WHSP contains over 150,000 items on Seward's life, family, career. This collection of record was given by Seward's grandson between 1945-1951. Augmented by 1987 gifts from the Fred L. Emerson Foundation, WHSP continues to grow through endowment-funded accruals and other gifts. In addition to political papers, WHSP includes public, personal, and family letters, photographs, household, business, and public account books, manuscript speech drafts, diaries, scrapbooks, sheet music, school exercise books, literary writings, commonplace books, travel souvenirs, maps, phrenological evaluations, memorabilia, printed pamphlets, and other manuscript items, ca. 1730-1917. Over 50,000 letters include many to Seward and family members from politicians, including Presidents Lincoln, Johnson, John Quincy and Abigail Adams. Papers are present from his careers as New York State Senator (1831-1834), Governor (1839-1842), abolitionist U.S. Senator (1849-1861), and U.S. Secretary of State (1861-1869). When WHSP was cataloged and organized, little was done with family material. However, family subcollections provide extensive firsthand accounts of the life and times of a large and influential extended nineteenth-century American family. As an intact family manuscript collection from the mid-nineteenth century, the collection is extraordinary if not unique. The Emerson Foundation currently funds digitization, transcription, annotation of letters among biological family members and servants working at the family home (33 South Street, Auburn, NY), 1817-1873. Based on these papers, Professor Thomas Slaughter leads a student team creating an online critical family papers edition. Remaining material requiring digitization includes political papers previously microfilmed (1981); a collection of ca. 3,600 printed pamphlets covering political and reform subjects, including anti-slavery, temperance, religion, woman suffrage; and tens of thousands of manuscripts never photographed, including public and family items. We seek complete WHSP digitization, focusing on the ca. 90% not covered by the Emerson grant, thereby opening up this vast personal library and archive to students and researchers worldwide.
Among other regions, WHSP covers New York State, Washington, D.C., Alaska, Yosemite, family trips below the Mason-Dixon line prior to the Civil War, and Seward's activities as one of the first diplomats to go "around the world," visiting Japan, China, Ceylon, British India, Egypt and Palestine, Europe, among other places.