William Plumer & the Young Government   

NATHAN: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

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ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory.

JOANNE: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

NATHAN: I’m Nathan Connolly.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers.

JOANNE: OK, so Nathan, Ed, I want to introduce you to a historical character who I’m particularly fond of.

ED: I’ll look forward to meeting him or her.

JOANNE: He’s a little quirky but really interesting. Picture this. It’s Washington, DC. It’s 1802. A man named William Plumer has just been elected to the Senate from New Hampshire, so the capitol is his base. Now imagine– Plumer’s a guy. He’s kind of tall. He’s kind of thin. He’s not really a flashy dresser. In that sense, he’s kind of New England-ish. So Plumer moves to the capitol at a time of pretty intense political divisions. His party, the Federalist, had just been booted out of power by Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party.

ED: So I guess not everything has changed in Washington since 1802, huh?

JOANNE: No, definitely not. So he arrives in Washington, and he’s grouchy. He already feels like he’s an outsider and everything that he loves might be crashing to ruin.

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So, early in his term, Plumer is wandering around the halls of the capitol, and he stumbles across a lumber room and peeks inside.

ED: I’m sorry, a lumber room?

[LAUGHTER]

JOANNE: Yes,

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NATHAN: Ed, I actually have one of those in my house. No.

JOANNE: Don’t we all have lumber rooms?

ED: So it’s a kind of storage room.

JOANNE: Right.

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And he peeks into this lumber room, or storage room, or whatever you want to call it, and what does he see? Documents. He sees manuscripts. He sees papers. And they’re all over the place. We know this because he writes about this in his diary.

MALE SPEAKER: The documents principally lay on the floor without any order, covered and mixed with dirt, plaster, and rubbish.

JOANNE: So Plumer is horrified.

MALE SPEAKER: The water in every rain that falls runs through the roof and wets these papers. They will soon be destroyed. They are trodden under foot by workmen. The quantity of water on the papers, the dirt and filth in the chamber, has rendered it unhealthy.

ED: These are the original documents?

JOANNE: These are original documents. You know, it’s not the formal journal of the House and the formal journal of the Senate, which are kept by a clerk. It is drafts of things, probably copies of reports, or notes of proceedings.

NATHAN: The stuff that we would like, as historians, basically. The database stuff.

JOANNE: Exactly! The stuff that has all the nifty detail, and the crossings out, and all of these documents that clearly have something to do with the working of Congress. But nobody cared about them, and they had been thrown in this room and forgotten.

NATHAN: Wow, so that would be like finding John F. Kennedy’s memos in a leaky closet or something.

JOANNE: Exactly. And Plumer has an epiphany.

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He decides that he’s going to make it his mission to preserve these kinds of working documents, to collect the history of the government, to keep all of these things that are disintegrating and vanishing and somehow become the guy who pulls them all together and hangs on to them for the future.

[? NATHAN: ?] Wow.

JOANNE: He is obsessed. He collects papers from the lumber room. He goes to the library and copies things. He asks congressmen to give him things. Apparently, every day for two hours, he would do his research to collect documents. After a while, Republicans got a little suspicious about what this Federalist was doing rummaging around in papers. So he began to memorize things and copy them down at night so that he could have a full record of Congress, from 1774 all the way up to the early 19th century that he’s writing about.

NATHAN: That must have been a lot of paper.

JOANNE: It was a lot of paper. He ends up with an archive of 500 bound volumes.

ED: Wow.

JOANNE: But he also then begins to record what he sees and what he hears. He writes down all of these amazing things that we wouldn’t have otherwise, that we wouldn’t know otherwise.

ED: Like what, Joanne?

JOANNE: So, for example, he happens to note down on a piece of paper that the clock in the Senate is set a half hour fast on purpose, so that the Senate can end every day in time for the senators to get to the horse races on time. They don’t want to miss the horse races. And then he says, I actually think that’s for the better, because the less the Senate can do, the better it is for the country.

[? NATHAN: ?] Wow.

JOANNE: We would never know that otherwise. He takes notes on what he sees when he’s invited to go and have formal dinners with President Thomas Jefferson. He talks about how Jefferson would very strategically set his table with these little props, like stagecraft, scattered around the table so that hopefully the conversation would veer towards what he wants it to veer toward. So there’d be a vial of water from the Mississippi River, or a piece of what was known at the time as the mammoth cheese, which was this massive, 1,200 pound cheese given to Jefferson as a tribute.

ED: I can see how that might come up.

[LAUGHTER]

NATHAN: Made of mammoth milk, presumably, right?

JOANNE: And then, poof! They’re talking about Lewis and Clark. Or, well, this cheese was given to me by appreciative farmers. You’re in the room at this dinner party, sort of watching the operation of politics in a way you might not otherwise have.

NATHAN: And he’s keeping all of this in his own personal collection.

JOANNE: He’s got stuff in trunks. He has massive amounts of stuff based on his time in the Senate. And then, also, after he’s out of the Senate, he continues on with this kind of behavior for 50 years.

ED: So Plumer’s an interesting guy. Did all his hard work end up making a difference?

JOANNE: Ed, you’re asking me, so what?

[LAUGHTER]

Is that what you’re doing?

ED: Well, kind of. But I thought that I used more words

JOANNE: OK, here’s the so what. He’s collecting things. He’s collecting not the formal journal of the House or the formal journal of the Senate, which record what’s voted on, and who voted for what. He’s collecting all the behind-the-scenes working. He’s recording the working of the institution and all the sorts of things that might not be seen as important, but that actually show you the process of governance. He clearly feels that the history of Congress and the history of early America is just vanishing before his eyes. I think at one point he says it’s fleeting down the current of time to oblivion.

NATHAN: Wow.

JOANNE: And someone has to rescue it. He uses the word rescue. Because it really is a feel for the time, the look of the time. The sort of ground-level reality of what’s going on is part of what Plumer leaves behind.

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