This collection contains two of his manuscript histories of the Civil War: a 1,200-page description of the war up to Gettysburg, and a 700-page politically-focused manuscript entitled "The Political Triangle." Griffith illustrated both with caricatures of personages, maps, and political cartoons drawn by Griffith and the text reflects his copperhead upbringing.
The remainder of the collection consists of a newspaper-like manuscript from 1872, "The Reservator," including political commentary on history and current events; a memoir of his Iowa boyhood during the Civil War (also made to look like a newspaper); another newspaper-like manuscript, entitled "Monthly Notings" written while in the Washington Territory, 1886; two notebooks, a scrapbook, and an album of family and friends' cartes-de-visite and tintypes.
As a boy growing up in Iowa during the Civil War, John Irwin Griffith appears to have imbibed his father's copperhead sentiments and his vehement opposition to Abraham Lincoln. He became a life-long Democrat and sometime politician. Griffith moved first to Belmont, Nevada, in the 1870s, where he practiced as an attorney and judge, and secondly, in 1884, to Snohomish, Washington, where, in 1886, he was elected as chair of the state Democratic Convention and as a Democratic representative to the state Constitutional Convention in 1889.
