wood-maple walnut and cherry constructed in an ornamental pattern.

In an earlier letter to Fison he explained that he had quarto volumes specially made for his correspondence, and stuck the letters with mucilage by the edges; Fison and Bandelier each have a volume, and other volumes are filled with selected letters from correspondents, among them Franz Bopp, J.J. Bachofen, Sir Henry Maine, Charles Darwin, John Lubbock and E.B. Tylor.13

Elsewhere we learn (following Morgan's concern for the dimensions of things) that the tall ceilings were 15 feet high. The reference to Abbotsford, from which the ceiling panels were copied, indicates the estate of Sir Walter Scott, one of Morgan's favorite writers. He had visited Abbotsford during his European journey of 187~71. On that journey he took with him Black's picturesque tourist of Scotland (C130) with a description and plan of Abbotsford from which, however, it appears that the plan of Morgan's library is quite different. We would not know of this architectural homage to the great Scottish novelist if Morgan had not made a point of explaining it to his visitors, and to the press. The firm of H.O. Hall & Co. constructed the copy from the stereoscopic photograph Morgan had made of the Abbotsford ceiling. A news article identifies the busts atop the bookcases as those of Doctors [Chester] Dewey and [William •3Morgan to FISOI\, 4 March, 1880, Morgan Papers.

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THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

Watson] Ely-fellow members of The Club-made by the Rochester sculptor Mr. Mundy, and of "eminent scientists and classical writers." The portrait of Blacksnake was painted by the Scottish painter John Phillips in 1845, and was acquired by Morgan in 1873, along with other articles, from the collection of Charles P. Avery of Owego, New York. This and the other artifacts in Morgan's library are now in the Rochester Museum, to which they were given by the University of Rochester.14 By the provisions of a will drawn up in 1878 the bulk of Morgan's estate and the contents of the library, namely, books and manuscripts, archaeological (that is to say, archaeological and ethnological) collections and cases, were to go to the University of Rochester, "for the purposes of female education of high grade in the City of Rochester, and under the management of the Trustees of said University."ts But the property was left to his wife and son for life, so that the university did not come into possession of the library upon Morgan's death in 1881. Mary Morgan died shortly after, in 1883, but their only remaining child, Lemuel, lived on until 29July1905. Records of the Monroe County Surrogate Court show payment to a workman on 26 May the following year for taking the cases apart and carting them from the Fitzhugh Street house to Sibley Hall, which was the library of the University of Rochester, and it appears likely that the books and collections were transferred at that time, and put into storage. The will, however, was then contested by collateral relatives of Morgan so that although the university had possession of the books, manuscripts, collections and cases its ownership of them, and of the other assets of the estate, was not settled for several years. It was not until the summer months of 1910 that the accession books of the university Library show Morgan's books being added. After accessioning, the books were catalogued for the general stacks of the library. In 1930, with the opening of the Rush Rhees Library on the new campus of the university, they were moved there. For reasons we can no longer explain, a few items were not

14William F. Peck, History of Rochester, Syracuse, 1884, p. 728; "Lewis H. Morgan's library," Sunday Morning Herald (Rochester), 24 October 1880; Richard Rose, ''The Lewis Henry Morgan Collection at the Rochester Museum," in Russell A. Judkins, ed., Iroquois studits: a guidt to docummtary and tthnographic resources from Western New York and tht Gtnestt Valley. De-

partment of Anthropology, State University of New York, and The Geneseo Foundation, Geneseo, New York, 1987. t5Mafter of Lewis H. Morgan, Will, University of Rochester, n.d. (bound volume of the briefs and judgements concerning the challenge to Morgan's will, University of Rochester library).

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accessioned until years later, as late as 1932 in the case of one title. Perhaps they had been misplaced. In the new Rush Rhees Library provision had been made for the first time for rare books, in the "Treasure Room." A second special collection division, the Local History Collection, was formed in the late nineteen-thirties. The two departments were administratively merged in 1955, and their successor is called the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Over the years a number of items from the Morgan collection have been transferred from the general stacks to one of these units, on an individual basis for reasons of rarity or association. Some 10or15 percent of the collection was under the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the time this project began. But it was not until the research for this project provided the necessary bibliographical information that the rest of the Morgan collection was systematically located in the stacks and transferred to the department, in 1988. Thus for several decades all of Morgan's library was in the general stacks, and until 1988 all but 10 or 15 percent of the volumes remained in the general stacks. There they were treated like all other books, and were freely available to borrowers. This accounts for the fact that many volumes have become worn from general use, a number have been rebound, some have become missing and others have been withdrawn from the collection. The two leading sources by which to identify the titles in Morgan's library are the accession book entries and the "Inventory of Books of L H Morgan&: Wife, 1851" which Morgan drew up in the year of his marriage and continued to the end of his life (see Figure 3). The inventory is on 22 folios of legal paper joined at the top of the page. Numbers of volumes are given in the left margin, values in dollars and cents in the right; running totals of each appear at the bottom of the first page. Turning back the first folio we see the entries continued on the verso side in the opposite direction, so that pages two and three are a continuous series of entries with running totals given at the bottom of the third page, and so on for subsequent pairs of pages. The writing is in ink, in Morgan's hand, except for the better part of three pages in which the entries are in another hand, apparently that of Mary Morgan (entries 1442-484). Newly-acquired titles were added to the inventory, and the year and date are given in the left margin, beginning in September, 1852. The inventory is drawn up and maintained with considerable care but it is not free of errors. There are several misspellings of

