The Case of the Missing Magazine

NARRATOR: It's June 25th, 1788. George Washington writes to Philadelphia printer Matthew Carey that, “I entertain a high idea of the utility of periodical publications. I consider such easy vehicles of knowledge more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry, and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free people.”

Washington subscribes to nearly two dozen newspapers and magazines in his lifetime. Not only is he buying them for himself, but he is also sharing them with his friends and family. Today, on the Secrets of Washington's Archives, we're sharing the unusual journey of The Bee and Literary Intelligencer, a magazine that Washington supports from its earliest days.

We’ll follow The Bee from its origins in Scotland, an enthusiastic reception by President Washington, right up to its mysterious disappearance and miraculous reappearance nearly 100 years later.

And now your host, Dr. Anne Fertig.

ANNE FERTIG: Welcome to Secrets of Washington's Archives, a special podcast celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Washington Presidential Library at George Washington's Mount Vernon. Today, we're introducing you to the fascinating story of The Bee and Literary Intelligencer, a magazine that Washington owned that he lost and that he supported the production of. So there's a lot to say about this particular book in question. 

With me today is Samantha Snyder, Research Librarian here at the library. In addition to knowing everything, Samantha is our resident expert on Elizabeth l, who was an influential early Philadelphia woman who plays an important role in today's story. So welcome so much, Samantha, for joining us. Just to start us off, can you tell me what you do here as research librarian? 

SAMANTHA SNYDER: Yes, well, thank you so much for having me here today. And as research librarian, I basically oversee all of the incoming research inquiries and scholarship that comes through Mount Vernon. So I handle research requests from the public, from staff members, from our research fellows, which I also manage that program, which are different people we pay to come do research here and write books and articles and things like that. But then I also just fill my brain with a lot of knowledge. I have learned more about George Washington and early America than I ever would have expected. 

FERTIG: And I'm not joking, Sam knows a lot. She is an expert on many, many subjects. Many a scholar is indebted to her knowledge of the Washingtons and of society in early America. So thank you so much, Sam, for joining us. We're talking today about a periodical, and it's called The Bee in Literary Intelligencer, or we'll just call it The Bee, and that is B-E-E, just like the insect. So to start us off, I thought it'd be really cool to talk about George Washington's relationship with periodicals. Because he was a big reader of newspapers and magazines, wasn't he? 

SNYDER: Yes, he definitely was. He loved periodicals. He loved newspapers especially. He subscribed to many, many papers. And there's documentation of him reading the papers, reading them out loud, and normally after dinner. But he had quite a host of periodicals, all sorts of types. So historical, scientific, everything. 

FERTIG: To give you an idea of what periodical culture was like in this period… periodicals were pretty much the cheapest literature you could get, and because of that, they were very widely read. We start seeing around the 1780s and 1790s in particular just a boom of new periodicals, and Washington subscribed to many of them. It's actually really hard to count, one, how many there were in the United States at the time, but two, Washington was subscribing to so many as well. 

SNYDER: And sometimes the print runs were so short on some of these, or they'd change titles, they'd go in and out. Like, The Bee only was in existence for three years? 

FERTIG: It's a tough business to succeed in to be able to produce these cheaply and then to make a profit on them. And so they were printed on very cheap paper with very cheap ink, would often run. It's actually a miracle any have survived to this day. I'm always amazed in the archive when I can see an original print copy of a newspaper or a periodical. And then there were things like The Bee, which were actually magazines, but not magazines as we would imagine them today. So unlike the newspapers, which were on broadsides and folded up, magazines could be bound, even if they were bound cheaply. And many people, including Washington himself, often chose to preserve their magazines by getting them formally bound with the boards and leather covers. So Washington valued his periodicals so much that he would preserve them forever, which is why we actually have so many of what we, as scholars and as librarians, would call ephemera. 

And ephemera is those publications that aren't meant to last. Your newspapers, your pamphlets, your calling cards, anything made of paper that is really just meant to be a temporary little thing. But so much of his survives because he actually took paints to bind them and store them in his library, which is very cool. 

SNYDER: And even some of his older magazines, he subscribed to the London Magazine at one point, The Gentleman's Magazine, I believe, and those date back to the 1760s, he was binding those.

