Oct 02, 2012 - Sale 2287

Sale 2287 - Lot 52

Price Realized: $ 19,200
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
(AMERICAN REVOLUTION.) Manuscript journal of Quartermaster Department at the Continental Army's supply depot. [3]-144 manuscript pages. Folio, 12 3/4 x 7 1/2 inches, modern buckram binding; first page worn and soiled, fore-edge of second leaf reinforced, final leaf laminated, otherwise only minor wear; extensive notes and indices by researcher James M. Ransom on endpapers. (JMR) Reading, PA and Morristown, NJ, 8 June 1778 to 12 November 1780
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This remarkable account journal documents the efforts of the Continental Army's Quartermaster Department to keep the troops supplied with wagons, nails, kettles, and all of the other hardware necessary for a fighting army. It begins a few months after Nathanael Greene's appointment as Quartermaster General in March 1778, and was kept at the Army's main supply depot under the immediate supervision of Deputy Quartermaster James Abeel, first at Reading and then starting in August 1778 at Morristown. The volume continues through the harsh winter of 1779-1780, when the main body of the Continental Army was camped at Morristown. The handwriting in this volume does not appear to match Abeel's; it may be in the hand of Timothy Ford, paid as a clerk on pages 96 and 125.
The accounts in this journal cover a variety of supplies being manufactured in bulk for Continental Army. Recurring charges are found for the manufacture of tents, harnesses, wagons, and knapsacks. Iron was ordered in bulk, and used to produce cups, nails, kettles, and other hardware by ironmasters such as John Jacob Faesh and Samuel Ogden. The volume names many individual seamstresses who produced the tents and knapsacks. New Jersey printer Shepard Kollock is paid for military printing on several occasions. Occasionally a member of the depot staff would be paid for bringing in a deserter (see 8 June and 7 December 1779, for example), and on 26 February 1780 a man was paid for "taking up a number of men who had been robing the publick." More than a year after the fact, a Phineas Fitzrandolph submitted charges for helping to "remove the stores on an alarm at Morris Town . . . in Sept 1778" (28 December 1779).
Sometimes supplies for individual officers are listed. Charges for "mending 2 cups & cannesters" for General Greene were recorded on 28 December 1779, and on 27 November 1779 one supplier was paid "for liquor for Gen. Green & escort." Christopher Smith was paid for making a set of marquee poles for General Washington's tent in Morristown on 9 August 1778.
Every page of this volume has interesting entries. This is not a regimental notebook listing the receipt of a few shirts--it documents the supply of a large portion of the Continental Army for a period of more than two years.