A Week in the National Archives

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aalan94
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AG
Had a research/vacation this past week, which basically was me researching and my wife vacationing in Washington, D.C. I spent most of the working hours every day in the national archives doing research for my book. Most of this was microfilm, which meant getting the rolls and putting them on the viewer and making sure it's wound properly - you know, the skills they taught me in 1990 when they said I'd use this all the time as a newspaper reporter, but which I've never actually used.

I spent most of my time in the records of the War Department from 1806-1814, including letters sent and received by the Secretary of War. My topic of course is the Gutierrez-Magee filibuster into Texas, but there is a lot of reporting about the expedition there, and there are a fair number of former U.S. military officers who are involved in the filibuster. I started out with a list of target documents which I had identified in the several works on the subject, as well as from other secondary sources I used. I also identified several targets to search for based on my own research. People I've identified as relative to the story who previous writers overlooked or simply didn't know about. Most of what I did was confirm stuff. I needed to get my hands on the documents and read them myself rather than just rely on what other people have read into them. But there was new stuff I found that nobody has used before.

You can actually order microfilm online, but I don't recommend it. I once spent $100 to order one roll, and then it turned out that the document I wanted wasn't on it. I had identified documents on 12 different rolls and had a speculative list of 3 or 4 additional rolls. That would be expensive at $100 a roll. Secondly, when they scan the roll, they just do the entire roll and you get what they scan. When you view it yourself, you can adjust the brightness and contrast, zoom in, etc. If a document has been folded, the faded parts look very dark. I usually would do a darker copy for most of the text, and then a lighter copy for the stuff in the folds, and that way I can read it all. You can scan the documents straight on the computer for 40 cents a page, but that's a lot of money when you're talking about possibly 200-300 documents. I simply took a cell phone picture of all of the "ordinary" documents" and then did high res scans of all the "money" ones. I brought a very good camera, but it turns out in the low light setting my phone adjusts better. I double checked the photos after I took them to make sure everything came out. Other than words that are simply hard to read on the document in the first place, I didn't have any problems.

I did pull a few actual hard copies of documents, but it wasn't worth my time because they didn't have the right info. I did hold a order book belonging to Zebulon Pike, which was very cool because you could still smell the smoke from the fires around which it was written, wafting up from the pages. Zebulon was arrogant, ambitious and court martialed about one person a day, was basically my take-away. The best line from that book was one guy's defense when charged with drunkenness. He said he did not agree with the court, and said that drunkenness was no crime in a soldier. I kind of like that honesty.

As for the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition, there has always been a big question about whether filibuster leader Augustus Magee, who resigned his commission to join it, was secretly allowed to do so by his leadership. A lot of historians have pontificated on this, but never looked into a very simple detail, which I found - to whom he submitted his resignation. The letter is well known - it's sent to the secretary of war. But it's sent via another officer to whom it was actually submitted. That officer, who I had to do some sleuthing to track down, was in another regiment. He was an infantry officer, and Magee was an artillery officer. He was not in Magee's chain of command. It smells of an end-run around the process, which is a small detail that reveals a lot. This is the sort of thing that comes from paying attention to really small things in letters, and having the actual letter in the context of the files tells you that.

I'm pretty close now to declaring my research done. There are no big files to get and only a few nibbles in docs here and there that I need to do. Goal is to finish the 2nd draft of my book in the next few months and then assess prior to a probable 3rd draft which will be editing only, no new research.
BQ_90
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AG
Nothing to add but sounds cool
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