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authors and titles, and some lapses of attention as when Ashbel Green's Lectures on the shorter catechism changes hue and becomes "Brown's Shorter Catechism" (1216) and when Gilbert's report on the Henry Mountains becomes a report on the Himalayan Mountains, half a world away (11162). There is one case of dittography in which three previously-entered titles are repeated (1262-4 repeated at 1265-7). We have checked Morgan's arithmetic by electronic means; the exercise is not unlike trying to balance someone else's checkbook. Errors were found in well over half of Morgan's balances, and a careful examination of the columns of figures in the original inventory makes it plain that while a few of the readings of individual figures may be subject to doubt, the great majority of wrong balances must be attributed to Morgan himself. The overall error, however, is less than one percent. The handwriting is not always legible, and the ink has become very faint on some of the pages with the passage of time. Morgan's handwriting becomes less legible and the entries more cramped toward the end of the inventory, and the most legible entries are those in the earliest pages. After Morgan's death, in April of 1882 appraisers drew up an inventory of his personal property to file with the court. t6 In respect of his books the appraisers merely made a hand copy of Morgan's inventory. There is no evidence that the appraisers verified that each of the titles of the inventory were still in the Morgan library, nor did they add up the columns of figures for themselves (they copy Morgan's final balance) so that this copy is not as valuable as it might have been. However, it has been very useful in deciphering some of the entries in the original inventory since it was made when the ink of the original was more legible than it has since become. The chief problem of the inventory however is that the entries are very brief, and identifying the titles in question is often difficult even after the entries have been deciphered. Authors are given by last name only, and titles only in brief, often no more than a word, which again may not correspond to the form of the name on the title page. Here the University of Rochester accession book entries are of inestimable value because of the much greater detail they give for each volume: accession number, volume number, author (last and first name), title, place and publisher, date, pages, size, binding, and source-Lewis H. Morgan in our case. There is also a remarks column in which it may subsequently be noted that the volume was discarded or is missing. Putting the accession book entries for the 16MoJuoe County Surrogate Court, Estate of Lewis Henry Morgan, File 1882-312.

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TiiE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

Morgan collection into a simple computer database made it possible to generate alphabetized lists by author and by title to facilitate comparison with the inventory entries, and to otherwise sift through these entries in order to clarify the reading of the inventory text. The inventory gives a total of 2,922 volumes in the collection. The accession books show that 1,343 volumes, or rather less than half the original library, were accessioned in the summer of 1910, though a further search has shown that Morgan gave some 45 volumes to the university during his lifetime, and some other volumes were entered into the accession books several years later. On the other hand, there are quite a number of titles in the accession books-over two hundred of them-which cannot be identified with entries in the inventory. There are a very few published after the year of Morgan's death (1881), which therefore must have been added to the library by Mary Morgan.17 But the great majority of the non-inventory titles are published within his lifetime and within the orbit of his interests, and some contain his signature and/ or annotations. From these it is evident that Morgan sometimes failed to record his acquisitions, and that the inventory is therefore not complete. While the accession book entries gave exact identifications for many of the titles in the inventory, for the more than half of the collection that was not accessioned we resorted to the National union Catalog, and in a few instances to the British Museum catalogue. For entries whose decipherment was uncertain, or whose particulars were too cryptic to be readily searched in the NUC, the four volumes of O.A. Roorbach's Bibliotheca Americana, listing American imprints for 1820-1861, and James Kelly's two-volume continuation, the American catalogue of books for 1861-1871, were as if tailor made for our purposes, covering just the period of Morgan's life except for the last decade; once identified by these means we could then find NUC entries for such items. Sometimes circumstances allowed an exact identification of the edition of a title in Morgan's library, as when only one edition was published, or when the date of Morgan's purchase and the date of publication made it clear that he had to have purchased the first edition. More often in the case of multiple editions it was impossible to determine which one Morgan had purchased, though other bibliographic details might be certain. Some few items in the inventory eluded all efforts at decipherment or identification. t7J>ost-1881 titles: CH7, C156, Cl61, OM, C579, C597, C933, CM4, C989, Cll26, Cl131.

INTRODUCTION

31

Having by these means achieved a higher level of bibliographic detail on inventory items not found in the accession books than one can find on those included, we turned to the card catalogue of the University of Rochester Library for entries on Morgan books that had been accessioned. These include the entire pamphlet collection of 714 titles and some 600 titles of the book collection. The 300 or so titles of volumes that have been discarded or lost in the eight decades since they were accessioned had to be identified through the National union catalog. The amount of detail in accession book entries is such that exact identification of the edition in question may be found in almost every case. By these various means it was possible to reconstruct the entire Morgan library as it originally existed, except for those titles that may not have been recorded in either the inventory or the accession books, that is, books that Morgan bought but did not enter into the inventory and for one reason or another did not reach the university, a small group at best. It was also possible to identify the surviving items of that collection in the University of Rochester Library, and to examine them for signatures, inscriptions and annotations. Finding that some of the books of Morgan's library that yet remain contained his annotations, it was apparent that they should all be examined and that information about markings of various kinds should be given in the catalogue we were compiling for this volume. About 10 or 15 percent of this group were in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, having been transferred there over the years for reasons of rarity or association. The better part of the collection has been in the open stacks. These were transferred to the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections in 1988 and each volume was examined for annotations. Some thirty volumes had signatures or inscriptions indicating that they belonged to Mary Morgan, most of them bearing her maiden name, Mary E. Steele, showing that they had been acquired before her marriage in 1851. A couple dozen volumes have been signed as author's presentation copies, including works by the ethnologists Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), the historian and president of Cornell, Andrew Dickson White, and the president of Brown University, Francis Wayland. A few volumes have signatures or inscriptions showing that Morgan inherited them from his father Jedediah or his brother Harry who died in 1838. A few of the volumes annotated by Morgan contain his signature on flyleaf or title page, and some of these give Aurora or Union College as his place of residence when they were acquired.

