Holly C. Shulman
Preface | Project History | Editorial Methods | Acknowledgments
Several mutually reinforcing goals have driven this project. We began with a commitment to publish as many of Dolley Madison’s letters as we could discover. After her death in 1849 her correspondence was widely dispersed. Some items had been sold to private collectors; some were held as a single letter in an institution’s collections or part of a collection of an infrequent correspondent; a few were still closely guarded by loving descendants. We wanted, moreover, not simply to assemble her letters, but to make sure that our work was done in accordance with the standards of the Association for Documentary Editing. We firmly adhere to the idea that a good documentary edition begins with an “established” text: with a transcription that is as accurate as possible. It was also important to us to make this edition as fully searchable as we could. A digital edition allows the reader to search the text in so many varied and powerful ways and we wanted to ensure that we took full advantage of the medium. We wanted to include ancillary materials, and to do so in a fashion that is best suited to the digital medium. Dolley’s correspondence is chatty; it is full not only of people, but of references to contemporary politics and diplomacy. People widely known during Dolley’s lifetime are now all but forgotten, especially the women. Place names have been changed, homes have been burned and lost. The political or diplomatic meaning of a letter sent, or of a message passed on, or of a name mentioned, is often obscure even to the contemporary scholar; our annotations seek to address this problem. And finally, we wanted to connect our work in print to this electronic publication. For lengthy essays and contextualizing materials, readers are advised to go to The Selected Letters of Dolley Payne Madison, published by the University of Virginia Press in the spring of 2003.
Scholars and biographers have long been interested in Dolley Madison, but until the publication of this collection they have had to rely on three sources for her correspondence: the Dolley Madison Collection at the Library of Congress, the Cutts collection at the Schlesinger Library, and two earlier published editions of her correspondence. The Library of Congress collection, while substantial in size and critical to any study of Dolley Madison, is largely limited to the years after James Madison’s death, and contains none of the family correspondence that allows an intimate glimpse of her life. The Cutts collection at the Schlesinger Library contains a difficult-to-read microfilm-only collection of the letters collected by Mary E. E. Cutts. The original letters are lost. The two previous books of letters are that of her grandniece, Lucia B. Cutts, published in 1886 as The Memoirs and Letters of Dolly Madison, and the subsequent larger compilation of her correspondence, edited by Allen C. Clark and published in 1914, The Life and Letters of Dolly Madison. Both editions are heavily bowdlerized and incomplete.
The Dolley Madison Digital Edition will ultimately include close to 2,500 letters. From the scattered correspondence we have gathered letters that have never been previously published. In this we have had the good fortune to work closely with the Papers of James Madison (PJM) at the University of Virginia. From the beginning the editors of PJM searched for Dolley letters as part of their regular assignment. They contacted repositories all over the world as well as private collectors and collateral descendants. The range and scope of the collection makes this edition an important scholarly contribution to the literature of the early republic, women’s history, and the institution of the First Lady.
The letters as presented in this volume have been edited according to the standards of the Association for Documentary Editing. Each letter is transcribed, proofread twice by the editors, and finally tandem proofread. This commitment to establish the text is a critical part of our mission.
The electronic environment enables us to search these letters in new and exciting ways. After our letters have been proofed and the text established, they are tagged in XML using the markup system of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and stored in an XML-based database. From this database we can use XML tools and programming languages such as XQuery to perform complex queries and searches on the content of the letters, and to format the corresponding results as desired in HTML for output to a Web browser. For the reader this means searchability: one can look through all of the letters for a person or a topic, or combine two people, or two people and a topic. Thus the user can ask to see all the letters that mention Dolley Madison and etiquette, or Dolley Madison and James Madison and family, or Dolley Madison, slavery, and agriculture; searches by person or topic can be combined with full-text searching.
In electronic publication, notes are often provided as hyperlinks to text, either with or without superscripts; we consciously chose not to create links within the letters for aesthetic reasons, to provide an uncluttered reading experience, and instead present them in the sidebar to the right of each letter.
Because this edition has been conceived from the beginning as a work about a woman who was central to politics but not an overt policy maker, and whose life illuminates the lives of her contemporaries, we have created a different kind of annotation: identification of all the people, places, and literature mentioned in these letters.
