DEPARTMENT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH. 187 



history of the African slave-trade and the importation of slaves into 

 English America, primarily the importation into the mainland colo- 

 nies. The main lack, when the work was interrupted, was the in- 

 spection of the manuscript materials in England. She has spent 

 the past summer in London in that research, chiefly at the Public 

 Record Office, but partly in the British Museum. At the end of her 

 stay in England a visit was made to Bristol, where in the eighteenth 

 century many merchants were engaged in the trade and where a con- 

 siderable amount of material respecting it still exists. In the Public 

 Record Office the main collection to be examined was the papers of the 

 Royal African Company. It is a collection of enormous extent (some 

 2,000 volumes), and its examination would have been almost hopeless 

 but for the fact that the Department some years ago had secured a 

 systematic report upon its subdivisions and contents from the compe- 

 tent hands of Mr. A. Percival Newton, now professor of imperial and 

 colonial history in the University of London, and who, together with 

 some of his special students, was most helpful on the present occasion. 

 Out of these various sources, but especially from this last-named col- 

 lection, which extends from 1662 to 1822, Miss Donnan secured a rich 

 store of documents for her volumes. 



Mrs. Catterall, resuming work upon restoration of health, has carried 

 her examination of judicial reports of slave cases, condensation of judi- 

 cial opinions, and excerpting of narratives, through the reports of 

 South Carolina and Kentucky, and some way into the series of Vir- 

 ginia Reports. 



The Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, under the editorial care of 

 Professor Bassett, has been all copied and collated down to the fol- 

 lowing dates : the letters of Jackson from 1788 to 1845 (the whole mass) , 

 and the letters to Jackson, of which a smaller number are to be printed, 

 from 1788 to March 4, 1829, representing about two-thirds of the whole. 



The Director's main object in going to England for the summer was 

 to prepare the way for still another documentary publication which he 

 hopes in time to achieve, a series of volumes of the Correspondence of 

 the British Ministers in Washington. It is thought certain that, in 

 the next series of years, American historical scholars will devote in- 

 creased attention to the diplomatic history of the United States, in 

 which our relations with Great Britain must always have the foremost 

 place. It is conceived, moreover, that such a publication as is pro- 

 posed may well be productive of much good outside the limited ranks of 

 the historical profession. Without exaggerating in the least the extent 

 to which volumes of documents are read by the general public, or filter 

 to it through the minds of historians, it is quite possible to believe that a 

 full publication of the instructions which British Secretaries for 

 Foreign Affairs sent to the representatives of their government in 

 Washington, and of the answering despatches in which the ministers 

 conveyed the information on which in large part those instructions 