32

THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

Morgan's mature style of annotation was restrained and regular, and its uniformity enables us to distinguish his markings from those made by other readers in the books that have been available for circulation in the open stacks these eighty years (see Figures 4 and 5). Annotations in the endpapers (here called "endnotes") consist of lists of subject headings and page numbers, comprising an index of subjects Morgan was actively interested in for his research. Markings in the text are restrained, being mostly limited to vertical lines in the margins indicating the index items. Marginal comments are fairly rare, though when they occur they can be revealing, as the comment "error" we find several times in Schoolcraft's work. The word "bosh" appears many times in Morgan's copy of Herbert Spencer's Principles of sociology, Chapter 4 on exogamy and endogamy, where he recites the theories of Morgan's rival, J.F. McLennan, concerning exogamy and marriage by capture, subjects over which they did battle in print. There are also corrections Morgan made in copies of his own books and articles. Morgan's markings in his earlier years as exemplified by textbooks contain underlinings of text, marginal braces and more abundant comments. Because many of the books that have been in open circulation have since been rebound, signatures or inscriptions in the front, and endnotes, may have been lost in some volumes, so that the absense of these in the catalogue here published cannot be taken as an indication that they did not once exist. Analysis of the collection The early inventory, to 1851 (11-229)

As the inventory title indicates, the Morgan library contains books of Mary Morgan as well as those of Lewis H. Morgan, and the first task of analysis is to determine which of the titles in the collection belong to Mary and which to Morgan, in order to characterize each one's tastes and intellectual interests. Fortunately there are a handful of clues which, taken together, serve to identify a substantial number of titles as Mary's. Direct statements in the inventory are few. The first nine pages (folios la-Sa), comprising entries from 1851 when the Morgans were married and the inventory started, to the first dated entries beginning in September, 1852, contain only one item identified as Mary's, a deluxe edition of Morgan's newly published League of the Iroquois (item 1161 in the Inventory below) that he gave to her as a wedding present. Of later entries, the inventory attributes only eleven to

INTRODUCTION

33

Mary. Fortunately, among the books of the collection that remain in the University of Rochester Library we find a further 27 titles that are signed "Mary E. Steele" or whose inscriptions otherwise indicate that they belonged to Mary before her marriage. Tracing these in the inventory we find that all of them appear on folios 3a, 3b and 4a, following the entry for the gift volume of the League of the Iroquois and, as we should expect, prior to the entries dated September 1852 and later. This fact, combined with one other, provide the key to the structure of the early part of the inventory. On folio 4a, after item 1229 a balance of volume numbers and dollar values is struck at a place about two thirds down the page, where we do not expect it, and another balance is struck at the bottom of the page, as is Morgan's custom. All but one of the Mary E. Steele titles fall between the gift copy of the League and the signature volume of Union hymns where we find the first balance, suggesting that we have here a block of 68 entries all of which belong to Mary. It further suggests that the first writing of the inventory ended at this point. If so, the prior entries (11-160) were all Lewis Morgan's books, including the Bibles and Testaments with which the inventory opens. It is consistent with this that several volumes signed or annotated by Morgan fall in this block, and none are signed by Mary. It looks very much as if Morgan drew up the inventory after grouping the books into three piles: Bibles and Testaments (11-7), his own books (18-160), and Mary's (1161-229). The only evidence contradicting this inference is a single title signed by Morgan but located in the block we have attributed to Mary (1165, Tupper's proverbial philosophy), which was probably misplaced. There is also one of Mary E. Steele's signed volumes that is entered slightly after the balance was struck (1234, Mackintosh's Miscellaneous works), presumably having been overlooked in the first writing of the inventory. Confirming our view is the fact that the whole series of 67 volumes in the block attributed to Mary (1161-229, excluding 1165) forms an intellectually coherent whole in which Mary Steele's tastes and interests as known through the signed volumes are also to be seen in the unsigned, inferred items in the collection that we now examine. This collection is surprising large for a young woman of her time and place. It contains, as we would expect, a number of textbooks (other than religious ones to be discussed below) that will interest those who follow the structure of female education in America before the Civil War. Of fiction, essays and poetry there is a strong representation of women authors, including Marguerite Blessington, Felicia Hemans, Hannah More and Lydia Sigourney to which may

---------

OHAPrER IV. EXOOAllY AND BNDOOAllY.

t

28'. h hia ingenious and interesting work on Pritnltitre JI~,* the words ., Exogamy" and "Endogamy" are used by Mr. M'Lennan to distinguish the two practices of taking to wife women belonging to other tribes, and . a ... taking to wife women belonging to the a.me tribe. As 1 ~ "'\ ' explained in hie preface, his attention waa drawn to these 1 diverse customs by an inquiry into " the meaning and origin of the form of capture in marriage ceremonies ;"--an inquiry which led him to a general theory of early 1exua.1. relations. The following outline of hie theory I clieentangle, aa well as I can, from 1tatemente that are not altogether couiatent. Scarcity or food led groups of primitin men to destroy female infante; because, "as braves and hunter. were re- . .._ qoired and nh1ed, it would be the interest of eYery horde 1 to rear, when possible, its healthy male children. It would; 1 ' be lees ite interest to rear females, aa they would be leH '. oapable of aelf-1opport, and or contributing, by their exer- ; tions, to the common good."' (p. 166.) M.r. M'Lennan next alleges that "the practice in early ( faoee of female infanticide," "rendering women l!Cal'Ce, led i •• t • at once to polyandry within the tribe, and the capturing of 1., ' • •omen from without." (p. 188.) Joined with a re-statement of the cau&e1 we oome upon

.

• Prl••"''" JL•'""r·

By John 1'. ll•J..emian. JLl.,

J:dhabarrh, 1881.