It is difficult to enter the daily life of a woman who lived during the years of the early American republic. Because these letters are often extremely gossipy and full of names, one of our goals has been to open them up to readers who want to follow the conversation. Each letter is accompanied by a list of every person mentioned in that letter, followed by his or her full (and standardized) name. Clicking on the full name brings up a brief biographical description. The identification continues to be accessible each and every time a name appears in any letter. This same procedure has been followed for literary references and places.
Holly Cowan Shulman began studying and writing about Dolley Madison in the mid-1990s. When she started working on this project, she was the associate director of the Science, Technology, and Society Honors Program (College Park Scholars) at the University of Maryland. In that capacity she ran an internship on publishing on the World Wide Web (the “Webship”). Introduced to the Web in 1993, she had become interested in the many possibilities inherent in this new medium of communication. Working with one of her students, Victoria Scott, she designed a Web site called The Dolley Madison Project; its goal was popular and educational rather than scholarly. Shulman and Scott began with an exhibit of a few of Dolley’s letters, including facsimile copies. They next created a section of resources to answer some of the questions they received by email. How, asked one student teacher, can I or my students learn to decipher the handwriting? Shulman and Scott therefore created a link in the resources section to a Web site on eighteenth-century handwriting. Other readers wanted to know how Dolley’s name was really spelled; Shulman wrote an essay answering the question. They later expanded the site to include a glimpse of Dolley Madison in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular culture after they discovered on eBay a wealth of commercial products named after Dolley Madison, ranging from dolls to cigars, from cupcakes to shoes. People continue to send mail to the Dolley Madison Project on an almost weekly basis.
From the beginning, however, Shulman’s major goal was to write a biography of Dolley. She decided early on that this would require her to work through Dolley’s letters as completely and thoroughly as possible. A documentary edition of Dolley’s letters was thus clearly desirable, and she teamed up with David B. Mattern, senior associate editor of The Papers of James Madison, to edit and write The Selected Letters of Dolley Payne Madison. From the beginning of their partnership the goal was to publish in two media. The print edition would include about three hundred letters along with lengthy essays exploring and explaining Dolley’s life. The editors felt that people would prefer to read long essays in a book, and that three hundred letters would be enough to give non-scholars a good snapshot of Dolley’s life. That left the publication of the whole corpus of Dolley correspondence for the digital edition, with a jointly written biography to follow.
Shulman began with the help of the Virginia Center for Digital History and the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Access and Preservation, and of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. She assembled a team of graduate students, while still working on a consulting basis with Mattern. She decided along the way that she wanted to aim not only at a documentary edition meeting scholarly standards, but at a traditional, permanent publication. When the University of Virginia Press agreed to publish the project under its Electronic Imprint, the way was cleared for “the Digital Dolley.”
We have included in this edition every original letter written to or from Dolley Madison that we could find. Their sources include letters collected by the Papers of James Madison; searches conducted by the Dolley Madison Project for letters still held in private hands; letters transcribed by Dolley Madison’s niece, Mary E. E. Cutts; and letters reprinted in other volumes, especially those edited by Lucia B. Cutts and Allen C. Clark. When there are two copies of any letter, one a transcription and the other a receiver’s copy, we have chosen to reproduce the receiver’s copy as the original letter. Our goal has been to make this as inclusive and accurate an edition as possible. We welcome information from any reader in regard to Dolley Madison letters that do not appear here.
Transcriptions have been kept as close to the original text as possible. Archaic and misspelled words are retained without correction, abbreviations are left as they appear, and original punctuation and style (underlining, superscripts, capitalization, dashes, etc.) are followed as closely as possible, with the following exceptions made for readability and clarity of meaning. The date and place of a letter, if the author has included them, are placed at the top of the transcription, regardless of where they appear in the original version. If the letter does not include a complete date, the conjectural version is placed in the letter’s header, with the conjecture included in square brackets. Illegible or missing material, whether from damage to the letters, tears, or unreadable handwriting, are rendered with angle brackets and ellipses, thus: < . . . >. Unclear characters or words for which the transcriber has been able to provide an unequivocal reading are displayed in green; readings that are uncertain are displayed in red. (When a full letter is printed from a Web browser, these readings are rendered using brackets, as "[text]" and "[text?]", respectively.) If there is no punctuation at the end of a paragraph, a period has been included for clarity. Dashes of various lengths have been standardized to an em-dash, except where a very long dash has been employed by the author to indicate the end of a sentence, in which case the dash has been rendered as a period. Following print convention, dashes used to represent missing portions of a name are given as two em-dashes: Mr. S——. In cases where two punctuation marks appear together, only the first has been rendered in the transcription. For example, instead of “I received your last letter. —” the transcription reads: “I received your last letter.” Similarly, a double period underneath a superscript element has been rendered as a single period (for typographical reasons, this period follows the superscript in the online version).
