The Library of John Gilmary Shea

An Exhibition of Rare Books and Manuscripts Relating for the Most Part to American Catholic History

For most Americans, regardless of the direction or "correctness" of their political opinions, 1992 constitutes a very great milestone indeed: the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World. Whether Columbus was "first" or not, or whether he came for good or for ill, hardly matters in the light of the importance his discovery made to European civilization. For nearly 300 years following his first voyage,efforts of both church and state would be bent to the opening up and exploitation of a vast new world.

For Georgetown University, and particularly for its main campus libraries, the same year, 1992, marks two other anniversaries; their celebration, unruffled by political or philosophical concerns, provides a fitting academic contribution to the larger anniversary marked by the nation as a whole.

The first of these anniversaries—the one which makes possible this quietest of celebrations, is the centenary of the acquisition by Georgetown of the library of John Gilmary Shea, the "father" of American Catholic historical studies. Toward the end of his life Shea drafted, at the request of a friend (and another seeker after his books, let it be known), Father John J. Dougherty, a succinct description of his remarkable collection. The opening paragraph of that description, in its modestly understated tone, offers us a key to what Shea did, and why Georgetown's acquisition of the fruits of his efforts is worthy of remembrance today (italics inserted):

The Library has been collected almost exclusively to bring together books relating to the History of the Catholic Church in the United States, and those countries directly connected with it.

Father J. Havens Richards, then president of the university, mounted an intense campaign to win the collection for Georgetown, even though the collector had always hoped his books would be able to remain in New York. Richards, undeterred, ultimately negotiated an agreement whereby Shea would retain possession of his library until his death. Unfortunately, Shea lived only a very few days after signing the agreement whereby Georgetown acquired his collection, dying at age 67 on February 22, 1892: the centenary of his death is the second anniversary we now celebrate.

Typical of the man, Shea's description of his library is both slightly evasive and quite correct. Not able, for want of money, to collect on the grand scale of a John Carter Brown, he limited his sights to bringing together “books” that would illuminate the Catholic part of American history, and with only a modest number of exceptions, he hewed constantly to that line. He thought that the only major deviation in his collecting from clarifying the role of Catholics in the exploration and settlement of America and their struggle to establish their faith in that new land was his assemblage of nearly 400 printed titles ( and a wealth of manuscript materials) in Native American languages or having to do with their grammar, vocabulary, or study: merely the sort of collection which might have brought lasting fame to a lesser man than Shea. By the same token, it mattered little to him whether a “book” as a monograph, a periodical, a newspaper, or a pamphlet; or even, in fact, if it were handwritten rather than printed. After all, he knew perfectly well what he meant, and after a lengthy career in popular journalism he also knew what kinds of recondite distinctions his readership would have little patience with.

Author, editor, or translator of more than 200 books, entries in encyclopedias, and contributions to periodicals, Shea was nonetheless to a remarkable degree self-taught. His initial formal schooling ended in 1837, when he was 13; during the years from 1848 to 1852, when he was a member of the Society of Jesus, his course of studies in the novitiate in Montreal, with one exception, would have little to do with what ultimately became his life's work. He had already been admitted to the New York State Bar in 1846 after two years in a law office, displaying by that achievement the facility with which he could learn anything to which he chose to tum his mind. He never really practiced law, and, having given up his vocation to the priesthood and married, his easy command of language made a career in journalism a natural way in which he could support both his family and his interest in historical research.

Late in life, Shea's importance and reputation in the Catholic community of his time was far greater than he apparently ever believed, though today we might have trouble accepting at face value his continued modesty in the face of reiterated proof. Father Joseph Finotti, the author of the pioneering Bibliotheca Catholica Americana (1872), the first attempt at a bibliography of Catholic works published in the United States, was an intimate of Shea's and a fellow collector in a largely neglected field. After Finotti's death in 1879, Shea oversaw the dissolution of his colleague's collection—making sure that the best of Finotti's books ended up in his own collection, of course. To Finotti, a man who took his priesthood and the dignity of that office most seriously, Shea was the only Catholic layman under whose roof he would condescend to spend the night. On a more obvious level, and despite the overtones of "development" that were involved, Shea was made the first recipient of Notre Dame's Laetare Medal, a distinction inaugurated in 1883 by the university, the annual medal to be given to the most outstanding Catholic layman in the United States.

