The sky was brilliantly illumined by the different conflagrations; and a dark red light was thrown upon the road, sufficient to permit each man to view distinctly his comrade’s face … I do not recollect to have witnessed, at any period of my life, a scene more striking or more sublime.1
GEORGE GLEIG, A young Scotsman serving in the British army, watched Washington burn in 1814 with mixed feelings. He had travelled across the Atlantic as part of an expeditionary force led by Admiral Cockburn and General Ross to wage war against the United States and took part in the most devastating attack the city had ever seen. Gleig was a highly intelligent observer and although he was undoubtedly a biased witness of the British expedition to America of 1812–14 he was also troubled by what he saw.
When the British attacked Washington they set fire to the White House (known then as the Presidential Mansion) and the Capitol, in which the Library of Congress was situated. The Capitol had stood proudly on the hill, ‘tastefully worked and highly polished’ with ‘numerous windows’, a ‘handsome spiral hanging staircase’ and apartments, ‘furnished as a public library, the two larger being well stocked with valuable books, principally in modern languages, and the others filled with archives, national statutes, acts of legislature &c. and used as the private rooms of the librarians’. A detectable note of discomfort is evident in Gleig’s description: ‘a noble library, several printing offices, and all the national archives were likewise committed to the flames, which though no doubt the property of government, might better have been spared.’2
The burning of Washington was indeed a heavy blow for the United States. The impact would be felt for generations to come. The British were so reviled for their act of barbarity that it would become a useful myth to help bind the American nation together through succeeding generations – proof that their ability to overcome adversity and to rebuild their capital city and its government showed resilience, resourcefulness and determination to succeed.
In 1814 the Library of Congress was still new. Having beaten the British in the War of Independence, the new government was based around a Congress of two houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The first Congress (1789–91) considered where to locate their capital city and their government, and it was three of the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, who agreed on a site along the Potomac river favoured by George Washington himself. The original location of what is now Washington, DC was a mixture of forest and farmland, remote from the great American cities like Boston, Philadelphia and New York. Siting government at a distance from the major urban centres provided symbolic intent to limit government’s influence on the emerging nation, a political trope that continues to retain its place at the heart of American politics today.
As the government began to develop and grow, so too did its need for access to information and knowledge. The politicians and government officials were mostly well-educated men, but as early as 1783 proposals were made in Congress to import books from Europe. James Madison, today regarded as the ‘Father of the American Constitution’, chaired a congressional committee that recommended the purchase of works by ‘such authors on the law of nations, treaties, negotiations, &c, as would render the proceedings conformable to propriety’, as well as ‘every book & tract which related to American antiquities and the affairs of the United States’.3 This was not for pure historical interest – the motivation was to provide evidence to help defend against the anticipated claims of European powers over American territorial possessions.4
In 1800, a bill was passed that allowed congressional funds to be used for the purchasing of books. Madison’s committee’s list of over three hundred titles included the great Enlightenment ‘bible’, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke’s edition of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie Méthodologique (1782–1832) in 192 volumes, and works by legal theorists such as Hugo Grotius and Edward Coke, but especially those of the English jurist William Blackstone, such as his Commentaries on the Laws of England published in four volumes (1765–9) and The Great Charter (1759). Political theorists such as John Locke and Montesquieu were represented, as was the economist Adam Smith’s massively influential treatise An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Its roll call of eighteenth-century thinkers also included Edward Gibbon and David Hume, but there were also more practical purchases listed such as maps.5
Despite such a compelling list of titles, Congress did not at first grant the committee the funds to buy the books. This was the earliest occurrence of what would become a familiar problem: the library depended on Congress for funds but Congress did not always see the library as a priority.