FERTIG: And he's also subscribing to a lot of American periodicals as well. And he was such a supporter of these periodicals that when it came to give his farewell address, and that is the speech that he gave when he left the second term of his office, he could have given this speech to Congress in a very private way, but he actually chose to publish it in the newspapers, because he wanted it to go out to the people. And this has been used by scholars like Kevin Hayes as evidence of his support of the press. To him, he saw these cheap, easily available vehicles of knowledge as the way to be able to reach out to the people of the United States most directly.

And a funny story about that farewell address, it was originally too long for the newspapers.

SNYDER: Oh, Hamilton!

FERTIG: So Hamilton was forced, Hamilton wrote it and he was forced to cut it down significantly, but it is considered to be one of Washington's finest speeches. So just to give you an idea of some of the periodicals that George Washington subscribed to, they included the Gazette of the United States sold by John Fennow. He was a big fan of Claypool's periodicals of which there were several, one being the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, another being Claypool's own Advertiser. He subscribed to one called the Congressional Register. He subscribed to the Boston-Columbia Centinel. He subscribed to the New York Daily Advertiser. And you can tell he's getting them from all over the country. 

SNYDER: Yep, exactly. 

FERTIG: And we also have sometimes really interesting little mentions in his account books of ones we can't trace. But there's one referred to as a Dutch newspaper, which is very interesting because Washington did not speak Dutch. And it may have been ordered for a member of his household or for some other purpose that we don't know. But there are mentions in there of other newspapers that we can't quite trace. And so all in all, in my research, I have found mentions of 22 different periodicals that he was subscribed to at different points. I'm fairly certain there are more out there. And I think it's really interesting that we actually have a record from his secretary Tobias Lear, who wrote that the night before Washington died, he read the newspaper with Lear. And this is a quote from Lear's account, “He was very cheerful. And when he met with anything interesting or entertaining, he read it aloud, as well as his hoarseness would permit him.” 

SNYDER: So sad.

FERTIG: It is. He was obviously ill, but he was still reading aloud his papers with gusto. And this was a lifelong love he had. If we look back through his letters, in 1788, he said to printer Matthew Carey that he, “Entertains a high idea of the utility of periodical publications. I consider such easy vehicles of knowledge more happily calculated than any other.” So why would that be? Why is he so interested in periodicals like newspapers and like The Bee? 

SNYDER: Well, I think because in the 18th century, that was how people got all sorts of news and did all sorts of research. Because you're seeing things coming from all over the world. And in something like The Bee, it's a miscellany. So there's even more of a variety, so you’re getting poetry, you're getting articles, you're getting scientific things, politics. And I think Washington was such a voracious learner and reader that he would be drawn to stuff like that. And that was how people got their news. And if they were interested in poetry, they could pick up a periodical, they could pick up a magazine and science and all sorts of things.

FERTIG: So that's really interesting. You said that The Bee is a miscellany. Can you talk about what that might mean? 

SNYDER: A miscellany would be just that. A compilation of all sorts of pieces. So, things on science, politics, poetry, essays, book reviews, anything and everything in the volume that we're talking about. There's even that article on a rhinoceros. 

FERTIG: A rhinoceros? 

SNYDER: With an engraving and everything showing what it looked like. 

FERTIG: And we know that from his presidential account books, Washington loved seeing animals. 

SNYDER: He did. 

FERTIG: Because he's so interested in animals, he might've really enjoyed reading about the rhinoceros in The Bee. 

SNYDER: Yes, exactly. And I think there was no Wikipedia or Google News or BuzzFeed or any of those sort of things where you're getting that constant flow of all types of information. So these things would have been just that. 

FERTIG: Well, that brings up a good point because a lot of those articles are short and easy to digest. And that's what The Bee is as well. These are short articles. Sometimes they're extracts of longer pieces. They're easy to digest for the president on the go. 

SNYDER: Yes. 

FERTIG: He was extraordinarily busy too, so we can see why that would have been of use to him, especially during his presidency, which is, I believe, when The Bee was originally published. So let's talk about the history of this particular periodical, The Bee, and Washington's involvement with it. 

