As part of the Early American Manuscripts Project, the Library has just digitized and made available online the Joseph Hawley papers. Hawley was a lawyer, legislator, and militia officer from Northampton, Massachusetts.  He also became one of the leaders of the American revolutionary movement in western Massachusetts. The collection contains  documents related to his private life,  religion in eighteenth-century America, and public affairs in Northampton and Massachusetts during the revolutionary era.

Hawley's commonplace book is also housed in the collection. Commonplace books were used to copy down extracts of books and other sorts of valuable information. As a lawyer, Hawley used his to collect material related legal matters. His commonplace book includes the most complete description of a major 1761 court case, which John Adams believed "was the first scene of the first Act of opposition to the Arbitrary claims of Great Britain" and set the American Revolution in motion.  You can read more about Hawley's commonplace book and the early American legal profession at The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History.  

About the Early American Manuscripts Project

With support from the The Polonsky Foundation, The New York Public Library is currently digitizing upwards of 50,000 pages of historic early American manuscript material. The Early American Manuscripts Project will allow students, researchers, and the general public to revisit major political events of the era from new perspectives and to explore currents of everyday social, cultural, and economic life in the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods. The project will present on-line for the first time high quality facsimiles of key documents from America’s Founding, including the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Drawing on the full breadth of the Library’s manuscript collections, it will also make widely available less well-known manuscript sources, including business papers of Atlantic merchants, diaries of people ranging from elite New York women to Christian Indian preachers, and organizational records of voluntary associations and philanthropic organizations. Over the next two years, this trove of manuscript sources, previously available only at the Library, will be made freely available through nypl.org.