The summaries serve as brief guides for the reader and are not full descriptions of the letters’ contents. The reader should bear in mind that almost every letter contains items of news and gossip with political and/or social significance; these are not necessarily included in the summary. The correspondent is referred to by last name only in each summary, unless the inclusion of a first name is needed for purposes of clarity. Female correspondents writing before they were married are referred to by their maiden name followed by all their married names for purposes of consistency and searchability.
All names, literary references, and places mentioned in each letter have been identified when possible. Each identification is linked to a glossary entry. All names have been standardized in the glossary and in titles for purposes of internal consistency and searchability. For women, the standardized name includes all known names: first, middle, maiden, and married. If a woman married more than once, all of her married names are included in her standardized name. For men, the standardized name includes all known names when possible and appropriate. Enslaved women and men are identified by all known names. Nicknames are included in parentheses following the person’s given name. Standardized names are not used in letter summaries. Signatures are rendered as they appear in the text.
The glossary is composed of the names of people, literary references, and places. We have created as complete a glossary as possible. When the identity of any person mentioned seems only probable or possible, we have noted that in the text. What we have not been able to identify is labeled as unidentified.
Every person referred to in every letter has been identified when possible. Each name (or
indirect reference) appears in the order in which it is mentioned in the letter in the
“crosslinks” section following that letter. The name or reference as it
was written in the letter is on the left, followed by a colon. The standardized name is
displayed on the right and underlined. This in turn is followed by a search icon (![[search]](img/search_icon.png){kind=icon}
) which when clicked on will retrieve every
letter in the edition in which that person appears. A crosslink thus reads, for example:
dearest Eliza: Ellicott,
Eliza Brooke
Dolley Madison knew an astounding number of people, many of whom have largely disappeared from the annals of history. Identifying them is one of the scholarly ambitions of this edition. Beyond that, however, the reader should think of these links as a series of annotations on Dolley Madison’s life and the rough equivalent of footnotes contained in letterpress documentary editions.
We have provided shorter definitions of the places mentioned in these letters. We believe that knowing not only their geographical location, but the political, military, or social significance of a place, renders these letters comprehensible in a way that would not otherwise be possible.
Dolley Madison and her friends frequently shared novels and poetry. They also included literary allusions in their letters. We have identified as many of these as possible.
The sources we used to create the glossary are many and varied. Whenever possible we have followed the tracks of the Papers of James Madison, and are grateful for their research. For well-known people we have relied upon The Dictionary of American Biography, Notable American Women, and The Dictionary of National Biography. We have also consulted such Web sites as www.familysearch.com, www.rootsweb.com, www.cyndislist.com, and other relevant Internet resources. Whenever possible we have consulted printed genealogies, such as William B. Coles, ed., The Coles Family in Virginia (New York, 1989), or Richard Channing Moore Page, Genealogy of the Page Family in Virginia (New York, 1893), and we have traced Virginia genealogy through E. G. Swem, Virginia Historical Index (Baltimore, 2003). We have made consistent use of the articles and notes in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and The Records of the Columbia Historical Society, as well as the pages of The National Intelligencer. We have found a number of supplicants and claimants who brought their suits to Dolley Madison through American State Papers. For the spouses and children of famous people we have consulted the relevant biographies. To identify military officers we have consulted Francis Bernard Heitman, Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army, from its organization, September 29, 1789, to March 2, 1903 (Washington, 1903), and for naval officers, Edward G. Callahan, List of Officers of the Navy of the United States and of the Marine Corps from 1775-1900 (New York, 1901), and William S. Dudley, ed., The Naval War of 1812, A Documentary History (Washington, D.C., 1985-1992). For the history and people of Washington, D.C., we have relied upon Wilhelmus Bogart Bryan, A History of the National Capital (New York, 1914). For Orange County, Virginia, we have found Ann L. Miller, Antebellum Orange (Orange County Historical Society, 1988) indispensable, as well as W.W. Scott, A History of Orange County Virginia (Richmond, 1907). For Russian diplomats in America, and Americans in Russia, we used Norman E. Saul, Distant Friends, the United States and Russia, 1763-1867 (Lawrence, Kansas, 1991), and N. N. Bolkhovitinov, ed, The Beginnings of Russian-American Relations, 1775-1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), and for an overview of diplomacy and the Treaty of Ghent, Fred L. Engelman, The Peace of Christmas Eve (London, 1962). For the early years we have found useful Elaine Forman Crane, ed., The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker (Boston, 1994), 3 vols. For the Washington years we have consulted John C. Van Horne and Lee W. Formwalt, eds., The Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (New Haven,1984), 3 vols. (For obvious reasons, it is not possible to itemize all of our sources here.)