Washington was originally sent these books in 1792 by the creator of The Bee, a man named James Anderson. And James Anderson had a benefactor, the Earl of Buchan, who corresponded with Washington, and through the Earl of Buchan, he sent copies of The Bee to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And originally, he actually sent his prospectus, which is his plan of what's to come. And he sent it to Jefferson, and Jefferson thanked him and said, “This looks very good, thank you, have a good day.”  And he sent it to Washington. And Washington was a little bit more effusive and wholeheartedly supported. 

SNYDER: Very excited, yes. 

FERTIG: In 1792, when the periodicals published, he and his benefactor have it bound. And Anderson sends him the first four volumes, and then the Earl of Buchan sends an additional six volumes of The Bee. And this starts off one of my favorite lines of correspondence, because Washington sends a letter thanking both of them effusively and saying, “I want to be a subscriber. I want to pay for this book.” In other words, he wants to support it financially. 

And they refuse. They're like, “No, it's a gift, George.” And he sends him another letter and he says, “I want to reiterate, I want to be a subscriber.” And once again, it doesn't go anywhere. And I believe it takes about four letters until George is about, “I am sending you money. If it is too much, send me the change.” Which is wonderful because he not only supported the periodical business, but he saw the use of a periodical like The Bee, which was meant for trades people. It was meant for business people. It was meant for people in agriculture. And he wanted to support it financially, which is really lovely to see. But what you're here to tell us today is an even more intriguing story about Washington's network of readers and a letter we have from one Elizabeth Powel. To start us off, who is Elizabeth Powel? 

SNYDER: Elizabeth Powel, as you had said, was an incredibly influential Philadelphian. Her and her house really were the center of the social network of Philadelphia, of the political network. And when Philadelphia was the capital of the United States, she really operated what's called a salon, which were intellectual gatherings and people from all over the world visited her. And she and George Washington were especially close. She was quite intellectual, especially for the time period for a woman, she seemed to be on the same par with some of the men in politics, like all the different cabinet members, John Adams really loved her. And of course, George Washington did. But yes, she and Washington were very close in a platonic way. And had quite an intellectual bond and would trade publications back and forth. 

FERTIG: Yeah, there seems to be quite a few letters that talk about them sending articles or books to each other. Is that right? 

SNYDER: Yes, there are several and we have several at Mount Vernon, which is pretty neat. And then some of those letters are at the Library of Congress too. 

FERTIG: So what about The Bee then? How does that play into their relationship? 

Well, it's really interesting because she writes to him, unfortunately, that letter doesn't survive, where she's somehow asking him for an essay from The Bee. Somehow she knows that this essay is in a volume of The Bee, but we have the letter from George Washington responding and saying he can't find the specific essay, which he says in quotes, “Dr. Franklin’s Strictures on the Abuse of the Press” in any of his volumes. And so what I wonder is given the fact that this is the 1790s, all of the partisan politics are ramping up, and the press is becoming incredibly partisan. If there was some sort of discussion that happened at a dinner party, at her house, if she was elsewhere, that they were talking about the press. And if someone referenced this to her, or if she referenced it to someone else and was like, “Oh, let me get you a copy of this.” Regardless, that essay is all about the issues of partisanship in the press and the freedom of the press versus the press abusing its power. So it's a fascinating little essay. Unfortunately, Washington could not find that volume. 

FERTIG: I believe he said, “My set of The Bee is entirely broken.” 

SNYDER: Yes. 

FERTIG: Which is very dramatic. It reads very dramatically in this letter. You can tell his frustration.

SNYDER: Exactly. And he then goes on to say, “Into whose hands all the volumes have fallen? I know not.” And he underlines all. So he's being very dramatic. What he says is he has checked all the indexes of these volumes, which when you look at the volumes, they do, they index every single article and little poem and things like that. So when you do see “The Strictures on the Abuse of the Press”, it is in the index of volume seven, which had disappeared. 

FERTIG: And we know from the letters from Elizabeth Powel, right? Washington is often loaning out books. I mean, this is his presidential household. A lot of people have access to his library. And this is sometimes what happens, things disappear. Sometimes books, letters, manuscripts, they get lost and we never find them again. But what is beautiful about The Bee is that we know exactly what happened to that missing volume. Samantha, would you like to explain? 