36

THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

be added (after her marriage) the novels of Dora Greenwell and the religious poetry of Helen Parmelee. The books of Sarah Stickney Ellis (The wives of England and The mothers of England) are devoted to preparing young ladies for their roles in adulthood. Other works of literature include the Protestant classics of Shakespeare, Milton, Goldsmith and Cowper as well as the Aids to reflection of the more contemporary Coleridge. Edward Lytton seems to have been a favorite; his Pilgrims of the Rhine is joined by several other of his novels later in the inventory. Collections of poetry and essays, and a number of "gift books," sumptuously bound and printed miscellanies of poetry and prose intended as presents, round out the literary section of Miss Steele's library. The remaining titles in her library, comprising by far the largest part of the collection, are concerned with religion. Mary Steele had prepared herself for the life of a missionary, and was to have accompanied her brother William to a mission in Borneo, but decided instead to accept Morgan's proposal of marriage. One can see in these books just how serious and demanding that preparation had been. Bible-study, of course, was central, and we find a number of exegetical works: the five volume Bible annotated by Thomas Scott; the Bible commentaries of Albert Barnes on Isaiah, on Job (2 vols.), and on the New Testament (10 vols.); Charles Hodge's commentary on Romans. Later inventory entries attributed to Mary show her continuing study of the Bible text: the commentary of Robert J. M'Ghee on Ephesians and those of Charles J. Ellicott on Galatians and Thessalonians. The elements of religion are expounded in the Confession offaith, presumably the Westminster Confession to which Presbyterians adhered, and Ashbel Green's (wrongly entered as Brown's) Lectures on the shorter catechism of the Presbyterian church in the United States, 2 vols. Moral guidance is represented by Gerando's (wrongly given as Legrando) Self-education; or, The means and art of moral progress and Wardlaw's Christian ethics. Calvinist theology predominates among the dissertations and collections of sermons: George Washington Bethune's Orations and occasional discourses; George Bush's Anastasis: or, The doctrine of the resurrection of the body; Horace Bushnell's God in Christ (Calvinist only in lineage and considered anti-Calvinist by conservatives); Louis Gaussen's Theopneusty, or, The plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures; James Cray's A dissertation on the coincidence between the priesthoods of Jesus Christ and Melchisedec; John Harris's Miscellanies (sermons and essays), Mammon: or, Covetousness the sin of the Christian church and The great teacher: characteristics of our Lord's ministry; Edward Madeley's The science of correspondences elucidated, and shown to be the true key

INTRODUCTION

37

to a right interpretation to the word of God; Samuel Noble's Important doctrines of the true Christian religion, explained, demonstrated and vindicated from vulgar errors; and Alexandre Rodolphe Vinet's Vital Christianity. Notable sermons were often printed as pamphlets at the expense of the congregation, and among the 36 volumes of pamphlets that Morgan had bound up are four volumes of the sermons of William B. Sprague of the Second Presbyterian Church of Albany, presumably Mary Steele's home congregation. The first two volumes of this set appear in Mary's portion of the first writing of the inventory (1197), together with the first two of five volumes of sermons by various pastors (1198) and a bound volume of Horace Bushnell's discourses (1202). Missionary literature includes John Harris's The great commission: or, The Christian church constituted and charged to convey the gospel to the world. In this category one should particularly note Hiram Bingham's A residence of twenty-one years in the Sandwich Islands which, as we see from two endnotes by Morgan, he consulted for information on Hawaiian social structure. Eliot Warburton's The crescent and the cross; or, Romance and realities ofeastern travel may also have appealed to the aspiring missionary in Mary Steele, as The missionary memorial certainly did. Works of a devotional kind include John Angell James's Anxious enquirer after salvation, directed and encouraged, religious poetry and hymnbooks. Among the later religious acquisitions of Mary Morgan are the inspirational works of Philip Bennett Power. Finally, we should briefly mention the books which Morgan gave his wife. As previously stated, on their marriage he gave her a deluxe edition of the League of the Iroquois which had just appeared. The following New Year's Day (1852) he gave her William Prescott's Conquest of Mexico (3 vols.) and Conquest of Peru (2 vols.) as indicated by inscriptions therein, and on Christmas, 1856 he gave her the writings of Amos Lawrence, as we know by the same means. One may wonder why Morgan gave Mary five thick volumes of Prescott, since her books give no indication of prior interest in such subjects. One wonders all the more when we find within extensive endnotes by Morgan. It was perhaps not the last time a husband has given his wife a book he wanted to read. Having thus identified Mary Morgan's books in the first (1851) installment of the inventory we may proceed to examine the remaining entries with some confidence that they were acquired by Morgan for his own use. In this group of entries we see the focus of his reading before the publication in that year of his first book, on the Iroquois league. If our inferences about the structure of the opening pages of the inventory are correct, it follows that Morgan's

38

THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

own early acquisitions amounted to some 153 titles, not counting Bibles, compared to Mary's 68. This comparison of titles in Mary's and Lewis' collections gives a measure of the difference in interests between a serious-minded young woman and a serious-minded young man of mid-nineteenth century America, but the differences in intellectual orientation are even more striking. We see at once that the directly religious titles in Morgan's holding are much fewer than Mary Steele's, though they are substantial by the standards of religious literacy in our own day. Seven Bibles and Testaments are noted at the beginning of the inventory, including the massive family Bible (probably purchased upon marriage) with which the inventory piously commences. Beyond that we find Christian martyrs (137) which perhaps would be Foxe's Book of martyrs, De Aubigne's History of the Reformation (166), Jonathan Edwards's Treatise concerning religious affections, an eighteenth century classic of American Calvinism (1100), Tales of the Crusades (1105, perhaps a work by George Cox), Thomas Dick's Philosophy of religion (1111), Alexander Keith's The evidence of prophecy (1118), a Life of John Newton (1125), William Paley's Moral philosophy, abridged American edition (1136), and of course John Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress. To the religious category we might perhaps add a sixvolume translation of the works of Josephus (171). These are surely the evidence of a serious education in religion, but fall short of the advanced training which Mary elected. Morgan's early collection illustrates much about his education. He attended Cayuga Academy in Aurora, from which he was admitted into the junior class at Union College in Schenectady in 1838-39, graduating at the end of the following academic year. Union College catalogues for those years show a dramatic increase in numbers for each class, suggesting that it was quite common to enter the higher classes from an academy as Morgan did (freshmen, 22; sophomores, 48; juniors, 94; seniors, 122).18 Early inventory entries include a goodly number of textbooks, and dictionaries, grammars and primers of English, French, Italian, Latin and Greek. We know from his inscriptions that his textbooks at Union College included Dalzel's Collectanea graeca minora and majora (141-2), Farrar's Mechanics (1104), Jackson's Conic sections (not in the inventory), Kames's Elements of criticism (132), Marcet's Chemistry (not in the inventory) and Say's Political economy (131). But we get a fuller picture

