Feature

Patience and Fortitude

After more than eighty years, the Clements Library reunited the Henry Strachey Papers
Summer 2011 By J. Kevin Graffagnino
Courtesy of UMI’s Clements Library.

Courtesy of UMI’s Clements Library.

Courtesy of UMI’s Clements Library.
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After more than eighty years, the Clements Library reunited the Henry Strachey Papers
Feature
J. Kevin Graffagnino
Courtesy of UMI’s Clements Library.

Sometimes good things really do come to those who wait—and to those who never give up the fight. That happened on October 15, 2010, when the William L. Clements Library of the University of Michigan purchased the Henry Strachey Papers at a Sotheby’s auction. The Clements’ acquisition closed the circle on a collecting hunt that began in the 1920s, and it proved again that institutional patience and persistence can reap big rewards for research libraries and the scholars who use them. 

The story of the Henry Strachey Papers begins in the late 1920s, when Randolph G. Adams, first director of the Clements, went to England on a collecting trip. The Clements, established at U-M in 1923 by Michigan industrialist William L. Clements, specialized in primary sources on American history from Columbus through the eighteenth century, with a strong emphasis on the era of the American Revolution. Clements and Adams found England a fertile hunting ground for acquisitions, buying thousands of printed items from London dealer Henry N. Stevens and negotiating successfully with the descendants of such key British participants in 1760s–80s American affairs as General Thomas Gage, Sir Henry Clinton, George Germain, and the second Earl of Shelburne to acquire their extensive archives. Working together, applying equal amounts of determination, luck, and money, in less than a decade the founder and director raised the Clements from an outstanding Americana library to the collection for the study of Revolutionary America. Adams’ attempt to secure the Strachey manuscripts was part of that work. 

left: Admiral Richard Howe’s letter to George Washington, written on board the HMS Eagle off Staten Island on July 13, 1776. This letter is part of the Clements Library’s William and Richard Howe Papers, which was acquired from Christie’s in 1958, long before it was complemented by the Strachey Papers. Gift of the Clements Library Associates. right: Henry Strachey’s appointment as secretary to the Commissioners for Restoring Peace to America, dated May 1776 and signed by King George III.

Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

Born to a respectable but impoverished Somerset County family in 1736, Henry Strachey began his career as a clerk in the War Office. He found an influential patron while working in India as Lord Clive’s personal secretary in the mid 1760s and served in Parliament on his return to England. In 1776 Strachey became secretary to the Commission for Restoring Peace to America and traveled to America to work with Admiral Richard Howe, head of the commission, and his brother, General Sir William Howe. The peace commissioners failed to bring the colonies back into the British fold, but in 1782 Strachey accepted appointment as secretary and assistant to the King’s commissioners sent to Paris to negotiate the Treaty of Paris that ended the war. Strachey kept voluminous notes of his experiences, wrote long letters home to his wife describing what he saw and who he met, and created a marvelous body of unique source material on England’s view of the creation of the United States. When Adams learned that Strachey’s descendants had kept his papers intact, adding them to the Clements Library’s holdings became a priority. Adams examined the papers, obtained Clements’ approval for buying them, and made his case to the Strachey family. Unfortunately, the arguments, blandishments, and financial offers that worked well before failed with the Stracheys, and Adams returned home to mourn the one that got away. If it is true that collectors and curators only regret the things we fail to buy, missing out on the Strachey papers was a major regret in Adams’ distinguished career.

Clements passed away in 1934 and Adams died in 1951, but the Clements Library kept the Strachey manuscripts in sight. In 1982, more than five decades after Adams’ encounter with one generation of Strachey heirs, their successors split the papers and put half of them up for sale at Sotheby’s. The Clements bought the Strachey lot for what in 2011 seems like the paltry sum of $7,000. The collection consisted of one linear foot of manuscripts, including letters, financial records, legal documents, and two volumes of 1773 reports from the governors of the American colonies to the Earl of Dartmouth. Among the highlights were twenty-nine letters from Henry in America to his wife Jane in England that provide extensive details of his experiences here from 1776 to 1778. The colonial reports to the Earl of Dartmouth provided detailed answers to twenty-two questions about conditions in colonies from Nova Scotia to the Leeward Islands. Complementing the Clements’ other Revolution-era manuscripts and printed materials as they did, the Strachey papers found the perfect historical context at the Clements Library.

