Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Calendar of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 1: In the Library of the American Philosophical Society
Before making the gift to the American Philosophical Society, up wards of one hundred letters, for the most part to Dr. Franklin from members of his family, were separated from the collection and pre sented by Charles P. Fox to Dr. Franklin Bache, a great-grandson of Dr. Franklin, and are now in possession of his son, Dr. Thomas Hewson Bache. Most of these were printed by William Duane in an octavo volume of one hundred and ninety-five pages, published in New York in 1859, by C. Benjamin Richardson.
The papers taken abroad by William Temple Franklin have a less clear history. For some years they were in the possession of a tailor in St. James's Street, London, over whose shop he had lodgings, and in the year 1840 were found by a gentleman who had been a fellow lodger there with him, roughly bundled-up on the top Shelf of a closet in an upper room which William Temple Franklin had occupied. This gentleman, an officer under the British Government, kept these manuscripts for ten or eleven years, according to Henry Stevens, and from time to time offered them in bulk to the British Museum, Lord Palmerston, and to the successive American Ministers at the Court of St. James, from 1840 - 1851. In the latter year they were offered to Hon. Abbott Lawrence, at that time American Minister in London, who, having no authority to purchase them for his Government, re ferred the owner to Henry Stevens as a likely buyer, and he, three days later, purchased the entire collection.
Mr. Stevens repaired and arranged the papers, and added to them a number of Dr. Franklin's printed works and imprints, and finally in 1882 the entire collection was purchased from him by the Govern ment of the United States, at the instigation of the then Secretary of State, the Honorable James G. Blaine, and was deposited in the Library of the Department of State. Later, under the Executive Order of March 9th, 1903, all the manuscripts and papers in this collection, with the exception of the diplomatic records, were transferred to the Library of Congress. A Calendar of the Stevens collection was pre pared under the direction of Mr. Worthington C. Ford, Chief of the Division of Manuscripts, and was published in 1905 by the Library of Congress.
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