Sep 30 2007
Selling some pieces of Robert E. Lee
A quick article on CNN caught my eye: the auction of documents relating to South Carolina between 1861-1863, including letters written by Robert E. Lee.
However, I found myself with more questions than answers. Here are a few:
-What is the provenance of these documents? Obviously there’s a somewhat shaky trail leading to Thomas Wilcox (the seller driving around with the letters in the back of his SUV), but to whom were bulk of the Lee letters (and other correspondence) addressed? Was this a treasure trove of documents entrusted to someone and passed down through the family as such, or an artificially assembled collection by a souvenir hunter? The article mentioned that the letters were in the family, but nothing else.
-A lawsuit is mentioned, but no citation. I wonder if South Carolina attempted to reclaim the documents by the use of replevin on the premise that these documents belonged to the Confederacy, and what the grounds were for dismissal?
-What repositories might have been interested in these records? Washington and Lee University seems like an obvious choice to me (and from the information online it appears that they have a gap in their Lee Papers between 1859-1962), perhaps the University of South Carolina or other institutions might have been interested as well. Was there any action on the part of these institutions or others to try to get these papers? Whether forming a consortium to share the costs and the documents, finding an interested patron to purchase and donate them, or negotiating some sort of deal with the holder of the documents, it seems (from my decidedly limited view after reading this article) that maybe something could have been done to keep the documents publicly available. [I’m not faulting either of the named institutions; not only am I aware of the costs of this type of thing, but I have no idea whether they were even approached in this matter.]
It’s a shame that the papers will now be dispersed and perhaps lost to history forever. In this type of situation, I hope that some transparency and media attention will bring focus on the private acquisition of presumably public documents, though I wish that the article had mentioned this a little more bluntly. What can we do as archivists, as historians, as citizens to advocate for less private holding of significant records?
I’m going to try to track down more information about this particular case.