Those Farseers Who Robbed the Rats and Flames
“There hath been a great neglect in keeping the records.”
— Virginia General Assembly, 1664.
Why would a people so given to memory keep so little of its own record? The men who later went looking for what survived kept coming back to that question. I backed into it. The country is marking its two hundred and fiftieth year, and I have spent it reading on the colonial South, which is older than the country by more than a century and a half. Reading is generous. I spend more hours running down every title in a bibliography than I do in the books. I was working through the source note in Wesley Frank Craven’s The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1689 when it sent me back to a set of essays I read years ago, on the preservation of Southern history.
The South knew how to remember. Keeping its papers was another story. The letters and muster rolls and statute books, the deeds and dockets and plantation account books, the raw matter a history is made from, mostly lay in basements and rotted. The rest people burned, drowned, sold, and fed to critters.
“Ancient civilization fell by the invasion of barbarians. We breed our own.”
— Dean William R. Inge
The comfortable explanation blames the Yankee. The fire that took the capitol at Baton Rouge in 1862 came in with the Federals. Sherman’s men sacked the statehouse at Milledgeville in 1864 and put Columbia to the torch the next winter, and we have never tired of saying so. True enough. Set the famous fires aside. The rest was domestic, done at leisure, in peacetime, by the people whose history it was, for the price of the paper’s rag content or the want of a dry shelf. We burned our own house.
E. Merton Coulter came back to the question in 1935, in the address “What the South Has Done About Its History.” The South stayed near the frontier far longer than New England and was not rid of its Indian wars until 1840, not to mention the Late Unpleasantness. Its people were rural, spread over long distances and thin on towns, busy clearing land and tilling the soil. “No frontier,” he wrote, “can become much interested in its history, however long or short it may be.” History asks for leisure and a mind at rest, and the section had little of either, whatever the romancing to the contrary. What it had was politics.
A Southerner writing in 1853 found that “when the offices of the federal and state governments were filled, few men of distinguished abilities were left unemployed.” Who, he asked, would “sit down in his quiet study, and endeavor with toil and pain to extract truth out of a mass of contradictory authorities, when the same energies directed in another channel might make him the ruler of a continent, the arbiter of the world?” A Virginian put it more bluntly in 1847: the gentry were so taken up with governing others that “they who are acting history themselves, care not to read the histories of other men.” Without the distraction, “it is conceivable that John C. Calhoun might have written learnedly on the philosophy of history and William Gilmore Simms might have become a Southern Bancroft.”
“Time and Accident are committing daily havoc on the originals deposited in our public offices. The late war has undone the work of centuries in this business.”
— Thomas Jefferson, 1791.
The deeper cause was a habit of mind. A people that wanted “no heroes to worship,” Coulter thought, would hardly trouble to save “the musty records of the past out of which unwanted heroes could be made,” and a planter moving his household and his fortunes west every few years discarded the old letters as “the least desirable impedimenta,” left in the attic of the house he was selling or burned in the yard before he went. The same unconcern ran through the public offices. A document outlived its use, went to an attic or a basement, and rested there until it accumulated into a nuisance, and the nuisance was solved either piecemeal by a janitor feeding his fires or all at once. The record died in a few ordinary ways, and the South was excellent in the ordinary.
What history got written was state history, and there wasn’t much of it. A man took up his own (usually not home) state and no more. Albert Pickett, setting out in 1847 on the first history of Alabama, found that other states had their historical societies and their gathered manuscripts and their transcripts copied out of the archives of Europe, and that he had, in his own words, “none of these aids.” He bought what books and papers he could find, took down what old men remembered, and more than once came near quitting, “sometimes almost resolved to abandon the attempt.” The question he kept running into was the one the whole section would have to answer: “where were the materials from which the fabric of that history could be woven?”
“From the federal government down, our history has been one continual orgy of burning or destroying or losing through neglect.”
— James A. Robertson, 1927.