Following the War of Independence, the United States placed great importance on education, and it grew as a nation with a thriving trade in books, much of which was linked to Britain and other European printing centres. Early America possessed a large number of commercial circulating libraries, and non-commercial social and community libraries serving the desire for news and knowledge for those who could not afford to buy books.6 Private libraries remained the preserve of the middle and upper classes, but the rise of circulating libraries, subscription libraries and libraries in places such as coffee houses was making knowledge more accessible to a wider audience, a process that would expand greatly through the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. The early congressmen were mostly from affluent backgrounds, many well educated, and most had their own private libraries, perhaps a reason why, initially, they did not see the need for a central congressional library.
In 1794 funds were allocated to Congress for the purchase of William Blackstone’s Commentaries and Emerich de Vattel’s Law of Nature and Nations for use by the Senate, but these were notable exceptions – it wasn’t until 1800, when Congress was relocated to Washington and Madison’s bill passed, that funds were allocated to the library. Even then, the bill that President John Adams signed in that year, ‘Making further provision for the removal and accommodation of the Government of the United States’, concerned itself more with issues of street paving and the housing of the president than it did with the library. What funds it did allow for the library were for:
the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress at the said city of Washington, and for fitting up a suitable apartment for containing them, and for placing them therein the sum of five thousand dollars shall be, and hereby is appropriated … the said purchase shall be made … pursuant to … such catalogue as shall be furnished, by a joint committee of both Houses of Congress to be appointed for that purpose; and that the said books shall be placed in one suitable apartment in the capitol in the said city, for the use of both Houses of Congress and the Members thereof, according to such regulations as the Committee aforesaid shall devise and establish.7
The priorities indicated here are important, as the first instinct of Congress was that their information needs would be limited to immediate functional purposes – essentially to cover legal and governmental issues. Making provision for their own operational effectiveness was particularly important because unlike New York and Philadelphia there was no other library in Washington.
The library’s collections were not vast but grew rapidly. The first printed catalogue was issued in 1802 with 243 books on the list, and it needed a supplement the following year. This first library had basic legal and governmental works, mostly in English, including the British Statutes at Large, Journal of the House of Commons and the fourteen-volume set of State Trials.8 Further purchases were made from London booksellers and publishers.9 The first Librarian of Congress, Patrick Magruder, even placed advertisements in newspapers suggesting authors and publishers should gift books, as their presence in the library would advertise them to the most prominent men in the land. One notice in the National Intelligencer boasted: ‘We observe with pleasure that authors and editors of books, maps, and charts begin to find that, by placing a copy of their works on the shelves of this institution they do more to diffuse a knowledge of them than is generally accomplished by catalogues and advertisements.’10
By 1812 the catalogue listed over three thousand volumes of books and maps, needing 101 pages to describe them all.11 In these early years of independence the Library of Congress – and its rapidly growing collection of volumes covering a wide range of subject matter – symbolised a nation forging its identity. Knowledge, as the old adage goes, is power, and although the library’s collections were still very small they were growing in tandem with the national government they were designed to serve.
It is therefore unsurprising that the Library of Congress should have been one of the British army’s key targets when they reached Washington. The war had already brought great destruction. This was not even the first library destroyed. In the American army’s attack on the British city of York (modern Toronto) in April 1813, one of the first encounters between the two armies, they had burned the library in the legislative buildings.12
In 1813, Patrick Magruder fell ill and was forced to take a prolonged period of absence from the library. His brother George was appointed acting clerk. On 19 August, the British arrived. As news of their advance became known, arrangements began to be made for evacuation.13 George Magruder ordered that the library should not be evacuated until the clerks of the War Department were seen to pack up their administrative records. He didn’t realise that most of the government departments had already begun to pack up and had sequestered wagons to help them take key items to the safety of the countryside.
Although many men serving in the government were also volunteers in the militia defending the city, a handful remained behind, including Samuel Burch, one of the assistant clerks in the library, and J. T. Frost, the assistant librarian, who had stayed behind for the purposes of opening and airing the books (important in the very humid atmosphere of Washington in the summer). On the afternoon of the 21st, Burch was allowed to leave his post in the militia and return to the library. On the 22nd he and Frost were finally informed that the clerks of the War Department had begun to move out of Washington.