8Catalogue of the officers and students in Union College,

1

183~39,

40, Schenectady, S.S. Riggs, 1838, and Riggs & Norris, 1839.

and ... 1839-

INTRODUCTION

39

by comparing the syllabus of courses in the Union College catalogue with the early inventory entries. Although Morgan entered Union as a junior, all of the authors in the syllabus for the first two years are represented in the inventory, and indeed he covered much the same ground at Cayuga Academy.19 In the freshman year the course was almost completely devoted to Latin and Greek authors: Sallust, Horace, Cicero, Livy; Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon's Cyropaedia and Anabasis, Lysias, Isocrates and Demosthenes (several of the latter from Dalzell's Collectanea graeca majora, 141), varied in the third term by Bourdon's Algebra (149). The sophomore year was devoted to Tacitus, further Greek authors in the Graeca majora (Xenophon's Memorabilia, Plato, Aristotle, Dionysius, Longinus, and the Odyssey), more of Bourdon's Algebra, Legendre's Geometry, plane and solid (148), and Whatley's Logic (195). The junior year had two terms of authors in the Graeca majora (Hesiod, Sophocles, "Medea, etc.") and a term of Cicero (De oratore), plus Legendre's Trigonometry (possibly substituting Farrar, C330, not in the inventory), Blair's Rhetoric (143), Bridges's Conic sections (possibly substituting Jackson, C507), Farrar's Mechanics covering statics, dynamics and hydrostatics (1104, and possibly also Lardiner's Hydrostatics, 180) and Say's Political economy (131). For the senior year the courses are named but only a couple of the textbooks are specified, though we can make reasoned guesses from among Morgan' s early inventory entries: "Intellectual Philosophy" (probably Abercrombie, 1120), "Lectures on Electricity and Magnetism, and Biot's Optics" (perhaps substituting Brewster's Optics, 193), "Elements of Criticism" (Karnes, 132), "Astronomy," "Moral Philosophy" (Paley, 1136), "Lectures on Chemistry" (Marcet's Conversations on chemistry, C619, not in the inventory), "Hebrew," "Greek Testament, with Lectures on Biblical Literature," "Chemistry, Botany and Mineralogy" (Marcet; Lincoln's (or Phelps') Botany, 1109, Comstock's Mineralogy, 162). To this list we should perhaps add Cuvier's Animal kingdom (133).

' 9A Catalogue of the corporation, teachers, and students, of Cayuga Academy, Aurora, 1835-6 (Auburn, Oliphant&: Skinner (1836)) survives, but the "course of instruction" is not as explicit as we would wish about the textbooks used. Introductory department: spelling. reading. writing. arithmetic, English grammar, geography, elements of natural philosophy (Paley?), chemistry, mineralogy and geology, algebra, geometry, Latin and French; junior department exercises on spelling. reading. writing and arithmetic, Colbum's Algebra, Legendre's Geometry, conic sections, natural philosophy, chemistry, mineralogy and geology continued, Uvy, Horace, Cicero-De oratore, Graeca Majora, Xenophon, Lucian, Homer's Iliad; senior department: same as in the junior department, plus Wollsey's Greek Tragedies, astronomy, rhetoric and logic.

40

THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

Morgan's copy of Cuvier is heavily annotated, especially in sections concerning the manifestation of mind in animals, a subject that held an enduring fascination for him, which he exercised in one of his earliest publications, "Mind or instinct, An inquiry concerning the manifestation of mind by the lower order of animals" (1843), and in his 1868 book, The American beaver and his work. Lord Kames's Elements of criticism was the subject of a memorable course given to all seniors at Union by the president, the Rev. Eliphalet Nott. From surviving students' notebooks we know that Nott disagreed with the major tenets of this venerable text, long a standard in American colleges, using it as a whipping boy and as a point of departure for his own ideas. Among these was the notion of a continuum of reason uniting humans with the higher animals, which appears to have had a great effect upon Morgan.20 This course is pretty much the ordinary college curriculum of its time. What is striking about it, when we compare it to college courses of the present day, is its strong Greek and Latin core, its smattering of Hebrew (old-fashioned even then) and philosophy, intellectual and moral, the inclusion of literature under the rubrics of rhetoric and criticism, and the complete absence of history. Algebra, geometry and trigonometry are nowadays covered at the high school level, and the two terms of "natural philosophy" or "mechanics," that is, physics, and chemistry, are rather less than the high school physics and chemistry of the present. (Union was ahead of its time in offering a "scientific course" as an alternative to the traditional "classical course," from the sophomore year, which omitted Latin and Greek, and included more math and chemistry, some history, Paley's Natural theology, and a term of law.) The dependence of American higher education upon European learning in that age is noteworthy. Among all of the textbooks' authors, only Farrar and Jackson are American. There remain a number of textbooks in the early inventory in addition to the ones mentioned above, and most of them presumably come from Morgan's earlier schooling in Aurora, as is certainly the case for the entry, "Aurora Class Book" (1107: probably Pierpont's American first class book, C828). His later training as a lawyer seems not to have been very bookish; Story's Commentaries on the Constitution is the only early inventory entry that seems to pertain. His inscribed and annotated copy of Blackstone's Commentaries on the laws of England (C132) and his set of Kent's Commentaries on American law 20The course on Kames is described in Hislop, the same, pp. 234-254. In "Dr. Eliphalet Nott's lectures to the senior class, 1832" (MS., Schaffer Ubrary, Union College) we find notes of Dr. Nott's lecture on the question of what distinguishes man &om brutes; it is not reason. which they share with man, but religion and the moral sense.

