Collamer Family Papers

The Collamer Family Papers consist of three cartons of letters, business papers, legal notes and dockets, account books, speeches and orations, and other manuscripts. Although the collection includes material from the early 1800s to the 1910s, the majority of the Papers fall in date between 1840 and 1865. The arrangement of the collection is chronological, within the following four major categories: Correspondence and miscellaneous papers; Legal papers; Speeches and writings; Bound manuscripts and printed volumes

The Collamer Papers contain an interesting miscellany of sources for Vermont and American historians. Students of social history will find much good material in the dozens of Jacob Collamer letters from Washington to his family in Woodstock in the 1840s-60s. There is a good deal on Vermont's role in the Civil War, including letters from such noted Green Mountain leaders as Erastus Fairbanks, Justin Smith Morrill, Frederick Holbrook, Peter T. Washburn, Eliakim P. Walton, and Frederick Billings (researchers will want to check Special Collections' holdings of the papers of notable mid-l9th century Vermonters for manuscripts that complement the Collamer collection on Vermont in the war). Collamer's legal notes and docket books offer some details on Vermont courts and legal practice in the 1810s-1850s. Three good 1813 letters to Collamer from University of Vermont friends assess the effects of the War of 1812 on UVM and the town of Burlington (carton 1, folder 2).

Although the collection is clearly not a full record of Collamer' s involvement in national affairs, there are some important pieces in the Papers. A few of the many Jacob Collamer notes and speeches in Carton 3 shed light on the antebellum and war years. Individual items of particular interest include: a series of December 1859 letters to Collamer on John Brown's visit to Vermont (1-35); Collamer's notes on the 1862 meeting of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate to discuss the prosecution of the Civil War (2-4 and 2-5); and four August-September 1864 letters between Collamer and John Austin Stevens, Jr., concerning the advisability of replacing Abraham Lincoln as Republican candidate for president (2-14). There are only a few letters from notable national leaders, and Collamer family tradition indicates that the correspondence from famous figures was pulled from the Papers in the early decades of the twentieth century. Other than Jacob Collamer's letters to his family, nearly all of the correspondence in the collection is addressed to him.