At last the decision was made – but it was too late. The other departments had commandeered all the remaining wagons in the city and it took Burch hours to find one in a village outside Washington. He came back with a cart and six oxen and he and Frost loaded some books and documents onto it during what remained of the 22nd, and on the morning of the 23rd they took it to a place of safety, some nine miles out of the city. Other small gestures were also made – for example, Elias Caldwell, the clerk of the Supreme Court, moved some of the court volumes to his home.14
British forces entered Washington on 24 August. Things rapidly went downhill from there. General Ross initially sent in a flag of truce with terms but then he was fired on and his horse killed. George Gleig wrote a vivid description of what happened next. It is worth noting however that the accusation of firing while under truce is a commonly used excuse in other episodes of library destruction:
All thoughts of accommodation were instantly laid aside; the troops advanced forthwith into the town, and having first put to sword all who were found in the house from which the shots were fired, and reduced it to ashes, they proceeded, without a moment’s delay to burn and destroy everything in the most distant degree connected with government. In this general devastation were included the Senate-house, the President’s palace, and extensive dock-yard and arsenal, barracks for two or three thousand men, several large storehouses filled with naval and military stores, some hundreds of cannon of different descriptions, and nearly twenty thousand stand of small arms.15
The official historian of the Library of Congress Jane Aikin tells us that British troops piled books and other flammable materials that could be found inside the building and set fire to it. Although we don’t know the exact details of what happened, the legend was taking shape. An account of the fire in Harpers New Monthly Magazine, much later in the nineteenth century, firmly attributed the start of the fire to British soldiers using books from the library.16
The devastation hampered the effective operation of the American government for a considerable time (although not for long enough to stop their army from winning a decisive victory at Baltimore in the battle for Fort McHenry). While the library was not targeted alone, its location within the central building of the US government, made it ideal as a target and as a source of combustible material to continue the fire. And yet, it seems at least one member of the British forces recognised the symbolic power of the library’s destruction. Amid the destruction of the centre of Washington, which Gleig reports as nothing but ‘heaps of smoking ruins’, a book was taken as a memento by the leader of the conquering army.17 A copy of An Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of the U.S. for the Year 1810 (Washington: A & G Way, Printers, 1812), with a leather title label on the front cover and tooled with the inscription ‘President of the U. States’, was presented to the Library of Congress by the legendary book dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach on 6 January 1940. The book had been given by Rear Admiral George Cockburn to his brother, and was clearly a souvenir. Whether Cockburn himself picked it up, or whether a British soldier found the book, is not known; of all the mementos to bring back the book spoke volumes. ‘By all the customs of war’, wrote George Gleig, ‘whatever public property may chance to be in a captured town, becomes, confessedly, the just spoil of the conqueror.’18
In the days following the fire it became clear that the devastation was complete – the stone edifice survived but inside all was gone. The British had struck a blow to the fledgling government, right at its heart. The members of Congress were unharmed, but with their building burned, and the information they relied on to function destroyed, their political status needed to be rebuilt fast.