Shea's own writings are now not much read. Many of his early works, largely devoted to various aspects of the Catholic role in the opening up of parts of this country and missionary work with its indigenous peoples, were more or less quickly dated by the increased access historians gained to original sources, some of them completely unavailable to Shea. Even his massive four-volume history of the Catholic Church in the United States, to which he gave up the last decade of his life and which he left incomplete at his death, has been entirely superseded. Yet he was the first scholar to put the Catholic experience in this country under true historical scrutiny, basing his works on the evidence of original sources and leaving to one side the incrustations of legend and wishful thinking that marred the work of so many others.

On the other hand, his editorial work, if technically mediocre by today's standards, is still of considerable value to historians. In his “Cramoisy Series," a group of 25 texts of great importance to the early history of Catholics in this country, he made available to scholars for the first time texts which until his publication of them had existed in unique manuscripts only. A parallel group of publications, 14 grammars and dictionaries of Native American languages, have remained equally important to scholars in this field of linguistics. In connection with these editorial ventures, it is useful to remember that Shea printed at most a few hundred copies, and often only 100 of these works: Shea understood all too well that the number of people in America interested in "original sources" was not overly large.

Ironically, Shea's most onerous editorial effort, and the one he probably felt was the most important, was initially published without mention of his name and has since sunk almost completely from sight. His bibliographical researches in the 1850s into the publication of the Catholic version of the Bible in the United States led him to the discovery that not only were the various American editions based on widely differing translations, they were riddled throughout with typographical, compositional, and literal errors. When a publishing firm hired him to edit a pocket-sized edition of the Bible, Shea converted that apparently simple and straightforward task into a meticulous re-editing of Bishop Challoner's 1750 translation of the Vulgate, the version of the text preferred by New York's Archbishop—later Cardinal—John McCloskey. Fortunately, the survival of many of his painstakingly marked proof texts makes possible an estimate of the extent of his work on the project.

Shea's principal biographer, Peter Guilday, expresses a certain awe at the remarkably tranquil and contented, though far from affluent, homelife his subject shared with Sophie, his wife of almost 40 years, and their two daughters, Elizabeth and Emma Isabel. While Shea's preoccupation with his work, both as an editor and as a historian, probably put some strain on his women-folk, it's far more likely that his sinking every extra dollar into building his collections of books, manuscripts, and coins and medals (the latter given to the College of Mount Saint Vincent shortly before his death) would have been a more proximate reason for dissension, if any there was. Then again, Shea may simply have kept the extent of his expenditures very much to himself.

Book and manuscript collectors, unwilling to give up domestic bliss as well as the arm and leg often required by the owner of some desired rarity, have been known to do that on more than one occasion. Judging by the quality and number of books and manuscripts in Shea's collection at Georgetown, he must have adopted some such course. Yet the collection itself reveals some of the financial constraint under which, all too clearly, he had to work. Sometimes he made do with a "cripple," such as his copy of the 1516 Genoa

Psalter (see #1, below), so long as the reason for which he wanted the text was not lost thereby. He almost always made do with copies in very ordinary—sometimes downright tatty—bindings: Shea's library is that of a scholar rather than that of a bibliophile. Nevertheless, the items displayed in this exhibition, while comparatively much cheaper when Shea was collecting in the latter part of the nineteenth century than they are today, were hardly inexpensive even then. Clearly, what money he could bring together went, like that of Erasmus, for books. Shea's longstanding friendships with collectors of the stature and depth of purse of James Lenox and S. L M. Barlow points, if perhaps by another path, in the same direction. But the sad fact is that, with the exception of the books Shea got from Finotti's estate, we know not nearly enough of how he put together his collection, which amounted in all to more than 10,000 books, journals, bound volumes of newspapers, pamphlets, and manuscript items of various kinds. ·

The 62 printed books and 13 letters and manuscripts in the exhibition are representative of, though they hardly exhaust, the "high spots" in the collection. One particularly noteworthy example, the first edition of Thomas More's Utopia (Louvain, 1516), could not with reason be inserted in an exhibition devoted to suggesting the research strengths of the collection; yet it is but one (if by far the greatest) of many. Any collection of this size lends itself to being, for purposes of understanding, considered in a number of categories. The categories of the exhibition are, obviously, arbitrary; many of the items shown could have been placed with equal justice in two or even three of the cases. Thus what might be thought of as the main themes in the collection as a whole are approximated in the exhibition by cases showing works devoted to general Americana; the history of the Catholic Church per se in the United States; Native American culture and linguistics; the French role in Canada and, to a lesser extent, Louisiana; the Spanish role in Mexico and the Southwest; and the early European efforts in Central and South America as well as in the Caribbean. The exhibition also displays, as a testimonial to Shea's remarkable plunge into the mists of Biblical scholarship, a small group of his collection of Bibles, though it avoids (with one exception) the early American Catholic editions that Shea most actively collected.

