Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789.

Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789. Volumes 17-26: March 1, 1781-July 25, 1789, With Supplement, 1774-87. Edited by Paul H. Smith, Ronald M. Gephart, and others. (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1990-2000. Pagination varies, $39.00-$62.00, ISBN 0-8444-0177-3.)

These volumes of the Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789, bring to an end the series begun in 1970 by the Library of Congress as a project to commemorate the Bicentennial of the American Revolution. The Letters series has become an essential companion of the Library's monumental Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789 (34 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1904-1937). Editors Paul H. Smith, Ronald Gephart, and their associates have provided an excellent source for documents relating to the Confederation government. Included are more than 23,000 letters written by the 344 delegates to the Congress and also letters by Charles Thomson, the ubiquitous "perpetual" secretary to the Congress. This series greatly improved upon Edmund C. Burnett's Letters of Members of the Continental Congress (8 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1921-1936) not only in the number of letters included but also in the comprehensive identification and annotation of individuals, events, and places referred to in the documents.

The Letters of Delegates has become the standard by which scholarly editions of early American letters and documents are measured. Volumes one through twenty-five each begin with comments on "Editorial Method and Apparatus." Editorial conventions used to clarify the text are identified. Symbols denote the type and location of the source for each printed document. An "Abbreviations and Short Titles" section identifies references cited in annotations to the letters. The "Acknowledgements" recognize many of the publications, institutions, and individuals that have contributed to the project. A "Chronology of Congress" is especially valuable to students and professional researchers, in that it provides dates for key events, debates, and reports for the period covered by each volume. A "List of Delegates to Congress" provides the dates on which delegates were elected and the inclusive dates of their attendance within the period covered by each volume. A thorough index for each volume provides further access to the letters, and through them the thoughts and actions of individuals and of Congress as a body. Students of American history have largely overlooked this first fifteen years of our national government, but Congress in this era did much to prepare the ground for the national government shaped by the Constitution. New interpretations for the period should emerge from these readily available and fully annotated letters. The historical detective work of the editors has made much new information accessible.

Volume seventeen begins by noting that in the Confederation Congress on March 1, 1781, the state of New York ceded its western land claims. At that point delegates from Maryland signed the Articles of Confederation, which officially established the Confederation Congress as the new national government. Succeeding volumes document the end of the war with Great Britain and contain much new information relating to the formation of the postwar government. These pages document, as examples, troubled negotiations and difficulties in concluding the peace, continued financial difficulties faced by a national government with no power to tax, failed attempts to amend the Articles of Confederation, difficulties of even getting a quorum of the states so that the business of the nation could be conducted, and quarrels over the location of the national capital. The new volumes also illustrate the inability of the Confederation government to deal with Indian problems, to increase international trade, and, ultimately, even to pay the interest on its debts.

Other documents demonstrate many of the little-recognized successes of the Confederation Congress, including such feats as maintaining a currency that financed the successful completion of the Revolutionary War. Other notable accomplishments include the Confederation's successful diplomacy with numerous foreign countries, the creation of what became the cabinet system under the new constitution, and the development of a national consciousness strong enough to inspire the framing of a new constitution that would alter the form of government and meet the nation's needs. While the Constitutional Convention was meeting in Philadelphia, for example, secretary Thomson made a quick visit to his home city and returned to New York with a sufficient number of delegates to provide a quorum and make possible the adoption of the Northwest Ordinance--a significant step toward shaping and expanding the new nation. Volume twenty-five closes with a July 23, 1789, letter from Thomson wherein he delivered both his resignation and the Great Seal of the United States to the newly elected president, George Washington. The government established by the Articles of Confederation was no more, and the new government under the Constitution had begun; except for an appendix and some supplementary documents, the Letters come to an end.

Volume twenty-six is a "Cumulative Index," accompanied by a list of the delegates to the Congress for the period 1774-1789. The index is more useful than those in previous compilations of congressional correspondence, and, due to its comprehensiveness, it is even more useful here than the indexes in earlier volumes of the same series. Presumably the index was enhanced as well by the utilization of a variety of electronic search engines (see the review below of the CD-ROM edition of the Letters for an evaluation of its search capabilities). The Letters of the Delegates to Congress is a significant contribution to the history of the United States under the Articles of Confederation and a fine example of the work of the Library of Congress and its Manuscripts Division.

J. EDWIN HENDRICKS

Wake Forest University