A New England Prison Diary by Hershock Martin J.;

Author:Hershock, Martin J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Chapter 6

DIARIES, DEAD ENDS, AND DISCOVERIES

I became familiar with Timothy Meader Joy entirely by accident and was moved to write about his life and times through sheer coincidence and good fortune. In the process of conducting research for my dissertation at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, I was drawn to the correspondence of James F. Joy, a Michigan railroad attorney and politician of the Civil War era, whose papers were part of a larger collection of manuscripts gathered by his son, the Detroit industrialist Henry Bourne Joy, one of the founders of the Packard Motor Car Company. After having finished reading a box of correspondence related to James Joy's railroad interests and local politics, I requested the retrieval of additional materials from the collection housed in the archive's stacks. Hoping to find something of interest to fend off the boredom attendant with what might be a lengthy wait, I took one last look in the box I had just been working in and noticed a file labeled “genealogy.” Sensing that the file might provide an interesting diversion while I waited for my new materials to arrive, I removed it from the box. There, appropriately enough tucked inconspicuously away amid numerous pedigree charts and other ordinary documents prepared by a genealogist hired by Henry Joy to compile his family's ancestry, was an eighty-four-page, unbound, handwritten journal. The heavy, yellowed, unlined pages, stood in stark contrast to the brighter, typescript documents immediately surrounding it and possessed a, by then, very familiar musty smell. While a bit tattered around its edges, the pages were covered with the neat copperplate script that we associate with a formal education. Attached to the manuscript was a simple receipt documenting the purchase of the diary—written in 1812 by Timothy M. Joy (who, it turns out, was a cousin of Henry Joy's grandfather, also named James, mentioned in the journal)—by the Joy family genealogist from a New England antiques shop. Curious, I began to read, “Ipswich Prison, March the 20th, 1812. Confined in a dismal awful Prison….”

The timing of my discovery of Timothy Joy's prison journal could not have been better if planned, as it came at a point in my professional training where I had become enamored with a relatively new and somewhat controversial mode of historical analysis known as microhistory. As a history student, I was, by this point in my training, very familiar with the ever-growing body of books written by social historians exploring the lives of everyday folk. But as much fuel for my imagination as I found in Paul Johnson's meticulous description of the collective experience and religious awakening of early nineteenth-century shopkeepers in Rochester, New York, or in Thomas Dublin's sweeping exploration of the lives and experiences of the Lowell Mill operatives (to cite but two examples), I desperately desired more; I wanted to be able to bore down into individual households and into the lives of these folks to understand how they, as individuals, experienced and shaped the changes outlined in these works.

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