was at pains to avoid in his lifetime. And so the old man discreetly and circumspectly polished the young man's prose. The impulse perhaps was not much different from that of Jared Sparks, an early editor of Washington's papers, who confessed: "On some occasions the writer himself [i.e. Washington], through haste or inadvertence, may have fallen into an awkward use of words, faults of grammar, or inaccuracies of style, and when such occur from this source, I have equally felt bound to correct them."'13

Washington's altered sense of self as the hero of the Revolution is reflected in another aspect of his management of his papers. Before the Revolution, he made copies of letters that he wrote and kept letters that he received only if they concerned his business or military affairs. In 1784, soon after his return to Mount Vernon from the army, he hired a private secretary and began to retain copies even of his personal letters and to preserve all letters written to him. As a consequence, far more of his personal correspondence from the post-Revolutionary years has survived, though the reticence of the great man tends to make these letters less revealing than the unguarded texts of the rare survivals from earlier years.

When the time came for Washington to give up the presidency in 1797 and return home, he had his clerks set aside the papers that the new President would need and packed the rest for their removal to Mount Vernon. During the next, and last, thirty months of his life, Washington gave a great deal of thought to his voluminous "Military, Civil and private papers," including his presidential papers, and talked of putting up a building at Mount Vernon for their accommodation and security. His papers were on his mind even on the day he died. In his account of Washington's death on December 14, 1799, his secretary Tobias Lear wrote: "I returned to his bed side, and took his hand. He said to me, 'I find I am going, my breath can not last long. I believed from the first that the disorder would prove fatal. Do you arrange and record all of my late military letters and papers. Arrange my accounts and settle my books, as you know more about them than any one else, and let Mr. Rawlins finish recording my other letters which he has begun.'" He died six hours later.

What happened to the papers that Washington preserved for posterity, from the time of his death until 1904 when most of them were deposited in the Library of Congress where they

now are, is told in masterful fashion by Dorothy Eaton in the Index to the George Washington Papers (Washington, 1964). For students of history and admirers of Washington, successive editions of Washington's writings appeared, beginning with Jared Sparks's in the 1830s and extending through that of John C. Fitzpatrick in the 1930s. In the late 1960s, at the urging of a group of historians, the University of Virginia decided to sponsor a modern edition of Washington's papers on the scale of the editions under way of the papers of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin. After the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association agreed to join the university in sponsoring the project and both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications Commission gave the undertaking their blessing and promised their support, editorial offices were opened in Charlottesville in 1969 under the direction of Donald Jackson, editor, and Dorothy Twohig, associate editor. Initial efforts were directed largely to the search for letters to and from Washington and to acquiring and cataloguing photocopies of manuscripts. A worldwide search, during which staff members spent months working in hundreds of manuscript collections in such places as the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania historical societies in addition to the National Archives and the Library of Congress, uncovered over 100,000 documents from three hundred repositories in the United States and another seventy abroad. Al

though the process was essentially complete before the first two volumes of Washington's Diaries were published late in 1976, a steady trickle of copies of Washington documents, five or six a month, including an occasional hitherto unknown autograph letter of Washington's, still come in from owners of manuscripts, particularly from dealers and collectors.

The editing with extensive annotation of the six-volume edition of The Diaries of George Washington (Charlottesville, 1976-79) and of The Journal of the Proceedings of the President, 1793-1797 (1981) helped prepare the editors of The Papers of George Washington for the daunting task of dealing with Washington's massive correspondence. As it happens, Washington's life, and hence his papers, falls into several distinct segments. These different segments also happened to fit neatly the particular interests and competence of the several historians who were to edit the letters and other papers. It seemed clear that the people awaiting publication of the papers would be as well, or better, served if the editors got on with the publishing of the papers of General Washington and President Washington at the same time they were editing and publishing the papers of Colonel Washington and Squire Washington, and so the decision was made to publish the Papers in several chronological series simultaneously, with a single editor having primary responsibility for the volumes in each series.

