Hidden Literacies

The Memorial

     This letter addressed “To His Excellency Zachary Taylor, President of the United States of America” is a “memorial” – a form of petition to an authority, laying out the basis for requests – written by John W. Newsom, a Stockbridge Mahican Indian, on behalf of 21 Munsee “memorialists,” who represented the Munsee community then living on Delaware lands in Indian Territory, in what is now Kansas.
     There are two versions, dated March 15 and March 29, 1849, and although the earlier one is labelled “Copy,” the discrepancies between the two indicate that it was more of a draft. Richard W. Cummins, the Indian Agent at Fort Leavenworth, forwarded the memorial to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Saint Louis, and it now resides among the “Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-1851,” in the National Archives in Washington DC. Cummins’s cover letter and two pages of commentary by the ethnologist and former Indian Agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft are part of the set of documents.

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