Interim Appointment: W. C. C. Claiborne Letter Book, 1804-1805.

Edited with Biographical Sketches by Jared William Bradley. The Louisiana Purchase Collection. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Pp. xxii, 666. $85.00, ISBN 0-8071-2684-5.)

The early published version of the Official Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 1801-1816, which was edited by Dunbar Rowland (6 vols.; Jackson, Miss., 1917), covered the years when Claiborne served as second governor of the Mississippi Territory, governor of Orleans Territory, and the first elected governor of the state of Louisiana. In the 1930s Louisiana State University acquired a bound volume of 218 letters to and from William Claiborne mostly dated from October 3, 1804, through May 4, 1805, most of which did not appear in the Rowland edition. This letter book has now been edited and published with extensive annotations by Jared William Bradley. (Bradley's title alludes to the provisional nature of Claiborne's initial commission as governor of Orleans Territory--a position to which Thomas Jefferson would have preferred to appoint the Marquis de Lafayette.)

David W. Parker's Calendar of Papers in Washington Archives Relating to the Territories of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1911) lists thirty-eight letters to and from Claiborne between October 1804 and May 1805 that are not found in the LSU letter book, including four of the six letters received from President Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison during this period. On the other hand, Interim Appointment contains 132 letters for which no duplicate exists in the National Archives, mostly ones addressed by Claiborne to local officials in Orleans Territory. This new book thus makes previously unpublished sources widely accessible to students of policy making and territorial administration, especially at the local level, in the years immediately following the Louisiana Purchase. Even when copies of the letters can be found elsewhere, Bradley's comprehensive notes point out related archival materials and provide context that will amply reward those who consult his edition.

The letters, however, make up slightly less than half of Interim Appointment. Most of the remainder consists of biographical sketches, some of them quite lengthy, in which Bradley pieces together information from local, national, and foreign archives about thirty-one lesser-known individuals in Claiborne's network of correspondents. Among them, fifteen had been present in Spanish Louisiana: three Creoles, four Americans, three foreign French, three Spanish officials, the Scottish doctor Robert Dow, and a free man of color. The sixteen others were mainly officeholders and military officials whose arrival coincided with the Louisiana Purchase; all were born in the United States or the British Isles.

Bradley's sketches reconstruct his subjects' entire careers to the best extent allowed by available sources. Some provide particularly interesting information on the role of Anglo-Americans in the Burr conspiracy. In another, Bradley claims that the free man of color Pierre Bailly, sentenced to prison in Cuba in the 1790s for his Jacobin ideas, is the same personas the Pierre Bailey (as the name is spelled in other published versions of the letters) whom Claiborne appointed as civil commandant of Iberville district in 1805, even though racial norms of the period make that highly unlikely. Neverthless, Bradley's biographical sketches are thoroughly researched, and his copious notes ensure that these biographies, like the letter book in the first half, will serve as a valuable research tool for years to come.

PAUL LACHANCE

University of Ottawa