The Counting House No. 14 — Filed Under Franklin

I went looking for Adrian Renaudel in William Bingham's papers. The finding aid was no help. A curator pointed me at a card catalog. The card catalog had no index of its own.

Two weeks ago I turned over a 1778 bill of exchange I had owned for the better part of thirty years and found, on the reverse, an endorsement in William Bingham’s own hand — Congress’s young commercial agent at St. Pierre, Martinique, routing the paper on to a Bordeaux merchant house. I ended that essay by promising the next one would report whatever a search of Bingham’s papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania turned up on the Frenchman named on the front of my bill: Adrian Renaudel.

This is that essay. It did not go the way I expected, and I want to walk through exactly how it went, because the how is the whole story.

I began where anyone would begin. HSP holds the Bingham Family Papers — Collection #1583, a genuinely enormous thing: two hundred boxes, roughly forty thousand items. I asked their archives staff whether the war years, 1776 to 1779, were represented, and I got back the kind of answer that is both completely honest and completely deflating. The collection is overwhelmingly post-1804 — estate administration, land dealings, the paperwork of a rich man’s death and its long aftermath. Of two hundred boxes, exactly one, Box 14, even spans the period I care about. Cary Hutto, HSP’s Director of Archives, confirmed there was also a second, much smaller “William Bingham papers” — Collection #53 — and then confirmed the thing I did not want to hear: it begins in the 1790s. My working theory, that the Martinique-era correspondence was sitting in a distinct Bingham collection waiting to be found, was simply wrong. The finding aids had answered my question correctly. There were no war-period Bingham papers grouped under Bingham’s name to find.

I want to name Cary Hutto here, and name her generously, because what she did next is the reason there is anything to write about at all. Instead of leaving me at the dead end the finding aids described, she pointed at something else: HSP’s old physical card catalog — the manuscript index, drawer after drawer of typed and handwritten cards — which has been digitized through FamilySearch. Individually catalogued Bingham documents, she said, are scattered across many different collections, and the card catalog is how you find them. An amateur had asked a professional a narrow question, and the professional pointed him somewhere better than he knew to look.

A brief note before I go further: I publish these primary-source essays on early-Republic financial history weekly. If the format is your thing, a free subscription gets each one delivered by email as it comes out. It’s the easiest way to follow the project as it develops.

Here is where the small, instructive deflation happened. I went to the digitized card catalog expecting a search box. What I found was 946,124 photographs of index cards. FamilySearch says so in plain language on the collection page: “This collection does not have a searchable index. Only images are available.” And of course it doesn’t — a photograph of a card is a picture, not text. Nobody has keyed in a million cards. “Digitized” and “searchable” turned out to be two different words wearing the same coat. What had been done was to move the filing cabinet online. You page through it, drawer by drawer, exactly as you would standing in front of the physical cabinet in the reading room in Philadelphia.

So I paged through it. This is the part I did not expect to enjoy, and did.

The only thing about the catalog that is text is the drawer labels — 516 of them, each naming the first and last card it contains, like the guide words at the top of a dictionary page. Reading the labels alone, without opening a single drawer, placed Bingham in drawer PC 1-39, whose label runs Bilse, Benjamin – Binney, family. That narrowed 946,124 images to one drawer of about a thousand. Inside that drawer, the cards are in date order, and the Bingham run occupies images 177 through 392. They were read one at a time, with an AI assistant doing the paging, which is the only way through a catalog that cannot be searched.

Twelve cards fall inside the 1776–79 window I cared about. And there — this is the find — were three cards datelined St. Pierre, Martinique, all three outgoing, all three in Bingham’s own hand, and all three filed in the same box:

14 January 1778 · St Pierre, Martinique — a Continental agent’s commercial letter, “Business, sales of indigo — lumber, tobacco etc.” An autograph letter signed.

16 September 1778 · St Pierre, Martinique — on trade conditions in the West Indies, privateers, and the war at sea. An autograph letter signed.

9 October 1779 · St Pierre, Martinique — a promissory note to the Intendant of Martinique. An autograph document signed.

That third one is a negotiable instrument Bingham signed to a French colonial official — a counting-house document, in the counting-house newsletter, run to ground by paging through photographs of a filing cabinet. All three sit in the Gratz Collection, Case 1, Box 3.

And then the catalog told me why no finding aid had ever surfaced any of this, and the answer is the reason this essay has the title it does.