The first two volumes of the Colonial Series, a series that will cover in ten volumes the years before Washington's departure for Boston in 1775 at the age of forty-three, appeared in 1982. Four more volumes in the series have since been published, and another two will be out in 1989, leaving the final two volumes covering the years 1771-75 still to be done. Three volumes of the Revolutionary War Series and three volumes of the Presidential Series are also now in print. Present plans call for the issuing of a preliminary edition on a laser disk of the papers that will appear in the eight-volume Confederation Series

The project to publish The Papers of George

Washington was begun in 1969 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

(1783-88) before the first two volumes of that series will be ready for the printer early in 1990. Every volume of the Papers includes an index, and there will be a cumulative index for each series.

The sheer mass of Washington's papers as commander in chief-more than one half of the 100,000 or so documents catalogued in the editorial offices of the Papers are dated between 1775 and 1783 make the editing of the Revolutionary War Series particularly complex; but of the four chronological series, it is the Presidential Series that presents the most intriguing problems. No editor has yet dealt with the full corpus of the presidential papers of a man who held office before the twentieth century, before the typewriter, carbon paper, and the telephone began to transform recordkeeping. The executive branch of government generated tens of thousands of documents between 1789 and 1797, and even with the strictest definition of what constitutes a Washington document, it will take some doing to print, or otherwise take note of, every one of these-i.e., to honor the commitment to produce a comprehensive edition of the man's papers-without unduly straining the resources of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Virginia to say nothing of the patience of fellow historians. For instance, letters written to Washington in 1788 and 1789 from men and women seeking offices for themselves or others would fill most of the papers in the first two volumes of the Presidential Series. Yet, not to print letters of application would be to

ignore what was one of Washington's main concerns as he went about the task of erecting a new government. Taken together, the letters show in the year that the new government of the United States was formed how an extraordinarily wide range of people, high and low, men and women, young and old, viewed themselves, their recent Revolution, their new federal republic, and how they saw Washington himself. There is nothing else anywhere quite like this outpouring of personal aspirations at the moment of the nation's founding. The key letter relating to each application, usually the applicant's letter, is being printed in the Papers, with related letters, such as letters of recommendation or acknowledgement, appearing in whole or in part, in footnotes. Even with such spacesaving devices, it will be difficult to get into each volume of six hundred pages more than three or four months of the Revolutionary War or presidential papers.

When the editor of a person's papers talks of his project, he first speaks of the person, then of the person's papers, and ends talking about himself. He loses his audience, even when with fellow editors, when he gets to his usual plaint that scholars out there do not attach proper value to the work he is doing. It is the documentary editor's way of asking in moments of doubt for assurance that what he does is worth the doing. As for the editors of George Washington's papers, they may take what comfort they can in the knowledge that the father of their country would think their undertaking worthwhile. ☐

NOTES

1989 by W. W. Abbot

W. W. Abbot, who is a former editor of the Journal of Southern History and the William and Mary Quarterly, is the James Madison Professor of History and the editor of the Papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia.

'Unless otherwise noted, all of the letters to or from Washington that are cited or quoted are in the Washington Papers in the Library of Congress.

2The quoted words are from Washington's letter to David Humphreys, Dec. 26, 1786, owned by Jagellion University, Cracow, Poland.

3Lund Washington wrote on Oct. 29, 1775, to General Washington about his wife's packing his papers. See also Washington to Lund Washington, Dec. 10-17, 1776.

*See particularly Washington to the president of Congress, Aug. 13, 18, Dec. 24, 1776, and to Caleb Gibbs, May 3, 1777. See also Introduction, Index to the George Washington Papers (1964).

5Washington to William Gordon, Oct. 23, 1782.

"Varick to Washington, July 19, 1781.

"Varick, for instance, wrote Washington five times in February 1782.

Varick to Washington, Aug. 15, 22, 1783. "See, for instance, Washington to Varick, Oct. 2, 1783. 10 Varick to Washington, Nov. 18, 1783.

11 Washington to Samuel Hogdon, Dec. 13, 1783; Washington to Varick, Jan. 1, 1784.

12 For a full description of these letter books and for the text with corrections of the letter books that Washington kept during the Braddock campaign of 1755, see Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series (1983), 1:236–364. For the text of all of Washington's French and Indian War letter books, see volumes 1 through 6 of the Colonial Series of The Papers of George Washington. 13Jared Sparks, The Writings of George Washington, 2 vols. (1833).

14W. K. Bixby, Letters and Recollections of George Washington (1906), p. 133.