Out of the ashes of the first Library of Congress, a new and better library was to emerge. The chief agent for this renewal had been one of the intellectual architects of the American Revolution and the foundation of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. By 1814 the former president was living in semi-retirement in Monticello, Virginia, a hundred miles to the south-west of Washington. Jefferson’s personal book collection, arguably the most sophisticated and extensive private library in America at the time, had been built up over a lifetime of serious reading. Jefferson knew what it was like to lose a library to a fire: his first library of legal books had been burned in 1770, and he had to rebuild his collection again. A few weeks after the burning of Washington, Jefferson wrote a carefully crafted letter to Samuel Harrison Smith, the editor of the leading Republican newspaper based in the city, the National Intelligencer:
Dear Sir,
I learn from the newspapers that the vandalism of our enemy has triumphed at Washington over science as well as the arts, by the destruction of the public library … Of this transaction … the world will entertain but one sentiment. They will see a nation suddenly withdrawn from a great war, full armed and full handed, taking advantage of another whom they had recently forced into it, unarmed and unprepared, to indulge themselves in acts of barbarism which do not belong to a civilised age …
I presume it will be among the early objects of Congress to recommence their collection. This will be difficult while the war continues and intercourse with Europe is attended with so much risk. You know my collection, its condition and extent. I have been fifty years making it, and have spared no pains, opportunity or expense to make it what it is … so that the collection, which I suppose is of between nine and ten thousand volumes, while it includes what is chiefly valuable in science and literature generally, extends more particularly to whatever belongs to the American statesman. In the parliamentary and diplomatic branches it is particularly full. It is long since I have been sensible it ought not to continue private property, and had provided that at my death, Congress should have the refusal of it at their own price. The loss they have now incurred, makes the present the proper moment for their accommodation, without regard to the small remnant of time and the barren use of my enjoying it. I ask of your friendship, therefore, to make for me the tender of it to the Library Committee of Congress …19
A lengthy period of discussion and argument over the value of Jefferson’s offer ensued, with intense debate on the relative merits of spending large sums of money on replacing the lost library, at a time when national resources were scarce and funds could be better spent for military purposes. The tenor of these arguments would be repeated many times in the library’s history in succeeding centuries.
Jefferson’s offer to supply ‘the American statesman’ with all that he needed (and these politicians were of course all male at the time) was fortuitous as it would have taken a long time and careful curation to either rebuild the original 3,000-volume collection or emulate Jefferson’s 6,000 to 7,000-volume personal library. Jefferson was therefore offering a shortcut to a major library collection, one that had the added value of having been collected by one of the people that had built the governmental edifice of the new nation, using some of the very books now on offer as intellectual fuel for the project.
Jefferson’s offer was not entirely altruistic, as he had considerable debts that he needed to clear. He also made it plain that he was supporting his countrymen in their hour of need while at the same time making sure his collection was sold en bloc, avoiding the ‘cherry-picking’ that many book collectors fear will happen when their collections are sold. ‘I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer,’ he wrote to Smith, making it quite clear that it was an all or nothing deal.20
In October 1814 Congress began to consider in earnest the business of replacing their library and established a joint committee who sought an independent valuation to help them make an informed decision on Jefferson’s proposal. They, and in November the Senate, proposed a bill ‘to authorise the purchase of the library of Thomas Jefferson, late President of the United States’, and in December this bill was passed.21
The House of Representatives, however, postponed their deliberations until January and the debates were lengthy and rancorous. The federalists were concerned that the collection betrayed Jefferson’s atheistic and immoral tendencies. One of their politicians felt that the acquisition would ‘bankrupt the Treasury, beggar the people, and disgrace the nation’. Other opposition related to the works of Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Voltaire, whose presence revealed Jefferson’s objectionable ‘atheism, immorality, effete intellectualism and infatuation with France’.22 American newspapers covering these debates joined in on both sides, with the American Register predicting that ‘the next generation will … blush at the objections made in Congress to the purchase of Mr Jefferson’s library.’23
Those in favour of the acquisition saw it as an opportunity to begin a ‘great national library’. They did not, perhaps, use this language in the sense that we might today understand the meaning of the term, but Jefferson’s collection had the breadth and depth to begin that process even if, in the end, not all of his library was acquired. Madison signed the bill authorising the purchase on 30 January 1815, the House having passed it with a majority of just ten. The deal struck with Jefferson and passed in Washington involved the purchase of 6,487 books for the sum of $23,950.24 At a stroke the Library of Congress became one of the largest and most sophisticated institutional libraries in North America, with the exception of Harvard College Library, which had between 30,000 and 40,000 volumes by 1829.25 The Library of Congress more than doubled the size that it was before the fire and dramatically increased the range of subjects covered, acquiring the output of Enlightenment publishers from across Europe that were barely present in the 1812 catalogue.