Virginia was the cradle of the colonial South and the most often burned. Its statehouses and capitols burned again and again for two centuries, at Jamestown and at Williamsburg, the college at William and Mary among them, until the burning of Richmond in 1865 took the records of the old General Court back to about 1619, the Court of Appeals, and the papers of the many county courts that had been carried into the city for safety. Of perhaps a thousand county volumes from the seventeenth century, by one estimate, fewer than a hundred and thirty survive.
The other capitals went in their turn, the Charleston State House in 1788 and the Raleigh capitol in 1831, but the most telling fire was the most careful. Alabama moved its records to Montgomery in 1846 in 113 boxes on 13 wagons, 26,704 pounds of paper hauled overland, and three years later the new capitol burned on a December night. When Florida and Louisiana passed to the United States, much of their Spanish colonial archives had gone to Pensacola and Havana, and the Pensacola fire that took so many of them was thought by later writers to have been no accident.
“By 1778 the Charleston Library Society’s book & periodical collection numbered five thousand volumes. The Charleston fire of 1778 destroyed all but a handful.”— South Carolina Encyclopedia
Some fires were set by the people the records belonged to. The Texas adjutant general’s office went up in 1855 with the military and naval records of the Republic, a fire that tradition says certain citizens lit to be rid of their own criminal records. The courthouses burned by the dozen, around fifty in North Carolina and dozens more in Arkansas, and fire took the printed record too, whole runs of the oldest newspapers and with them the day-to-day life of the section, its elections and prices and the notices of its dead.
Fire was not the only enemy of the records. South Carolina kept its papers better than most and still could not keep the sea out of them. Before the eighteenth century was out a Charleston officer reported his papers found “floating about in three feet of water in his office,” and in 1752 a storm burst the doors of Craven’s bastion and left the surveyor-general’s warrants and plats and books of record in “four and a half feet of salt water,” to be carried to the ovens and dried whenever the weather allowed.
What fire and water spared, motion took. Georgia’s records died of travel, and the dying started in the Revolution. When Savannah fell to the British in 1778 the governor got only a part of the official papers off to Charleston, and the rest, left behind, were destroyed or lost, and with them nearly all the colony’s surviving records from its twenty years under the Trustees and many of the royal governors’ papers besides. After the war the capital itself kept traveling, Augusta to Louisville to Milledgeville and at last, in 1868, to Atlanta, and the record lost a little more at every remove.
North Carolina lost records the other way, by having no fixed seat at all, its offices scattered among private houses from Brunswick to Edenton to New Bern, so that Governor Dobbs could write in 1754 that with no proper place to keep them, whenever a Receiver General or a Surveyor General died, “all papers die with them.” And when the armies came the records moved a last time, hauled out of the capitals ahead of the raids to wherever a wagon could reach, and lost the more for it.
The men who held the records found their own uses for them. The Union troops who took Jackson in 1863 mutilated what they found, scrawling “Remember Grant” and “Remember Sherman” and “Remember U.S.” across the pages. When paper ran short during the war, the record books were torn up to make cartridges. And what the armies burned for warmth, the clerks burned for room, every change of officeholders bringing a housecleaning that swept the old papers into the nearest fire.
What no one burned, no one kept. In Mississippi the inactive records were stacked so high on the third floor of the capitol, in what one official called hopeless confusion, that the weight of them was thought to endanger the justices of the supreme court sitting below, so the state, as the phrase went, sentenced and committed its archives to the penitentiary.
In Arkansas the overflow went into what one writer called the “catacombs” under the old State House, rooms so damp and dismal that fetching up a book was “very much like exhuming a mummy,” and the new capitol got catacombs of its own. Asked where the land office kept its field notes and plats, the man in charge said, “Some in this office, some upstairs, and some in the basement.”