Simon Gratz, the collector whose autographs make up much of what I was reading, collected autographs — and autographs are filed by who signed them. Not by who received them, not by what they concern, not by whose story they belong to. By the signature. So Bingham’s incoming mail — the letters that would tell you what Congress’s agent at Martinique was being ordered to do — is not catalogued under Bingham at all. It is scattered under the names of the men who wrote to him. A letter of 3 June 1776 from the Committee of Secret Correspondence, about purchasing muskets in Martinique, is catalogued under Franklin, because Franklin signed it. Other letters sit under Livingston, under Morris, under Lovell, under Hooper, under Paine, under Warren, under Holker. Every finding aid I had consulted over months had been answering its question correctly and honestly. The question was wrong. I had been asking where are Bingham’s papers, and the catalog’s answer was that the most important ones are filed under Franklin.

That is the sentence I keep turning over. A letter is indexed under the person who wrote it, not the person who needed it. For a working merchant like Bingham, whose whole function was to be the man everyone wrote to — the node every American ship and every Continental bill passed through — that indexing convention is close to a curse. His significance was as a recipient. The catalog has no drawer for recipients.

Now the honest part, because this newsletter’s one firm rule is that an unsourced specific is worse than an honest gap, and a corrected specific is better than either.

I went into the card catalog looking for Adrian Renaudel. He is not there. Not in the Bingham run, and not in his own drawer, PC 1-385, where a “Renaudel” card would sort between Renardi and Renault. I read those cards. They are consecutive images — 862 and 863 — with no gap between them. You can look at the exact place in the alphabet where the name would be and see the two cards on either side of the space it does not occupy.

His endorsing partner is not there either — and here I owe a correction, because I got this one wrong in public. The reverse of my bill names a Bordeaux merchant house: David Cypian & Cypian frères de Bordeaux. In a short note I posted on 24 July I called Cypian “a French frigate captain.” That was a guess dressed up as a fact, and it was wrong. The document says plainly what the firm was — merchants of Bordeaux — and I should have followed the document.

Cypian is not in the catalog under his own drawer, PC 1-124, either. Three drawers, 368 cards, and neither French name appears once.

Here is the guardrail I want to be careful about, because it would be easy to overstate this into a conclusion it cannot support. A card catalog indexes documents by principal name — the sender, the recipient, the signer. It does not index the contents of documents. Adrian Renaudel’s name is written on the face of a bill of exchange that passed through Bingham’s hands. A bill enclosed inside, or referred to within, one of Bingham’s own Martinique letters would never earn a card of its own. So the correct, honest formulation is not Renaudel is not at HSP. It is Renaudel is not in the index. Those are very different claims. The first would close the case. The second only closes one route to it — the route that runs through the catalog by name. It says nothing about what might still be sitting inside the text of that 14 January 1778 letter, which no catalog card would ever quote.

Which is why the whole question now rests on a single box. Gratz Collection, Case 1, Box 3 — the box holding all three St. Pierre letters — is the one place left that could still name Renaudel, and the only way to read it is to be in the room. That is not more research I can do from home. That is a train to Philadelphia, or a researcher hired to sit in the reading room in my place. I put the odds of recovering Renaudel from this thread at somewhere between one in five and one in three, and two clean negatives in the catalog have not moved that number, because neither negative tested the thing that matters.

There is something I keep coming back to about what the digitization actually did and did not do. It moved a million cards from a cabinet in Philadelphia onto a server, where I could reach them from a desk in New Jersey. That is a real and generous thing; a curator’s tip and an afternoon of paging did work that would otherwise have cost a day in a reading room. But the cards were photographed, not read. No machine turned them into words you can search. The index was reproduced without being made legible in the way we now expect indexes to be legible. You still have to do what the catalog has always required — know the alphabet, find the drawer, and turn the cards over one at a time. The technology changed where the cabinet lives. It did not change the discipline of using it.

And the last, smaller thing, which is the one I did not go looking for and cannot stop thinking about. The men who ran the American Revolution’s Caribbean supply line were writing to a young man in a port town, and two and a half centuries later their letters survive — but not under his name. To read what Congress asked of William Bingham, you do not look up Bingham. You look up Franklin. The person who needed the letter is not the person the archive remembers. The archive remembers the hand that signed.

Renaudel was not in the drawer.

— Paul

If the practical side of this is what interests you — where these collections actually live, which of them are open to anybody, and how to reach them without leaving your desk — I keep a standing page of it: Where to Look. The card catalog described above is on it, along with the rest of the infrastructure these essays are built from. It costs nothing and it is not a reading list; it is the working directory I would have wanted when I started.

Next week: Robert Morris — the piece I’ve been carrying and displacing since July, and the one the Bingham thread can’t advance past until somebody is physically in the HSP reading room with a call slip for Case 1, Box 3. So Morris takes the 12th, and the Philadelphia question stays open on my desk where it belongs.

Thank you for reading.