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Do you have a hobby? Are you a pastor with a passion for something slightly outside your vocation? We have written previously about pastors who were collectors of antiquities. William Buell Sprague was such a pastor.
Early in life, Sprague was given by a widow a collection of manuscript sermons preached by her late husband. He was ten years old at the time. A decade later he served in Virginia as the private tutor of Major Lawrence Lewis, nephew of George Washington, from 1815 to 1816. In this capacity, he came into possession of some of Washington’s personal correspondence — a happy providence that strengthened what became a lifelong hobby of (in fact, a self-described “mania” for) collecting autographs and letters from the hands of famous contemporaries and luminaries of the past. He also acquired an extensive collection of books and pamphlets.
It was from Judge Bushrod Washington, another nephew of the first American President and keeper of his papers, that Sprague acquired a batch of 1,500 manuscript letters from George Washington’s personal papers, on the condition that he leave copies of each letter in replacement. From this seed, Sprague was able to develop a full set of autographs by each of the 56 Signers of the Declaration of Independence, and a full set of autographs by each of Washington’s generals. It is believed that, as a pioneer in the field, he was the first person ever to complete a full collection of the Signers, which he had acquired by 1834. By the time he died, he owned three complete such sets of the Signers’ autographs.
His collection included autographs of Augustine, John Calvin, Theodore Beza, Philip Melanchthon, John Wesley, John Bunyan, Oliver Cromwell, Richard Baxter, William Wordsworth, Presidents of the United States, cabinet officials, Moderators of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, college presidents (he wrote a series of 84 articles on American college presidents for the New York Observer), and many others.
One particular letter written by Sprague to President James Madison sheds light on his efforts to obtain certain notable autographs.
Albany, NY. December 12. 1831.
Dear Sir,
I fear you will think, and not without good reason, that I am presuming too much upon your kindness in troubling you with one more inquiry in connexion with my favorite pursuit of collecting autographs. I have at length succeeded, tho’ not without great difficulty in obtaining a letter or some other document in the hand writing of each of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, with the exception of Button Gwinnett, and I have the prospect of being able soon to procure something (at least a signature) of his. I am now attempting the same thing in respect to the Signers of the Federal Constitution, and have already succeeded to a considerable extent. Among those in which I am deficient is John Blair of Virginia. Will you, My dear Sir, if my requests on this unimportant subject are not already past endurance, be so good as to inform me to whom of his descendants or correspondents I may apply for a letter or note from him, with the prospect of success. I have a letter from a person of the same name who was Govr of Virginia several years before; and whom I at first identified with the Signer; but I have since discovered my mistake. I have only to say in apology for troubling you about this matter, that I could think of no other person who would be likely to have it in his power to give me the information; and I confess I have presumed a little upon my recollection of your past indulgence. With every sentiment of perfect veneration, I am, Dear Sir, Yr most obedt and obliged,
William B. Sprague
In the process of building his collection, which has been estimated to include somewhere between 40,000 to 100,000 autographs overall, Sprague corresponded with many other fellow-collectors, including Joseph Harrison Hedges of Philadelphia and Rev. Thomas Raffles of Liverpool, England. The correspondence of Sprague was a key feature in the development of a later biographical project, his magnum opus, the 9 vols. (one other left in manuscript) of the Annals of the American Pulpit. The letters he received constituted a great part of that work.
Ultimately, much of Sprague’s autograph collection was obtained by the Historical Society of Philadelphia. Around 20,000 of Sprague’s pamphlets were donated to the Princeton Theological Seminary Library; 8,000 were donated to the Andover Theological Seminary; 2,000 were donated to Union Theological Seminary in New York; and many were also donated to Yale, his alma mater. Other beneficiaries include the New York State Library, the Connecticut Historical Society Library; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Wisconsin Historical Society, the New York Historical Society, and the American Antiquarian Society.
Some portions of Sprague’s autograph collection have been auctioned off, even in recent days. His own signatures on letters and sermons are not infrequently available for purchase on Ebay. He has been criticized for a willingness to expunge certain comments from letters by unorthodox persons of interest, such as Benjamin Franklin, but even though he was free with the scissors, and sometimes incurred the wrath of librarians who opposed his efforts to obtain all that he could for his personal collection, the greater part of his legacy is the found in the preservation of numerous historical documents and signatures, many of which he donated to institutions without any profit motive, or desire for fame, which otherwise might have been lost to history.
Sources consulted for this article include:
Draper, Lyman Copeland, An Essay on the Autographic Collections of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution (1889);
Jenkins, Charles F., “The Completed Sets of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 49, no. 3, 1925, pp. 231–249. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20086575;
Moore, Charles, A Biographical Sketch of the Rev. William Buell Sprague (1877)
Mulder, John M., and Stouffer, Isabelle, “William Buell Sprague: Patriarch of American Collectors.” American Presbyterians, vol. 64, no. 1, 1986, pp. 1–17. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23330916; and
O’Leary, Derek Kane, “William Buell Sprague and the Trouble With Antiquarianism in the Early U.S.” (2019).