The county records, the ones nearest the lives of the people, fared no better in the courthouses than the state papers did in the capitols, and Georgia’s were a study in it. At Milledgeville someone had cut the back pages out of an eighteenth-century volume of wills. In one county the oldest record book was coming apart for want of a few dollars and a dry shelf; in another the Ordinary, asked for an antebellum school register, owned that he did not rightly know where it was, pointed to an outhouse stacked with what he called innumerable old papers, and offered to mail it north if it turned up. A survey of the state’s own records made one year, and made again fifteen years on, found that any number of the valuable papers carefully listed the first time had entirely disappeared.
“Nowhere in these early years is there manifest any recognition of obligation to preserve historical material.” — J. G. De Roulhac Hamilton, 1927.
Florida cared less for its records than any Southern state. It never lost a capitol; it did not need to. The coal bin and the garret were its archives, and when the rooms gave out, the overflow went into two dry wells on the Capitol grounds. An investigator early in the century found the papers of the secretary of state lately recovered from a coal bin, and others loose in the garret, the floor so thickly covered that he had to walk on them. When he tried to move the oldest state census volumes somewhere safe, the current census office would not take them, pleading no room and calling them worthless.
Even the public documents Florida was bound to keep as a federal depository lay “dumped indiscriminately on the floor” of the Capitol janitor’s workroom, until two men sorted the Florida volumes out of the pile and shelved them, with no certainty they would last. What was saved was saved by chance, like the engrossed ordinance of secession, signatures and all, rescued, as one writer said, as by fire from the trash heap. Years later the historian Dorothy Dodd found the comptroller’s records from before the war, ledgers running back to the 1840s, stacked at a basement door of the Capitol for the trash man to haul off. She asked the janitor whether more were going out, and he said, “I don’t know, Miss; I hasn’t rightly decided yet.”
Tennessee is the case the others are measured against. In the years after the Civil War the noncurrent records of the state were carried down into the west crypt of the capitol basement at Nashville and left there. They lay, in one report, “piled in masses on the stone floors among old paint barrels, ashes, trash of every description, dirt, and grime,” and they got wet, and they rotted, and several cartloads of them were burned for the rot and the stink.
What did not rot was mined for what it would bring. Someone with the run of the basement cut a full set of the governors’ signatures out of the official papers and sold them to an autograph collector, and a later sorting found the records gone through for rare signatures and scarce revenue stamps, the stamps “torn out” so cleanly that too little was left to tell what the paper had been.
A superintendent of the building found three thousand bound ledgers of the old state bank in the same rooms, had the leather stripped from them, and sent a score of wagonloads to the junk dealers for the weight of the linen paper; the covers he burned on the capitol grounds until they proved too slow to burn, and then he had them hauled off to fill a low place in a street in East Nashville. The stereotype plates for the state’s printed supreme court reports, stored in the same basement and ready to run again, a state employee hauled off and sold for scrap; they “went for the few pounds of metal in them.”
Somewhere in that building, dusty in the back of a pigeonhole in an unused closet, a man looking for something else came upon the original manuscript draft of the Tennessee constitution of 1796, with the signatures of every member of the convention that framed it. It had lain there, by his guess, thirty or forty years. Hamer, weighing the states against one another, called Tennessee’s the saddest story he had to tell.
Tennessee was not alone in selling its past by the pound. By 1900 the crowded Arkansas offices were selling their archives to a dealer bound for a paper mill in St. Louis, and Kentucky sold off as waste paper the records it left behind when it moved into a new capitol. What was not pulped was scattered out of the South altogether.
“There was nowhere adequate protection against fire, water, vermin, insects, and even the citizenry.” — J. G. De Roulhac Hamilton, 1944.
Sherman’s men had burned the first collection Charles Colcock Jones Jr. gathered, and after the war the rest went to market, A. A. Smets’s library sold out of the state, Israel Keech Tefft’s autographs auctioned in New York, until a Georgia historian, asked why he would not go home and take up the state’s history, answered: “I can study Georgia history in Wisconsin better than I can in Georgia.”
