Additional Resources
The following list of references was drawn from Julian Fowler's finding aid for the manuscripts: Calendar of manuscripts and broadsides in the Orrin W. June collection on the War of 1812 which can be accessed in Special Collections, Ref. Z1240 .O34 1965. This list of sources is not intended to be up-to-date, but instead shows where Fowler derived his information.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
Explanatory and bibliographical comments in the calendar itself are necessarily brief; more detailed steps in documentation are with the transcripts of the papers in their individual folders.
Identification of persons and circumstances was perhaps the chief problem. While for general coverage plenty of standard material was at hand in the Oberlin Library or in the June Collection, Poltroons and Patriots, a Popular History of the War of 1812 (1954) by Glenn Tucker and Benson J. Lossing’s Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (1869) footnotes and indexes of names and events. Along with these, the Dictionary of American Biography, the Dictionary of National Biography and the Biographical Directory of the American Congress combined to give leads for investigation in less accessible places. Catalogues of exhibits commemorating the sesquicentennial of the war at the Lilly Library of the Indiana University (1962) and the Clements Library at the University of Michigan (1964) were helpful.
For the considerable portion of the documents which deals with the activities of militia personnel from the states bordering on the Great Lakes or from adjacent areas, information could be drawn from various publications. Among them may be mentioned Alec Gilpin’s War of 1812 in the Old Northwest (1958); Selections from the Gano Papers printed by the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio (1920-1924); Richard C. Knopf’s Document Transcriptions of the War of 1812 in the Northwest (1957-) and data furnished by the library of the Ohio Historical Society. The Military Minutes of the Council of Appointment of the State of New York, 1783-1821 (1902) list ranks and changes of status for all militia officers from the largest units down to the company level, but by far the richest source for this state was the military section of the Public Papers of Governor Daniel D. Tompkins, 1807-1817 (1902). In some cases the letters themselves are printed here; in others the answer and/or the communication that prompted the letter help to explain its content. There are rosters of the other states compiled by their respective adjutants-general: Kentucky…Soldiers of the War of 1812 (1841); Records of Officers and Men of New Jersey in Wars 1791-1815 (1909); Roster of Ohio Soldiers in the War of 1812 (1916). Several volumes of Pennsylvania Archives are devoted to similar lists (Series 2, v. XII; series 6, v. IV, VII-IX).
With allowance for certain discrepancies, the identification of officers of the regular army and information about its units are based on The Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army…by Francis Heitman (1903); The Army of the United States: Historical Sketches of Staff and Line edited by T.F. Rodenbough and William Haskin (1896); List of Officers of the Army of the United States from 1790…compiled from Official Sources by William H. Powell (1900).
The collector’s main concern has been with land operations but some interest in related naval affairs is apparent. Here again, the standard histories gave most of the needed information, supplemented by assistance from the Mariners Museum, Newport News, Virginia.
Julian Fowler, 1965