INTRODUCTION

41

(CS35) (both named in the Union "scientific course" syllabus, and the standard works of the age) are somehow not included in the inventory. Perhaps he kept them in the office. In addition to the textbooks from his formal education, Morgan's enhies in the early inventory include acquisitions of other kinds. A few titles came from his father's estate, as we know from their inscriptions, notably Locke's Essay concerning human understanding (169), Smollet's translation of Le Sage's Gil Blas (170), Roche's Children of the abbey (1137), Washington's Farewell address (C1145-6, not in the inventory) and perhaps a few others. From his brother Harry, who died in 1838, he got Trumbull's General history of the United States ofAmerica (1279) and Wirt's Patrick Henry (199). But the greater part of the remaining titles were acquired more deliberately, with the purpose of forming a library to sustain the intellectual life of his maturity. The first two pages of the inventory list the more expensive and sometimes multi-volume editions of standard works which he must have purchased after his schooling was complete. These begin with the massive Natural history of New York (18) and Documentary history of New York (19), and continue with such titles as Allison's History of Europe (4 vols., 115), Prescott's Conquest of Peru (2 vols., 116), Gibbon's Decline and fall of the Roman Empire (4 vols., 117), Thirlwall's History of Greece (2 vols., 118), and the works of Johnson (2vols.,120) and Pope (121) in the first block of such enhies. History is strongly represented in the early collection, including standard works on Greece (Goldsmith), Rome (Goldsmith, Gibbon), England (Goldsmith, Hume, Macaulay), Guizot's History of civiliz.ation, De Aubingne's History of the Reformation, Lamartine's History of the Girondists, Scott's and O'Meara's Napoleon, Botta's American Revolution and Colton's Life of Henry Clay. The classics are even more prominent among Morgan's early acquisitions, forming a solid block of enhies toward the end of Morgan's section of the first writing (1142-159). Beginning with 10 volumes of Cicero we have a series of 16 titles in Latin, all of them Tauchnitz editions which Morgan had uniformly bound in quarter leather with marbled covers, again with a strong leaning toward historians, intermixed with poetry, comedy and fables, more or less mirroring British and American tastes of the period. The selection of authors included all of those whom he had studied at the academy and in college. It is interesting that Lucretius, whom he woulq later regard as the first proponent of evolutionism long before Darwin, is among the very first purchases of Latin texts. Of Greek authors, on the other hand, we find only Thucydides and Homer, the first in translation and the second probably so; Morgan's Greek was perhaps not so sure, and in later purchases he acquires translations

~1

THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

r,f Greek authors before he acquires the Greek text. No particular relh cm. monthly A55536 v. 6 1840

1425 C949 [Southwic~ Solomon) 1773-1839. A layman's apology, for the appointment of clerical chaplains by the legislature of the State of New-York; in a series of letters, addressed to Thomas Herttell, member of Assembly for the City of New-York, 1833. Originally published in the Washington County Post, Salem, under the signature of Sherlock [pseud.] To which are added notes and illustrations, by the author. Albany: printed by Hoffman &t White, 1834. xxxvii, (1) ~314 p. 12° A54773 C950 Speaker's manual. 1126 C951 Spencer, Herbert, 1820-1903. First principles of a new system of philosophy. By Herbert Spencer ... New York, D. Appleton and company, 1875. xx, 566 p. 201/2 cm. (Half-title: A system of synthetic philosophy, v. 1) Morgan text marks and notes. •Ass254

C952 Spencer, Herbert, 1820-1903. The principles of biology. By Herbert Spencer ... New York, D. Appleton and company, 1871. 2 v. illus. 20112 cm. V. 1: 492 p., app. p. 477-92; v. 2: 569 p., app. D, p. 567-69 •AS5255-6 11027 C953 Spencer, Herbert, 1820-1903. The principles of sociology, by Herbert Spencer ... New York, D. Appleton and company, 1877-1909. 3 v. 20 cm. (His A system of synthetic philosophy. vv. 6-8) Pt. IV-VI published separately, with special title-pages only. CONTENTS.-v. I, pt. I. The data of sociology. pt. II. The inductions of sociology. pt. ill. The domestic relations. 1877.-v. II, pt. IV. Ceremonial institutions. pt. V. Political institutions. 1909.-v. III, pt. VI. Ecclesiastical institutions. pt. VII. Professional institutions. pt. vm. Industrial institutions. 1908.