SNYDER: Sure, so the volume had disappeared or so Washington thought, and this is a testament to the fact that women were reading The Bee, even though it was targeted towards agriculturalists and businessmen and stuff like that, people like Elizabeth Powel reading The Bee, and then people like Martha Washington were reading The Bee. And in Martha Washington's case, she may have snatched up The Bee from Washington's bookshelf and then given it to her granddaughter at some point, and then poof, it magically disappeared.

FERTIG: And how do we know that she gave it to her granddaughter? 

SNYDER: Well, Nellie, so Eleanor Park Custis, their granddaughter, was one who really liked to write inscriptions in her books, tracing the provenance, which is really neat for librarians and historians today. And we found that with several of our books. And she wrote in it on the title page, given to Eleanor Park Lewis by her beloved grandmama. 

FERTIG: That is so sweet. And that is volume seven, the one with the “Strictures and the Abuses of the Press” that Elizabeth Powel had requested and George Washington could not find. And once again, things do have a tendency of disappearing, but sometimes they have a way of reappearing and reappearing in equally dramatic circumstances. So we have volume seven today. We have it here at the Washington Presidential Library. You can see Nellie's inscription in it. You can turn to the page and see the article by Dr. Franklin. 

SNYDER: Yes. We forgot to mention that part, that the article was written by Benjamin Franklin. You can turn to that page. You can also see the page with the rhinoceros engraving. 

FERTIG: And the way that it returned came in some of the most unusual circumstances. Just to explain, I didn't even find, historian though I am, it was my mother who sent it to me when she was searching for various genealogical things. She decided to search on one of her websites for the Washingtons and she found this article from 1890. And I remember dismissing it because those late Victorian articles, you're really never certain if they're true. But this one actually was and it had a great story and it's from 1890. And it talks about the discovery of a trunk of belongings that Nellie had inherited from her grandparents. And in it were a wide variety of things. I'm going to read part of this article, “The greater portion of this most valuable collection was unearthed not more than three weeks ago in a musty old trunk in the storeroom of the Oddly, the country seat of the Lewises in Virginia,” the Lewises being the family that Nellie married into. 

SNYDER: Which that house still survives, Oddly. 

FERTIG: “The contents of the truck have been entirely lost sight of by Mr. Lewis, and the discovery of these valuable Washington papers was a great surprise to him.” And in this trunk, there were letters, deeds, ledgers, and a number of books owned by both George and Martha Washington, including a book that has one of the only known signatures of Martha Washington's long deceased daughter, Patsy, a book owned by George Washington's own mother, Mary Ball Washington, and a list containing the names and residences of the entire enslaved community at Mount Vernon at the time of Washington's death. So you can imagine just what a treasure trove this trunk was for historians and researchers.

SNYDER: And I will say, we have those things at the library now. So this trunk, not only The Bee, but the list of enslaved people, Mary Ball Washington's books, we have that all here, which is what's so neat. 

FERTIG: So yes, those books found their way, including that lost number seven of The Bee were in this trunk, and they were shortly thereafter purchased by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association.

So George might not have found his copy of The Bee to loan to Elizabeth Powel, but it was in good hands and it did eventually find its way home. So why would Elizabeth Powel ask George Washington specifically for this book? George Washington wasn't known to have the most expansive or largest library. He didn't have a reputation as the biggest man of letters around town. Why would she reach out to him and not say somebody else who also could have owned a copy of The Bee? 

SNYDER: Well, to put it into context, at this point, it's the beginning of 1795. And her husband, who was a man of letters, was incredibly intellectual, had passed away of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia less than two years prior. So she is very much still in a state of disarray. She sadly, actually the day before, writes to a man named Benjamin Rush, who was one of the most prominent men in Philadelphia. He had written a pamphlet on women's education, and someone had asked her about that. And she was trying to find a copy to give to this person. But then she goes on to say that the melancholy event of 1793 made it proper that “The library,” meaning her collection of books, her and his collection of books, “with its content should be exposed to the vital air. This occasioned great derangement of his valuable collection of books and other things. Unfortunately, my afflicted mind has not as yet been sufficiently strengthened to arrange anything there properly.”