North Carolina handed its records to its own historians. Around 1800 three men set out to write the state’s history, Hugh Williamson, François-Xavier Martin, and Archibald Murphey, and drew documents out of private hands into keeping no steadier than the hands they took them from; the histories got written, and the papers did not survive the gathering, Williamson’s vanished, Martin’s vanished, and only a part of Murphey’s was ever salvaged. The state’s greatest private collection went the same way, David L. Swain’s, the largest and most valuable ever gathered by one man in the history of the State, given away in pieces while he lived and broken up after he died.
Even the careful states were not proof against plain carelessness: almost the whole of South Carolina’s adjutant general’s records, it is said, were destroyed during the First World War by an army sergeant who wanted the boxes for shipping. David Thomas, who wrote Arkansas’s account, judged the whole business without mercy: few states, if any, he said, have done less.
The public record was at least somebody’s legal charge. The private papers were nobody’s, and they fared worse. Thomas D. Clark, who spent a career fishing manuscripts out of attics and gully heaps, said he could write an eloquent essay on the single sentence “I burned that two years ago.” He told of a fine collection promised him in a Mississippi store attic; he drove the gravel roads at first light, climbed the ladder behind the owner, and heard the man at the top say only, “I’ll be damned.” Someone had cleaned the attic overnight and hauled the papers off and burned them. Fire and rats and leaking roofs, Clark said, were minor enemies beside maiden ladies and efficient housekeepers; the new bride, eager to display her keeping of an old house, wanted to know one thing about the contents of the trunks and chests, which was whether they would burn.
Now and then the destruction was deliberate, and reasoned. A Georgia lawyer had written an account of the state’s early days and died before he could publish it. The manuscript fell to two executors, both lawyers, who could not divide it among the heirs, balked at the cost of printing it, and saw in it nothing but a coming family quarrel. They burned it.
War reached the private papers too. Henry Laurens, who had presided over the Continental Congress, came home to South Carolina to find his own had suffered “plunder and ravage,” scattered and torn and burned by the men who came through.
The fullest single case Hamilton told. Colonel Theodorick Bland, a Virginian of the Revolution, died childless in 1790, and his papers passed to an heir who took no care of them. The house they were stored in burned. A room they were moved to next, in Hamilton’s telling, “from age actually rotted down underneath them.” After that they lay in “the mouldy damps of a cellar,” heaped together, and then in a carriage house, and the first sign that any survived was a letter of George Washington turned up at the bottom of a bucket of eggs. About 1833 Charles Campbell traced them and watched the lady of the house hand down a bundle of Revolutionary letters from “the interstices of the eaves of the porch, where they were nicely pigeon-holed,” and a boy led him to an outhouse and a wooden chest crammed to the lid, a Washington letter near the top and the rest of them “mouse-nibbled, rat-eaten, stained, torn and faded.” Even Campbell, having saved them, set them at last in the drawers of an old bureau three flights up and let them lie.
“Much that could have been saved but yesterday, is already gone forever.”
— James A. Robertson, 1927.
Not all of the loss was the South’s own doing. The Federal armies burned and ransacked as they went, and what they did not burn they often carried off, so that for years afterward the stolen papers kept surfacing at auction. The most fought-over of them was the will of Martha Washington. A Federal colonel quartered in the Fairfax County courthouse found his men feeding the county records into a stove, drew the will out of what was left, and kept it; after his death his daughter sold it to the elder J. P. Morgan. The New York Times judged the colonel within his rights, the Southern states having been too “slack and slovenly” in guarding such relics for the Union men who knew their worth to be called thieves. Fairfax asked for the will back in 1908 and got no reply, the Daughters of the American Revolution asked and were refused, and at last the legislature ordered the governor to demand it and the attorney general to sue in the Supreme Court if Morgan would not give it up. The younger Morgan held out, said the will would not be safe from fire in Fairfax, offered it instead to Mount Vernon or the Library of Congress, and only when the suit was filed sent it home, writing that rather than try the case and reopen the questions of “the late war” he would waive whatever right he had. Martha Washington’s will came home to Fairfax at last, to a courthouse whose other records had long since gone into the stove.
