DEPARTMENT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH. 159 



Van Buren, Polk, and Donelson papers. Meantime Professor Bassett, the 

 editor of the series, has spent many weeks in the work of annotation, which 

 has been carried well into the period of the War of 1812. 



When the series of volumes of the Correspondence of the British Ministers to 

 the United States was originally planned, it seemed necessary to resolve that 

 the work of editing should be performed by the Director himself. Agreeable 

 as the work is, and deeply as the editor is impressed with its interest and 

 importance, it must be confessed that his normal duties have left him, since 

 his return from Europe in November 1921, little time for its prosecution. He 

 has made such progress as he could. Meantime, by the careful work of Miss 

 Fisher and Miss Lockhart in London, a large mass of transcripts has been 

 made in the Public Record Office and sent in regular fortnightly consignments 

 to Washington. What has been thus far received, from among the Foreign 

 Office Papers in that repository, embraces, on the one hand, the instructions 

 and other communications sent by the successive Foreign Secretaries in Lon- 

 don to their diplomatic representatives in Philadelphia and Washington from 

 1791 to 1807; on the other hand, of the more numerous despatches sent by 

 the latter to the Foreign Secretaries, it embraces those sent from Philadelphia 

 by the first minister, George Hammond, in the period from November 1791 

 to July 1795, and those sent during the ensuing period of nearly a year by 

 Phineas Bond while he was charge d'affaires in the interval between the 

 departure of Hammond and the arrival of Robert Liston, the second minister. 

 More than enough material to constitute the first volume has thus arrived. 



These two series of communications — of Foreign Secretary to minister and 

 minister to Foreign Secretary — will furnish the main substance of the suc- 

 cessive volumes. The purpose, however, for which the series is planned, 

 that of exhibiting the spirit and development of British policy toward America 

 by showing, so to speak, what British officials said to each other while their 

 diplomatic action was going on, is further subserved by making use of the 

 correspondence of the British ministers with other British officials besides the 

 Secretaries of State. With this in view, the editor, while in the Public Record 

 Office in the preceding year, sought for such additional despatches in other 

 sections than the Foreign Office Papers, and it has been deemed expedient 

 that the transcribing carried out during the present year should include these 

 miscellaneous gleanings, throughout the whole period to the War of 1812, 

 in advance of the completion of the two main series of official despatches. 

 Accordingly, the receipts of the year have embraced a considerable amount 

 of correspondence, from the Admiralty Papers, that passed between the British 

 ministers and British admirals on the Halifax or Bermuda station, a little from 

 the papers of the Marquess Wellesley, at the British Museum, and much 

 from the private papers of Francis James Jackson, envoy in 1809-10, which 

 were years ago turned over to the Public Record Office by his representatives. 



Last year's report explained the peculiar value of the private letters, out- 

 side the regular series of public official despatches, which ministers wrote to 

 the Foreign Secretary or his assistants, or to relatives and friends in England, 

 and described the efforts made to find such letters and obtain permission to 

 use them. That report was dated September 1, 1921, and so did not include 

 the results of the last five weeks of the writer's stay in London. During that 

 time, in addition to the continuance of work in the Public Record Office and 



