Raab supplied the nation’s library with unpublished letters of statesman Henry Clay to William H. Crawford on matters of great American importance
The Library of Congress (LOC) recently added to its historic collections more than a dozen important letters documenting the negotiations before and aftermath of the Treaty of Ghent, which formally ended the War of 1812 when it was signed on December 24, 1814. Half of the letters are unpublished and only came to light when discovered by The Raab Collection, which is sharing this news in concert with the LOC.
The letters are addressed to the U.S. minister to France and later Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of War William Harris Crawford. Ten are from Henry Clay, Treaty negotiator and later Secretary of State; and the other two are from diplomat and representative from Massachusetts, Jonathan Russell, and Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. Along with John Quincy Adams, Clay, Russell, and Gallatin shaped both the Treaty of Ghent and subsequent commercial negotiations with Great Britain following the war, and they kept Crawford apprised of their doings through frequent correspondence.
“These letters, which will be added to the Manuscript Division’s Crawford papers, are a valuable source of information about the diplomats that negotiated the end of the war of 1812, the career of Henry Clay, and the age of Napoleon,” writes Julie Miller, curator of early American manuscripts in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, on the library’s “Unfolding History” blog.
After the treaty, Clay continued to write to Crawford, reporting on the movements of Napoleon. “Wonderful age! Wonderful man! Wonderful nation!” writes Clay, just three days after Napoleon marched into Paris for the 100 Days.
A final letter in the grouping, dated 1829, details Clay’s anger over the election of his political foe, Andrew Jackson, and describes how it has filled him “with awful apprehensions.”
Raab acquired all of these letters from a direct descendant of William Crawford, a discovery chronicled in Nathan Raab’s bestselling book, The Hunt for History. For more than 35 years, The Raab Collection has been instrumental in helping descendants and heirs of historic families place their important documents in major collections, such as, in this case, the Library of Congress.
Raab has in the past sold a number of historical documents, individual pieces and collections, to the LOC, among them a document of Thomas Jefferson ordering books for the Library in the hand of Meriwether Lewis and an important archive relating to female aviation that included documents signed by Amelia Earhart.