The history of Shea's collections at Georgetown provides an instructive, if not in retrospect entirely pleasant, lesson in collection development and library management. The initial acquisition, which cost the university roughly $10,000, was the collection of printed materials. Shea's daughters, in 1892 and 1893, donated the large collection of manuscripts which, from Shea's point of view, was part and parcel of his library. These acquisitions were received with considerable fanfare, but no particular effort was made for almost 15 years to add similar materials to keep the collection alive and growing. When the Morgan Maryland Colonial Endowment was activated in the first decade of the twentieth century, its income was used primarily to collect general Americana with a slight slant towards things of Maryland interest: almost, but not quite, what Shea had been up to. Initially of worthy size, the endowment was not increased, and within the space of only a few decades its ability to fund the acquisition of rarities in American history was much diminished.

The library, while in the 1890s at least blessed with a new building and in a period of spectacular growth, was not staffed with people skilled in collecting; neither was there, on the part of the university community, any special demand for a growing collection of rare Americana nor source of funds to develop one. Shea's collection, which he had so dearly hoped would make possible the research of others and be the basis for ongoing study of the development of the Catholic Church in America, became just another curiosity—such of it, given its very minimal cataloging, as could be retrieved at all.

College catalogs from the early 1890s refer briefly, if somewhat vaguely, to the "cataloging'' of the collection. Little evidence survives as to what form that first cataloging took, save for the stamping, or stickering, or hand initialing of various items, though it seems that some sort of arrangement, possibly following the Dewey decimal system, was undertaken. In the 1930s the bulk of the books, those for which Library of Congress catalog cards were available, were cataloged—or perhaps re-cataloged—as a separate collection using the Library of Congress classification system; to this portion of Shea's library were added several categories of related materials such as American imprints of the eighteenth century, whether donated by Shea or not. These materials were removed from casual public access and styled the "Shea Collection."

Those items (including, of course, virtually all of the real rarities) for which ready-made cataloging was not available, or which were not obvious Americana, were intermixed with other collections. Some of these, like the main group, remained because of their age, perhaps, in special custody; several hundred others, then too recent in date to be deemed rare, were committed to the library's general stacks. The common library prejudice against pamphlets—books too thin to be considered valuable—left more than a thousand items completely undescribed, including much of the most valuable material from a historian's point of view. The manuscripts were amalgamated into the scrapbook-type filing system of the University Archives, largely undescribed and, until the 1970s, unavailable for research.

The Shea manuscripts were among the first things extracted from the University Archives after it became part of the Special Collections Division in 1971. Although still not fully processed, the collection has been thoroughly organized, and a number of scholars have made use of items in it in the course of their research. Perhaps the most important segment of the collection is the five boxes of manuscripts dealing with Native Americans, and primarily with the recording of their languages. A major subset of this group is the body of original papers and letters of Henry R. Schoolcraft, many of them sent in the first instance to Lewis Cass. Only a little less significant is the somewhat larger group of original documents and transcripts relating to the history of the Catholic Church in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Reconstruction of Shea's library of printed materials is in full swing, and all of his books and pamphlets should be available, fully and accurately cataloged, before the end of 1993 or, at worst, sometime in the following year. For the first time, the catalog will reflect the total contents of Shea's library, since it will include bibliographical records for his collection of well over 1,000 pamphlets, finally isolated from the much larger group of similar materials into which they had been integrated early in this century. For the first time, too, cataloging records will be available for Shea's very large collection of pastoral letters of American bishops and records of American diocesan synods, both sets of items which Shea thought to be very nearly complete up to the time of his death.

No greater testimony could be given to the strength of Shea's library than that it is still, 100 years after it came to Georgetown, able to further serious research in its fields of interest. Completion of the cataloging of the books and manuscripts will finally, too, enable the pursuit of additional items to supplement and increase the utility of the collection as Shea left it. Even though it is probably too late in the day to add significantly to Shea's group of notable rarities, it definitely will be possible to acquire materials that will make the library's collections an increasingly significant resource for research into the history of the Catholic Church in the United States up to 1892, and thus, finally, realize the dream Shea had when he agreed to let his library come to Georgetown.