Collections : [University of Michigan William L. Clements Library]

The Samuel G. Drake Additions and Corrections manuscript is comprised of 121 pages of corrections, revisions, and notes Drake compiled around 1866 while he edited a new edition of Francis Baylies's 1830 book An Historical Memoir of the Colony of New Plymouth.

This manuscript is broken up into chapters one through nine (excluding chapter five), totaling 91 items (121 manuscript pages). Each chapter title page contains lists of the sources Drake referenced in that chapter. In chapter one, Drake gave his justifications for editing Baylies's work and explained the extent of his contributions; he was primarily concerned with Baylies's lack of citations and the need to update the book with new information that arose since its initial publication.

In this manuscript, Drake synthesized new secondary sources alongside his own analysis of primary sources. He kept his own notes, including family trees and short biographies of individuals. For example, on page eight Drake sketched Elizabeth Poole's family tree, and on page seven he described his difficulty finding information for her short biography. At the end of chapter one, he listed all the towns of New Plymouth and gave brief histories of them. Drake also kept detailed footnotes throughout the manuscript to keep track of his sources, add commentary, and provide clarification. In some chapters, Drake dedicated two or three pages to copies of long excerpts from other sources. For example, in chapter four, he copied primary source letters from men who lived in Plymouth in the seventeenth century, like John Cotton and Josiah Minslow.

The Thomas Morton New English Canaan or New Canaan manuscript is Samuel Gardner Drake's 1830 transcription of Thomas Morton's book, New English Canaan or New Canaan (2nd edition: Amsterdam, 1637). The work describes Native Americans and New World flora and fauna, and satirizes the Massachusetts Bay colonists.

The Thomas Morton New Canaan manuscript is a copy of the 1637 Amsterdam edition of Morton's major work, New Canaan. Antiquarian Samuel Gardner Drake made the transcription in 1830, from John Quincy Adams' printed copy. In addition to a full transcription of all three volumes of the work, Gardner included Adams' and his own sources for further reading on Morton, as well as "Notes by the transcriber," in which he recounted his request to Adams to borrow the work and laid out his reasons for making a copy (p. ii).

Each of the three "volumes" that make up Morton's work addresses a different subject. The first contains information collected by Morton on Native Americans, including a description of a recent deadly plague (p. 23), child-rearing customs (p. 31-32), and lengthy accounts of Native Americans' home, and religious and agricultural practices. Morton was a fairly sympathetic, if at times confused, observer, and found a great deal to praise. In the second volume, Morton focused on the natural features of the New World, and cataloged and commented on a range of trees, herbs, animals, and minerals. He expressed great admiration for the wilderness, calling the New World "a Country so infinitely blest" (p. 92). The third volume satirizes the austerity of the Puritans and criticizes them for the massacre of members of the Massachusett tribe at Wessagusset (p. 111). It also incorporates several poems by Morton.