Ever since the founding, the people of the United States have been particularly interested in their own history. The first collected edition of the Federalist Papers was published shortly after the originals were first printed. In the early days of the republic, newspapers would print transcripts of congressional debates, which were collected and organized for publication beginning in 1834. In 1861 Congress established the Government Printing Office—an important landmark, for it moved the publication and proliferation of public information outside the boundaries of the spoils system.
In the second half of the 19th century, historians began organizing multi-volume compendiums of the writings of the Founding Fathers. The first major contribution was from Charles Francis Adams, the grandson of John Adams, who beginning in 1856 published the papers of the second president. By the turn of the century, many other Founders had multivolume works of their papers in print—Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and more.
In the 20th century, as the social sciences became more rigorous and better funded, universities expanded on this project. After World War II, institutions like Columbia University and the University of Chicago began efforts to gather all the papers of the major Founders. Amazingly, this is a process that continues to the present day. The first volume of the Papers of James Madison was published in 1962 by Chicago, and in 2013 the University of Virginia published the 37th volume, with more to come.
When the Internet became popularized 20 years ago, it was not irrational to hope that it might facilitate the distribution of these amazing documents, which track the development of the American republic in the first person as it happened. Alas, those dreams have been largely unfulfilled—as the web seems mostly dedicated to cat videos and social media.
Granted, there are some digital redoubts for those interested in our nation’s history. The American Presidency Project, created by John Woolley and Gerhard Peters at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is a treasure trove of primary documents from the executive branch. Similarly, the Online Library of Liberty, run by Liberty Fund, offers a vast array of primary documents that cover the whole of Western history. Intrepid browsers might also stumble upon “A Century of Lawmaking,” an old, forgotten site from the Library of Congress, which contains scanned documents from congressional history. Notable as these efforts have been, one cannot but be disappointed that the Internet era has failed to fulfill its promise in carrying on the tradition of collecting and distributing the Founders’ documents.
Happily, the gap has begun to be filled in an important and exciting way—by Founders Online. A project of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (part of the National Archives and Records Administration), Founders Online represents a great advance in the digitization of our nation’s primary documents.
For those who love American history, Founders Online (founders.archives.gov) is a site to behold. The commission has digitized the papers of several Founding Fathers—the Adams family (including John, Abigail, and John Quincy), Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington. These are not the late-19th-century, incomplete volumes, but the comprehensive series begun after World War II—a total of 262 printed volumes to date. Beyond that, Founders Online is regularly adding “Early Access Documents” that have yet to be included in the final printed volumes, to give readers access to even more material. In all, it adds up to more than 178,000 documents, which one can browse or search by date, author, recipient, and keyword. Also included are the annotations and introductions by the archival historians who originally compiled the volumes.
The reach of the Founders Online collection extends beyond these core Founders. The digitized volumes include not only the letters written by them, but also to them. This makes it possible to better understand the relationships that they had with any number of other figures whose papers are not directly included.
According to Kathleen Williams, the executive director of the commission who has overseen Founders Online since its inception, the idea had been percolating since 2004 to create an online nexus that connects the papers of the Founders to one another. The commission was encouraged by successful documentary editing projects like Rotunda, the electronic imprint of the University of Virginia that made great progress in converting print volumes into a usable digital platform. It began putting together a detailed plan in 2007, and went to the Office of Management and Budget at the end of the George W. Bush administration. “We got them listening to us about this,” Williams said. “They saw an immediate public benefit to this for a whole bunch of sectors—from schoolkids, to journalists, lawyers, genealogists, and scholars.” OMB submitted it as part of its 2009 budget to Congress. “And Congress,” Williams added, “liked it so much, it actually added more money to it,” enabling the commission to speed up the process.
The final cost of this invaluable resource? Just $4.5 million—less than a rounding error in the federal budget. The dividends to scholarship and understanding will be many times this original expense. Comparing scholarship on the founding from the late 1940s to, say, the 1980s, one cannot help but detect a noticeable increase in detail and sophistication. This is in part a consequence of the systematic collection and publication of documents by major research universities, which lowered the transaction costs for researchers. No longer would they have to rely on incomplete volumes or track down original manuscripts.
Founders Online opens up a new realm of efficiencies. Unless one has access to a major university library, it can be all but impossible to find these volumes—many of them are out of print and unavailable on the secondary market. Many more are prohibitively expensive—running upwards of $100 apiece. But now they are free and open to the public, meaning that one can research the founding independent of the higher education system. And the functionality of the collection—leaps and bounds above the typical government website—creates all sorts of opportunities for surprising discoveries. Keyword searches enable one to research specific subjects with just a click of a mouse, rather than flipping through multiple volumes. Searching by date makes it easy to narrow down one’s focus to a particular period. One can also track correspondence among separate Founders occurring at the same time, to see the differing reactions to the same events.
Williams and her team at the commission are hoping to expand Founders Online—perhaps including the works of John Jay and John Marshall. They have talked as well of including mapping tools, to enable visitors to see where the Founders’ correspondence went over time. And maybe even working with the Library of Congress to link the transcribed documents to their original images.
The federal government wastes an obscene sum of money every year, but this is no waste. In fact, it is central to one of the purposes of our government. The Constitution empowers Congress to regulate patents to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” And Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” was an early advocate of a national university as a way to promote knowledge. Founders Online is a realization of such goals, a leap forward by our government in advancing one of its constitutional missions. It is a project worthy of high praise—and more funding.
Jay Cost is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