Despite this wonderful injection of books, the Library of Congress remained small by comparison to other great libraries. The Library of Trinity College Dublin held over 50,000 books by 1802. Cambridge University Library held over 47,000 volumes following the accession of Bishop Moore’s Library in 1715, and by 1814 it was considerably larger, perhaps approaching 90,000. Meanwhile, the catalogue of printed books in the British Museum (now the national library in all but name) was published in seven volumes between 1813 and 1819, listing about 110,000 volumes, in addition to manuscripts, maps and other materials, making it more than fifteen times the size of the Library of Congress.26
With the Jeffersonian library secured, the next challenge for Congress was to find a suitable home for the collection. At first, Congress, and the library, were housed in Blodget’s Hotel while the original Capitol building was repaired and renovated. The books arrived from Monticello in May 1815; two months later they were unpacked and arranged according to a pared-down version of Jefferson’s own classification scheme, based on systems for organising knowledge developed by the English Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon and the French Enlightenment thinker d’Alembert.27
In March 1815, Madison appointed George Watterston as the first true Librarian of Congress. George Watterston was a writer, published poet, newspaper editor and trained lawyer. The idea of the collection being the nucleus of a ‘national library’ was one that really seems to have fired Watterston’s imagination and he sent a notice to the National Intelligencer asking writers, artists and engravers to deposit their works. The paper thought that ‘the Congressional or National Library of the United States [should] become the great repository of the literature of the world’, and that it was the government’s responsibility to provide ‘a great reservoir of instruction … for the use of the public as well as its own members’. Other contemporary articles at the time echoed these sentiments. Although they don’t compare America with other nations, the implication is clear, that America needed a national library to gather all the world’s useful knowledge. The shadow of Alexandria was to be felt again in nineteenth-century America.
The first catalogue was published in the autumn of 1815, describing itself as the Catalogue of the Library of the United States. The joint committee increased the salary of the librarian and extended those able to use the library to the staff of the Attorney General and the diplomatic corps.28 In 1817 there was the first of a series of attempts to provide the library with the copies deposited for copyright with the Secretary of State, and in the same year calls began to be made for a separate building to be constructed to house the library. These calls, however, were to remain unheeded for some time.
The process of deciding whether to acquire Jefferson’s library raised the point that the congressional library was de facto the core of a national library, and made the link that the library of government should be the hub of a broader collection of more than purely utilitarian value for politicians and the bureaucrats that surrounded them. That said, the impetus that the fire provided for the idea of the national library of the United States was tediously slow to build and would in fact require another fire, this time accidental, to really gather momentum.
On Christmas Eve 1851 a fire took hold in a chimney of the library and more than half of the library’s 55,000 books were destroyed, including most of the Jeffersonian library. The rebuilding of the library had to wait until the end of the American Civil War, and for the appointment of Ainsworth Rand Spofford as the sixth librarian of Congress by President Lincoln. Spofford saw clearly the trajectory for the library to become the national library, and was able to articulate his vision, increasing congressional funds for acquisitions, organising the transfer of the Library of the Smithsonian Institution, and most importantly finally securing the library as the place for the legal deposit of US publications in the Copyright Act of 1870.29
The destruction of the library by the British in 1814 was the act of one state against another. It was a deliberate political act designed to weaken the centre of politics and government. In that sense the episode has echoes of some of the attacks on knowledge in the ancient world. The response to the destruction of the Library of Congress proved as transformational to its history as the destruction of Oxford’s library had been in the 1550s. The new Library of Congress would not just be larger than the one that had been destroyed, it would be a resource that better suited a country forged on modern ideas of what it meant to be a democratic, enlightened nation. It would take time to become established, but when it did it became a global leader in the preservation of knowledge, and helped to fuel with information and ideas the most powerful nation on earth.