Quick Archive Trip

In mid-May I did a one day trip to the Manuscript Reading Room of the Library of Congress. I was there to search for one thing. I wanted to see if William Marcy wrote about the Dred Scott decision in his personal papers. My hunch was that he did not. Marcy died in July 1857, a few months after the Supreme Court issued its opinion in the case. Still, there were a lot of papers for those few months, and so I wanted to try.

What I found was interesting, but nothing about the case. He received letters from his son in March 1857 who was abroad in Paris, and who referred to the city as “the most enchanting place in the world.” In his diary we found Marcy’s reading list for 1850 with some interesting titles on it. On the 19th he remarked. “read in Burke’s French Revolution. For imagery & beauty of language incomparable.”

Given that this little blog is about my reading habits, I thought I’d take the chance to share the former Secretary of State’s. You can see the full list in the photo attached. It included works by Shakespeare, Bacon, Pope, and Tacitus.