THE CATALOGUE

269

Many Morgan text marks and notes, including passages marked "bosh" and "error". •Ass248 v.1 11143 v.1 C954 Spencer, John Canfield, 178S-1855. Argument in defence of the Rev. Eliphalet Nott, D.D. president of Union college, and in answer to the charges made against him by Levinus Vanderheyden and James W. Beekman; presented before the Committee of the Senate, appointed to investigate certain pecuniary affairs of Union college, by John C. Spencer. With a synopsis of its contents; to which are appended the principal documents, testimony and statements produced in behalf of Dr. Nott, and the trustees of the College, before the Committee: together with some of the testimony, statements, &c., on the part of the prosecution; with a table of the contents thereof and an explanatory note. Albany, C. Van Benthuysen, printer, 1853. xiii, 113, viii, 111p.231/2 cm. A55470 C955 Sprague, William Buell, 1795-1876. Annals of the American pulpit; or, Commemorative notices of distinguished American clergymen of various denominations, from the early settlement of the country to the close of the year eighteen hundred and fifty-five. With historical introductions. By William B. Sprague ... New York, R. Carter and brothers, 1857-[69]. 9 v. fronts. (ports.) 24 cm. The volumes for each denomination were bound also separately with special t.-p. CONTENTS-v. 1-2. Trinitarian Congregational. 1857.-v. 3-4 Presbyterian. 1859.-v. 5. Episcopalian. 1859.-v. 6. Baptist. 1860.-v. 7. Methodist. [1860].-v. 8. Unitarian Congregational. 1865.-v. 9. Lutheran. Reformed Dutch. Associate. Associate reform. Reformed Presbyterian. 1869. v.1-5 AS4795-9 1477 v. 1-2 v.3-5 1598 C956 Sprague, William Buell, 1795-1876. Letters on practical subjects to a daughter. By William B. Sprague ... 2d ed. New Haven, 1831. xi, [13]-214 p. 191/2 cm. •AS4769 C957 Sprague, William Buell, 1795-1876. Visits to European celebrities, by William B. Sprague ... Boston, Gould and Lincoln; New York, Sheldon, Lamport & Blakeman, 1855.

270

THE LIBRARY OF LEWIS HENRY MORGAN

xii, [13)-305 p. 20 cm. •A54878 C958 Squier, Ephraim George, 1821-1888. Antiquities of the state of New York. Being the results of extensive original surveys and explorations, with a supplement on the antiquities of the West ... by E. G. Squier ... Buffalo, G. H. Derby and co., 1851. vi, [7)-343 p. illus., XIV (i.e. 16) pl. (maps, plans) 21 cm. Originally published in the Smithsonian contributions to knowlege, v. 2 with title: Aboriginal monuments of the state of New York The supplement contains a resume of the Ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley, by E. G. Squier and E. H. Davis. 1432 C959 Squier, Ephraim George, 1821-1888. Peru; incidents of travel and exploration in the land of the Incas, by E. George Squier ... London, Macmillan and co., 1877. 1 p. 1., [vii]-xx, 599 p. front., illus., plates, maps (partly fold.) plans. 221/2 cm. Morgan text marks and notes. •ASS274 11146 C960 Stael-Holstein, Anne Louise Germaine (Necker) Baronne de, 1766-1817. Corinna; or, Italy. By Mad. de Stael Holstein ... (tr.). 1807, etc.

1486 C961 [Steele, Oliver Gray], 1805-1879. Letters from Europe written during the summer of 1858 ... Buffalo, E. R. Jewett, 1859. 180p.18cm. •AS4654 1612 C962 Stephens, John Lloyd, 1805-1852. Incidents of travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan. By John L. Stephens ... 12th ed. New York, Harper & brothers, 1850. 2 v. fronts. (1 double) illus., plates (part double) map, plans. 231/2 cm. ASS232-3 1605 C963 Stephens, John Lloyd, 1805-1852. Incidents of travel in Yucatan. By John L. Stephens ... lliustrated by 120 engravings ... New York, Harper & brothers, 1848.

THE CATALOGUE

271

2 v. fold. fronts., illus., plates, maps (1 fold.) plans. 221/2 cm. ASS272-3

1606 C964 Steme, Laurence, 1713-1768.

The complete works of Laurence Sterne. With a life of the author, written by himself. A new ed., carefully compared with the best texts, and a memoir, by David Herbert, M.A. Edinburgh, W. P. Nimmo, 1872. 2 p. 1., [iii]-xxiv, 455 p. front. (port.) 24 cm. AS4917 11118 C965 Stevenson, John McMillan, 1812-1896.

Toils and triumphs of union missionary colportage, for twenty-five years. By one of the secretaries of the American tract society. New York, The American tract society [1866?] 182 p. 15112 cm. AS4748

C966 [Stewart, Balfour) 1828-1887. The unseen universe; or, Physical speculations on a future state [by B. Stewart and P. G. Tait] ... New York, Macmillan and co., 1875. 212 p. 231/2 cm. AS4812 C967 Stone, William Leete, 1792-1844.

Life and times of Red-Jacket, or Sa-go-ye-wat-ha; being the sequel to the history of the Six nations. By William L. Stone ... New York and London, Wiley and Putnam, 1841. 2 p. 1., [iii]-x p., 11., 484 p. plates. 23 cm. "Ho-na-ye-wus, or Farmer's Brother": p. [407)-419. "Ga-nio-di-euh, or The Complanter": p. [421)-456. Morgan text marks (and those of other hands), endnote (1 entry). •ASS237 1614 C968 Stone, William Leete, 1792-1844. Life of Joseph Brant-Thayendanegea: including the border wars of the

American revolution, and sketches of the Indian campaigns of Generals

Harmar, St. Clair, and Wayne. And other matters connected with the Indian relations of the United States and Great Britain from the peace of 1783 to the Indian peace of 1795. [4th ed.] By William L Stone. New York, A. V. Blake, 1838. 2 v. fronts, illus. plates (1 fold.), ports. plans (1 fold.), facsim. (v. 1) 23 cm. •ASS221-2

1471

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C969 Stone, William Leete, 1835-1908. The life and times of Sir William Johnson, bart., by William L Stone. Albany, J. Munsell, 1865. 2 v. front. {port.) illus. 231/2 cm. The material for this work was collected and the first seven chapters were written by William L. Stone, father of the author. cf. Pref. •ASS219-20 1837 C970 Story, Joseph, 1779-1845. Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States; with a preliminary review of the constitutional history of the colonies and states, before the adoption of the Constitution. By Joseph Story ... Boston, Hilliard, Gray, and company; Cambridge [Mass.] Brown, Shattuck, and co., 1833. 3v.24cm. Morgan signature, all vv. •ASS472-4 123 C971 Stowe, Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) 1811-1896. Uncle Tom's cabin; or, Life among the lowly. By Harriet Beecher Stowe. 1852 etc.