But there was more to come. In 1988 the Strachey family consigned the second half of Henry’s papers to Sotheby’s. This time the buyer was San Diego’s Copley Press, which paid $283,000 to add the manuscripts to the library that housed the treasures of newspaper magnate and Americana collector James S. Copley. Those Strachey papers remained in San Diego until last year, when Sotheby’s of New York began a series of Copley auctions they described as “the greatest sale of historical American manuscripts and letters since the five Sang Sales of 1978–81.” The series generated a good deal of publicity, with much of the media attention zeroing in on the Strachey manuscripts as the star of the Copley materials. An article in the March 23, 2010, New York Times highlighted the Strachey papers and Sotheby’s plans to offer the collection as a single lot. The Times article and the thirty-two-page illustrated catalogue that Sotheby’s published for the October  auction alerted the book-collecting and research-library world to the Strachey collection, effectively demolishing any chance that would-be buyers like the Clements could secure them under the radar.

An undated portrait of Henry Strachey, who took part in the peace negotiations that resulted in the Treaty of Paris.

Photos Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

At first the Clements had no hope of pursuing the Strachey papers, especially after Sotheby’s published a pre-sale estimate of $700,000–1,200,000, a range between two and four times the library’s annual acquisitions budget. We resigned ourselves to buying interesting individual lots in the other Copley sales and watching the Strachey lot go to a collector, dealer, or institution with deeper pockets. Just before the first Copley auction in April, however, a Clements donor came forward with a generous pledge of $150,000 towards Clements purchases at the Copley series, provided that the Clements raise enough from other supporters to match his gift. The members of the Clements Library Associates, our friends group, rallied to the cause with checks ranging from $25 to $50,000, and we raised the matching funds. The resulting $300,000 left us well short of making a run at the Strachey lot, but with the help of the U-M administration, more help from the Associates, a final scraping of every Clements Library fiscal barrel, and a generous “spend this money last” $100,000 pledge from a New York foundation, we boosted the war chest to $800,000, enough to stay in the game for a few innings at least. Still thinking of ways I could spend more if necessary (would my staff accept a 35 percent reduction in salaries for the rest of the fiscal year if I asked nicely?), I headed off to New York.  

 The Henry Strachey papers span 1775–1783 and contain approximately 480 pages of archival material, now housed at the University of Michigan’s Clements Library.

Photos Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

In the end, the auction was anticlimactic. The experts I consulted—Clarence Wolf of G. S. MacManus in Philadelphia, W. Graham Arader in New York, and William Reese in New Haven—all predicted that the lot would sell below estimate. “The other history libraries will stay away because they know you have the other half of the collection,” one told me, “and there’s no big-name autograph pizzazz for collectors or break-up value for dealers. This is a great scholarly research collection, and Clements is the right library to purchase it.” My advisors were right. It took auctioneer Selby Kiffer of Sotheby’s less than a minute to sell the Strachey lot: Reese placed one bid past the reserve price on behalf of the Clements, nobody else raised a paddle, and we were done, at a hammer price of $500,000, or $602,000 with buyer’s premium. I breathed a sigh of relief, thanked the book gods for rewarding my life of clean living and pure thoughts, waited for my heart rate to go back down below three hundred beats per minute, and hit my cell phone to tell everyone that eight decades after Adams’ expedition to London, the Henry Strachey Papers were going to be reunited in Ann Arbor.

The Strachey manuscripts will be a gold mine for scholars of the American Revolution. The Sotheby’s lot includes letters on the 1776 peace negotiations, details of British military and naval operations in the first years of the war, Strachey’s diary of his time in America, long letters he sent to his wife, a manuscript draft of General Sir William Howe’s lengthy justification of his conduct of the war, and important documents relating to the Treaty of Paris. The papers fit beautifully with the Clements Library’s existing collection; it’s as if the Strachey descendants drew a jagged line through the entire collection in the early 1980s and sent the two halves in different directions. Bringing them back together creates a rich new set of wonderful primary sources for historians.