Set the Southern losses beside the Northern ones and the boast of an older New England conscience grows thin. Jeremy Belknap, who founded the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1791, could count the wreckage in his own native state. Fire had taken the Boston courthouse in 1747 and the Harvard College library in 1764, and in neither case did anything of historical value survive. A Stamp Act mob had sacked Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s house in 1765 and scattered the documents he had gathered for his history of the Bay Colony; British troops evacuating Boston in 1776 had ransacked the Court of Common Pleas and thrown its legal papers into the street.
The loss Belknap felt most was the fate of Thomas Prince’s New England Library, the finest collection in the region, left after Prince’s death in the steeple of the Old South Church, neglected and pilfered before British soldiers quartered there and dispersed the greater part of it. “Had we suffered it by the hands of Saracens,” he wrote, “the grief had been less poignant.”
The follies were indifferent to latitude, and to nation. A member of the Wyllys family of Hartford cut up one of the two original charters of the colony of Connecticut to stiffen a bonnet, and only a passerby’s sharp eye saved the remainder; a fire at the New York State Library in 1911 destroyed nine-tenths of the province’s executive minutes; and the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 took three hundred volumes of Spanish archives that the city had refused, out of civic pride, to send to the Library of Congress four years before.
The plainest disgrace was the federal government’s own. Petitioned for more than half a century to provide a national archive, Congress would not, and the records of the United States sat in barns and lofts and rented theaters until the archive building rose between 1931 and 1935. Clerks had carried the government’s papers out of Washington in barrels ahead of the British in 1814, and when the city later filled with soldiers during the Civil War, somebody threw the forgotten barrels into a neighboring marsh to clear the room.
The North had no more virtue in it. The difference was timing, and the shape of the loss. Its fires struck the old settled centers, the courthouse and the college, and a concentrated blow of that kind wakes a town and they the next one. The South bled quiet. Scattered country, moving capitals, frame courthouses, the record going a shelf at a time, a wagonload at a time, a little each year. Half a dozen Northern states had founded historical societies before a single Southern state followed; Tennessee and Virginia organized the first in the South several decades behind Massachusetts.
“Literally millions of pounds of papers have been destroyed either by fire or by being dumped into gullies to prevent erosion...” — Thomas D. Clark, 1953.
It took defeat to make a Southern historical mind. Stripped of its wealth, governed for a season by men it despised, and certain it would be condemned by the pens of the victors unless it wrote its own account, the South discovered all at once that the past was worth keeping.
Denied vindication in the courts and in Congress, the South had, as Benjamin H. Hill put it, “but one resource left us for our defense or vindication. That resource is history,” and he named the kind he meant: “impartial, and unpassioned, un-office-seeking history.” But defensiveness was not the whole of it. Stephen B. Weeks, surveying in 1896 how little the South had done with its own past, put the question to his own people. “In no respect, perhaps, has the South been more silent, more careless of her own duty to herself, than in the matter of history writing and book collecting. We complain that Northern men and foreigners misunderstand and misrepresent us. Who is responsible for this misunderstanding and misrepresentation but ourselves?... when it becomes evident to the outside student that Southern men have done so little to preserve their own history, need we be astonished if he come to the conclusion that we have no history to preserve?”
The work came in three waves that overlapped. The first was the labor of private men and small societies on the model Massachusetts had set, whose founders, as Jeremy Belknap put it, meant “not to lie waiting, like a bed of oysters, for the tide of communication to flow in upon us, but to seek and find.” The Southern societies followed slowly, many died at birth, and in their early years most spent themselves on dinners and addresses rather than the gathering of sources.
The Virginia Historical Society lived on where others failed, though never easily; it moved its collections from building to building, lost its whole endowment when the money went into Confederate bonds, and during the war gave up its rooms to the Confederate War Department. A trustee who went to claim another room for the books found it full of soldiers, and the captain holding it told him they were making Virginia history now, and it mattered more than anything in his old volumes.