1588 C972 Strabo. The geography of Strabo. Literally tr., with notes. The first six books by H. C. Hamilton, esq., the remainder by W. Falconer ... London, H. G. Bohn, 1854-1857. 3 v. 18 cm. {Half-title: Bohn's classical library.) Morgan endnotes, v. 1; text marks and endnotes (2 p.), v. 1; text marks and endnotes (3 entries), v. 3. •AS4269-71 11056 C973 Strabo. Greek text. 3v. 11073 C974 Street, Alfred Billings, 1811-1881. The Council of revision of the state of New York; its history, a history of the courts with which its members were connected; biographical sketches of its members; and its vetoes. By Alfred B. Street. Albany, W. Gould, 1859.

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573 p., 11. 241/2 cm.

"'AS4540 1647 C975 Street, Alfred Billings, 1811-1881. Frontenac; a poem of the Iroquois ... Albany, J. Munsell, 1866. 324 p. front. (port.) 30 cm. Inscription: "Lew &r Mary From George &r Abby January 1, 1867." Morgan text notes correcting spelling and ethnography. "'AS4683 1863 C976 Stubbs, William, bp. of Oxford, 1825-1901. The early Plantagenets, by William Stubbs. New York, Scribner, Armstrong &r Co. [n.d.] vii, 300 p. 2 fold. maps (incl. front.) 18 cm. ASSOS4 C977 Sturm, Christoph Christian, 1740-1786. Reflections for every day in the year, on the works of God: and of His providence throughout all nature. From the German of Mr. C. C. Sturm. The first American edition ... Hudson [N.Y.] Printed and published by Ashbel Stoddard, no. 135, comer of Warren and Third-streets. 1814. 2v.18cm. AS4630-1 1395 C978 Suetonius Tranquillus, C. C. Suetonii Tranquilli Vitae XII Caesarum, Nee non eiusdem qui feruntur de grammaticis, rhetoribus ac poetis illustribus libelli et fragmenta. Ad praestantissimorum librorum lectionem emendavit C. H. Weise. Lipsiae, sumtibus et typis C. Tauchnitii, 1845. 388 p. 131/2 cm. Morgan endnote (1 entry). "'AS4228 1152 C979 Suetonius Tranquillus, C. The lives of the twelve Caesars. By C. Suetonius Tranquillus; to which are added, his Lives of the grammarians, rhetoricians, and poets. The translation of Alexander Thomson, M.D., revised and corrected by T. Forester ... London, H. G. Bohn, 1855. vii p., 11., 557, [1] p. front. (port.) 18 cm. [Bohn's classical library, v. 77) "'AS4313 11059

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C980 Surratt, John Harrison, defendant. Trial of John H. Surratt in the criminal court for the District of Columbia, Hon. George P. Fisher presiding ... Washington, Gov't print. office, 1867. 2 v.23cm. •A54697-8 1892 C981 Swan, James Gilchrist, 181&-1900. The northwest coast; or, Three years' residence in Washington territory. By James G. Swan ... New York, Harper&: brothers, 1857. xiv p., 11., [17)-435 p. incl. illus., plates. front., fold. map. 19 cm. Morgan text marks and notes, endnotes. •A54652 1592 C982 Sweet, Samuel Niles, b. 1805. Practical elocution: containing illustrations of the principles of reading and public speaking ... By Samuel Niles Sweet ... 1839, etc. 190 C983 Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745. The works of Jonathan Swift ... Edinburgh, William P. Nimmo, 1873. viii, 608 p. 8° AS4918 11118 C984 Tacitus, Cornelius. C. Comelii Taciti Opera quoad extant, ex fide optimorum librorum accurate recensuitC. H. Weise. Nova ed. stereotypa ... Lipsiae, sumptibus et typis C. Tauchnitii, 1846. 2 v. 13 1/i cm. Morgan text marks, v. 2 (De Germania). •AS4229-30 1256 C98S Tacitus, Cornelius. The Germania of Tacitus, with ethnological dissertations and notes. By R. G. Latham ... London, Taylor, Walton, and Maberly, 1851. cxxviii, 180, clxx, [2] p. front. (fold. map) 23 cm. •Ass102 11128 C986 Tacitus, Cornelius. The works of Tacitus. The Oxford translation, revised. With notes ... London, Bell and Daldy, 1870. 2 v. 18 cm. [Bohn's classical library, vv. 7&-79)

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Morgan text marks and notes, endnotes, v. 2. •AS4314-S 11060 C987 Talfourd, Sir Thomas Noon, 1795-1854. History of Greek literature, by Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, D. C. L.... Charles James Blomfield, D. D.... R. Whitcombe, esq., M. A. ... E. Pococke, esq.; the Rev. J.B. Ottley, M.A.... and the Rev. Henry Thompson, M.A.. . . Second edition, revised and enlarged. [London, J. J. Griffin and co.; etc., etc., 1850] viii, 396 p. 191/2 cm. •AS4584 C988 Taylor, Isaac, 1829-1901. Etruscan researches; by Isaac Taylor ... London, Macmillan and co., 1874. xii, 388 p. incl. front., illus., tables. 2211z cm. Morgan text marks and endnotes. •AS4357 11107 C989 Temple Hill High School (Geneseo, N.Y.). Souvenir of the reunion: after fifty years, of the excursion party from Temple Hill high school to Niagara.-