Original 19th-century manuscripts and letters
Sources: whitmanarchive.org/letters/scribal
“Attorney General’s Office,Washington, July 17, 1865.Hon. Sam’l H. HartJudge U. S. Dist. Court, S. Dist. Ill.Springfield.Sir:
I am directed by the Attorney General to transmit herewith a Commission appointing David L. Phillips Marshal of the United States for the S. Dist. of Ill. and to request that you will deliver the same over to Mr. Phillips, when he shall have given the official bond, and taken the oath required by law.I am sir very respectfully,
Your obedient servant,Wm. Stewart,Chief Clerk.”
Scribal Documents
“This section of the Archive offers users transcriptions and page images of approximately 3,000 documents (all of them letters) Whitman produced while working as a clerk in the Attorney General’s office, 1865–1873. An additional 400 documents will be made available as time allows. These documents include letters in the hand of another clerk for which Whitman has provided short marginal annotations, apparently for indexing purposes, as well as summaries of legal cases and office notes in Whitman’s hand, such as the “Memorandum of Examination of Nott & Co’s Claim—with order,” from February 1869. We would like to provide annotations for all of the scribal documents and possibly enrich the encoding of them, though it is not yet clear when we will have the time and resources to reach these goals.” – Letters | Whitman Archive
Format: Primarily XML (using TEI – Text Encoding Initiative standards). This is crucial because XML allows researchers to “tag” names, dates, and places within the text.