The largest, the Southern Historical Society, was in Coulter’s words “born Confederate and it has always remained so.” Dabney Maury and a roomful of generals, Bragg and Beauregard among them, founded it at New Orleans in 1869, moved it to Richmond under Jubal Early, and filled forty-nine volumes of its Papers with the testimony of the losing side. Those men had come together to defend the Confederate record. The keeping of the South’s colonial and antebellum records fell to other hands, and to a later time.
The second wave went to Europe after the colonial records that had never crossed the water. Georgia sent Charles Wallace Howard to London in 1837, and at a cost of seven thousand dollars he brought home twenty-two folio volumes of transcripts, which the secretary of state then lent to a college professor while he wrote a book on temperance, and which burned with the professor’s library in 1891. The loss left Georgia, in Jack’s phrase, “where it did before any effort had been exerted.” So it was done over.
Allen Candler went to London as Howard had, copied the colonial records a second time, and the state printed them at last as the Colonial Records of the State of Georgia. Louisiana owed what it kept of its beginnings to Charles Gayarré. The papers looted from the burning Baton Rouge State House he traced, through Lyman Draper, to the widow of a Federal officer, and brought home in the black boxes Laussat had sealed long before; forgotten again in a Tulane attic, opened at last, they held a mass of “confused, crumpled, charred, water-stained fragments,” until Henry Plauché Dart, the Society’s unpaid archivist, had them read back into the judicial record of the French Conseil Supérieur, reaching to 1717, a whole colony’s wills and marriage contracts and slave sales and murder trials. The Society engaged Pierre Margry, the great archivist of France, to transcribe every Louisiana paper in the Marine from Iberville to the cession, and Grace King called the Margry transcripts the achievement of the century for the historian of Louisiana. Texas did the same patient copying for the Bexar Archives, three hundred thousand folios of the Spanish and Mexican governments, until George Garrison’s seminar turned the heap into a usable record of a border country.
Between the second wave and the third stood a change in the writing of history itself. The defensive, patriotic histories of the postwar years gave way to a trained generation that had learned its method in the European seminar by way of Johns Hopkins under Herbert Baxter Adams and Columbia under William Archibald Dunning. William P. Trent took that method to Sewanee. John Spencer Bassett built collections at Trinity and started a quarterly. George Petrie went home to Auburn and trained the men who came after. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips went after the plantation diaries and account books that no one had thought worth keeping, argued that these unguarded private papers were the truest record of the old economy, and pushed the universities to buy them before they too were lost. The scholars wanted sources, and the want of sources drove the building of the archives.
“Thomas McAdory Owen, who was destined to do more for the preservation of Alabama history than any other man or group of men had ever done.”
— Mitchell B. Garrett, 1928.
That building was the third wave, and the South led the country in it. Thomas McAdory Owen, a young Alabama lawyer with no formal training in history and a lifelong love of it, took over the dying Alabama Historical Society, won a commission to survey the state’s records, and in 1901 carried through the legislature the first independent, state-funded department of archives in the United States, with himself as director.
What Owen built, the South copied, department by department across the region, each charged with guarding the public records, gathering the private ones, and spreading the knowledge of the state’s history. The men who ran the new departments fought poverty the whole way; Arkansas had to set up its commission over the veto of its own governor, Jeff Davis, and then staff it with keepers who served unpaid, on the trust that some later session would make them whole. Mississippi put Dunbar Rowland over its department the year after Alabama’s, and he gave twelve years to the wreck the old Capitol had made of the state’s papers, moving twenty tons of manuscripts into the new building, all of it, as he said, “in a state of decay and confusion from barbaric treatment.” At the University of North Carolina, J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton’s Southern Historical Collection drew in the papers of the whole region.
By the late thirties the federal government had joined at last, on a scale no state could match. The Library of Congress was buying newspapers and personal papers and the foreign transcripts that fill the colonial gaps. The National Archives was taking in the federal record, including the Confederate papers the War Department had been keeping—until a few weeks before Hamer spoke—in a garage in Washington. And three arms of the Works Progress Administration were doing what three centuries had left to chance, the Historical Records Survey going county by county and church by church and putting the state and local archives at last on paper.