While most of the letters reproduced in this edition were written or received directly by Dolley Madison, there are a few that exist only as transcriptions. We have chosen, nevertheless, to include them as the closest approximation of the originals that we can find. These letters consist of transcriptions made by Dolley Madison’s niece, Mary E. E. Cutts, the daughter of Dolley’s favorite sister, Anna Payne Cutts. Anna’s children were extremely close to their aunt, and Mary E. E. Cutts collected Dolley’s letters with the idea of publishing them herself. She never did so, but her transcriptions of the letters and her memoir of her aunt are available on microfilm at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. Some, but not all, of these letters appear in Lucia B. Cutts, The Memoirs and Letters of Dolly Madison (1886). In transcribing these letters, Mary E. E. Cutts “improved” upon them in the ways that Victorian editors regularly bowdlerized their texts. She corrected their spelling and grammar, she cut out sections, and she occasionally merged two or more separate letters into one. Those we have printed are clearly marked as Cutts’s transcriptions and should be used accordingly.
For each letter in this edition, the archival data format is an XML file tagged according to the encoding scheme developed by the Model Editions Partnership, which in turn is an extension of the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the standard for markup of literary, historical, and other texts. The underlying XML is transformed to XHTML for Web browser viewing via a series of scripts written in the XML Query Language, or XQuery, which run the searches on the letters in the database and format the output. Bibliographic information derived from the TEI header is displayed in the full-letter view for each document, and much of it is also made available as Dublin Core metadata in the head section of the XHTML sent to the browser, where it can be used by software applications.
The editors dedicate this edition to Ralph Ketcham, who as one of the first editors of The Papers of James Madison made the decision to collect the letters of Dolley Payne Madison. Without his efforts this project would not have been possible.
We thank all those whose work contributed to the preparation of this edition. The staff of the Papers of James Madison has given us enormous help. In particular we acknowledge J. C. A. Stagg for his close reading and criticism of our work; David B. Mattern for his constant help, close reading of texts, transcriptions, and enthusiastic support; and Anne Mandeville Colony, Mary A. Hackett, and Angela Kreider. Susan Lyman of Charleston, South Carolina, and Mary Black of Fincastle, Virginia, shared their family papers with us. Thanks also go to Catherine Allgor, Cindy Aron, Mary Gilliam, Cynthia Kierner, Ann Lane, Susan H. Perdue, Herbert Sloan, William G. Thomas III, and Kimberly A. Tryka.
We are indebted to people at numerous research institutions, museums, and libraries for their help: Ryan Hyman, Macculloch Hall Historical Museum; Brian J. Lang, Dumbarton House of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America; J. Stephen Catlett, the Greensboro Historical Museum; Karin Wittenborg and Michael F. Plunkett, Alderman Library, University of Virginia; Wendy Wiener, Octagon House; Mary Ellen Chijoke, Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College; and the staffs of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard University, and of the Manuscript Room of the Library of Congress.
This project is also a creation of the Electronic Imprint of the University of Virginia Press. We thank Mick Gusinde-Duffy for his vision of an electronically published comprehensive documentary edition of an important woman’s correspondence. David Sewell provided critical help in applying best standards to the edition’s XML markup. He has taken the material and improved it at every step. Oludotun Akinola helped with software installation and created a program to automate the conversion of letter transcriptions to XML. Shannon Shiflett was responsible for most of the programming on the search and display interface; Mary Ann Lugo has helped manage the project as well as worked on XML markup, copyediting, and fact-checking.
Finally, this project would not have been possible without the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Access and Preservation, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Nor would it have happened without the collaboration of the Virginia Center for Digital History, whose institutional backing has been critical.