And so I think, putting that into context literally the day before, she might've at one point owned a copy of The Bee and just couldn't find it. But I think that's very interesting that if that was the case, she was so close with the Washingtons that I think she trusted them. I think did value Washington's intellectual abilities more than maybe some of his peers did. And I find it very interesting. I just think it's a testament to how close they were. But I just find that to be such an interesting little connection, given the context of the time that this was all happening.

FERTIG: A true friendship, that she can reach out to them and request something when she needs it and when she feels vulnerable. Because that letter to Benjamin Rush is very vulnerable. And I think this is wonderful, too, because it tells us a bit about the networks and the friendships that the Washingtons had during the presidency in particular. 

SNYDER: Absolutely.

FERTIG: So we've spoken so much today about Washington's love of periodicals, how many periodicals he subscribed to, how he was loaning some of them out, how he was binding them. What does this all tell us about George Washington and what we might call his intellectual life? What was going on there that he just put so much effort into reading and collecting these periodicals?

SNYDER: As far as the effort he was taking, what I always say when I'm giving tours of the Washington Library and talking about his books, he wasn't one to fake it. He genuinely wanted to be well read, well spoken. He didn't want anyone to manage to call him out on not knowing something. But also when you think about the jobs he was working, at first he's a general, then he's the president, and he had to be in tune with the information going on all around the country. And you're getting little bits of information from each city. So I think as far as typical newspapers and periodicals, that would be one thing he was doing. You're getting international news. It was a quick way to know what was going on, rather than rely only on correspondence, especially when he was president. For the magazines and things like that, I think that was a little more for entertainment. And I think he just genuinely really enjoyed learning.  I think it helped him in situations with some of these men that he was around who had been in college, women like Elizabeth Powel even, who was very intellectual. So I just think it helped him out too. It helped him build this persona for himself. 

FERTIG: I love that because, one, it shows how much George Washington wanted to learn, how he saw the importance of intellectual pursuits. But also how much he enjoyed learning and how this is a form of diversion for him, a form of entertainment. Maybe he didn't read a lot of novels, but he read the poetry and he read about rhinoceroses and about other amazing stories coming through to him in these periodicals. 

SNYDER: And it shows he was a human being, just like all of us. He wasn't just sitting and thinking about politics all the time, just sitting all by himself and that sort of stuff. So he was enjoying and he was reading and he was discussing. He's at all these parties and these levies. Like he has to have something to talk about. 

FERTIG: And he's sending his books to people. 

SNYDER: Exactly. 

FERTIG: And he's reading with Tobias Lear. 

SNYDER: He's getting pamphlets from people. Elizabeth Powel sends him several publications like, I want to know your thoughts on this and he'll send it back and he'll let her know and vice versa. It's just fascinating the way this all works.

FERTIG: Yeah, it really lets us see more into Washington as a thinker, as somebody who does have his own intellectual ideas about the world. Well, thank you so much, Samantha, for joining us here today. Now if you would like to see that missing volume of The Bee with your own eyes, be sure to check out the video companion to this podcast available at georgewashingtonpodcast.com where you can watch the video and Samantha describe this amazing book and the importance of periodical culture in this time period. 

Thank you again. Have a wonderful day. 

SNYDER: Thank you. 

NARRATOR: The book featured in this podcast was The Bee and Literary Weekly Intelligencer, a magazine produced by James Anderson. Several volumes, including volume seven, mentioned in this podcast are held by the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. Mrs. Alice Mary Longfellow, Vice Regent for Massachusetts, generously gave these books as a gift to Mount Vernon in 1891. The Secrets of Washington's Archives is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and CD Squared. This show is hosted by Dr. Anne Fertig. Dr. Fertig and Samantha Snyder contributed research to this episode. Narration and audio production were completed by Kurt Dahl at CD Squared. The music featured in this podcast is from an album, No Kissing Allowed in School, produced by the Colonial Music Institute. You can listen to more from this album and other productions of the Colonial Music Institute on Spotify.