“This appears to have been a result of the efforts of a relatively small number of men who had not only an understanding of the desirability of preserving the records of our history but those combinations of personality characteristics which enabled them to secure legislative action.”
— Hamer, 1939.
The men who did the saving were themselves called thieves by some. The real thieves had always been impersonal, the leaking roof and the housecleaning and the junk dealer’s wagon, and against them a handful of underpaid men had at last built the keeping-houses the section had done without for three hundred years.
In 1900 the Public Archives Commission found that “the Southern States have done relatively much less than the others in this direction”; by 1913 Worthington C. Ford could write that “every one of the original Southern States is doing more to make what it has available for history than is my own State of Massachusetts.”
“The lost cannot be recovered, but let us save what remains.”
— Thomas Jefferson, 1791.
Sources
Charles M. Andrews, “On the Preservation of Historical Manuscripts,” William and Mary Quarterly 1, no. 2 (1944).
Thomas D. Clark, “Preservation of Southern Historical Documents,” American Archivist 16, no. 1 (1953).
E. Merton Coulter, “What the South Has Done About Its History,” Journal of Southern History 2, no. 1 (1935).
Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1689 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949).
J. H. Easterby, “The Archives of South Carolina,” Historical Commission of South Carolina (1951).
Mitchell B. Garrett, “The Preservation of Alabama History,” North Carolina Historical Review 5, no. 1 (1928).
R. A. Halley, “The Preservation of Tennessee History,” American Historical Magazine 8, no. 1 (1903).
Philip M. Hamer, “The Preservation of Tennessee History,” North Carolina Historical Review 6, no. 2 (1929).
Philip M. Hamer, “The Records of Southern History,” Journal of Southern History 5, no. 1 (1939).
J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, “The Preservation of North Carolina History,” North Carolina Historical Review 4, no. 1 (1927).
J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, “Three Centuries of Southern Records, 1607–1907,” Journal of Southern History 10, no. 1 (1944).
J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, “History in the South: A Retrospect of Half a Century,” North Carolina Historical Review 31, no. 2 (1954).
Richard B. Harwell, “A Note on the Preservation of Georgia History,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1946).
Theodore H. Jack, “The Preservation of Georgia History,” North Carolina Historical Review 4, no. 3 (1927).
William H. Kilpatrick, “Preserving Southern History Material,” address before the Southern Club of Columbia University (1923).
Grace King, “The Preservation of Louisiana History,” North Carolina Historical Review 5, no. 4 (1928).
Marla R. Miller, ed., Rescued from Oblivion: Historical Cultures in the Early United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020).
Charles W. Ramsdell, “The Preservation of Texas History,” North Carolina Historical Review 6, no. 1 (1929).
James A. Robertson, “The Preservation of Florida History,” North Carolina Historical Review (1927).
Alexander S. Salley, “The Preservation of South Carolina History,” North Carolina Historical Review (1927).
David Y. Thomas, “The Preservation of Arkansas History,” North Carolina Historical Review 5, no. 3 (1928).
Lyon G. Tyler, “Preservation of Virginia History,” North Carolina Historical Review 3, no. 4 (1926).
William H. Weathersby, “The Preservation of Mississippi History,” North Carolina Historical Review 5, no. 2 (1928).
Stephen B. Weeks, “On the Promotion of Historical Studies in the South,” Publications of the Southern History Association 1 (1897).
R. H. Woody, “The Public Records of South Carolina,” American Archivist 2, no. 4 (1939).
* The title joins two phrases from the sources. “Those Farseers” comes from E. Merton Coulter’s account of the rare Southerners who, “despite the apathy and carelessness of the South in general in preserving its records,” possessed “all the zeal of a present-day collector for conserving documents.” “The rats and the flames” comes from Thomas D. Clark’s defense of J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton’s manuscript collecting: “He did not rob anybody but the rats and the flames; he saved from destruction many of their choicest historical records.”