by Steven Tice

Huntington Library conservator Fiona Johnston is in the middle of a sticky problem, thanks in no small part to 19th-century writer Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In 1844, Emerson wrote a lecture titled “The Young American.” In it he said, “The bountiful continent is ours.” John L. O’Sullivan, a prominent New York editor at the time, evoked the words “manifest destiny” in proclaiming that it was the right—even the duty—of the United States to expand to the Pacific Ocean. Some 160 years later Johnston has found herself repairing a diary from the Mexican War (1846–48), a conflict that was manifest destiny in action.

While the American Revolution and the Civil War have loomed larger in the national consciousness, the Mexican War was a pivotal event in American history. At the close of the war a defeated Mexico ceded almost all of present-day California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. Today, scholars use Huntington materials to gain a better understanding of this era, especially by consulting the observations of participants such as Jacob Medtart Smith.

When Smith served in the Mexican War, he carried a packet of writing paper with him and eventually filled 36 pages with his experiences between July 1846 and June 1847, including entries during the two-day Battle of Buena Vista (Feb. 22–23, 1847). His unit, the Arkansas Regiment, “represented the worst of the volunteer troops who supplemented the regular army,” says Peter Blodgett, the H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western Historical Manuscripts. “Undisciplined and poorly trained, they seemed to do everything they could to embarrass the army.”

The Huntington has only one other firsthand account by an enlisted man from the Mexican War. “This fact makes Smith’s perspective valuable,” explains Blodgett. It is among the 2,000 objects that are being treated this year by the Huntington’s staff of five conservators and one volunteer.

This diary speaks volumes about its own wear and tear. Smith wrote during a year of travel on horseback across more than 2,000 miles of Texas and northern Mexico. He (and the diary) endured 25-mile marches in summer heat and winter cold. Diary passages reveal his tribulations: “Oh! What a storm…our tents blew down…it was a hell of a cold night…crossed the Rio Grande by swimming most of the horses.” Such fluctuations in temperature and humidity wreak havoc on a soldier’s morale—and on paper.

The real damage came with a well-meaning but misguided repair effort about 25 years before it was donated to The Huntington in 1988. A page-by-page reinforcement with clear tape—considered state-of-the-art adhesive around 1960—had done more harm than good. The tape had become embedded in the paper and darkened over time, obscuring much of the writing.

In the conservation lab, Johnston first examined the diary with her unaided eye and then with a microscope. The sheets had a fair share of water stains (think rain, snow, Rio Grande) as well as numerous tears and “losses” (areas of missing paper). But Johnston would devote most of her attention to the adhesive, which was acidic and had weakened the paper over the years. Surgery is an apt word to describe much of her work. Her instruments are tiny spatulas, scalpels, and tweezers as well as small artist’s brushes and cotton swabs.

She began by warming a thin metal spatula on a heating iron before using it to soften the adhesive under the cellophane strip. This allowed her to lift off the tape, but some of the adhesive remained. She then donned a respirator to get ready for the task before her: dissolve the rest of the adhesive without damaging the paper or affecting the ink in any way. By spot testing more than 20 solvents on discrete areas of the diary, she was able to settle on a group of four that proved to be both safe and effective. Throughout this painstaking procedure—taking up to three days per sheet—the pages rested on a counter equipped with a suction device that drew the liquid through the paper.

She then used Japanese tissue to repair tears and fill in the missing areas of paper. Made with plant fibers native to Japan, the tissue is strong, flexible, and naturally acid-free. The new tissue is “sympathetic” in hue to the original, says Johnston. “The finished effect should not distract a reader—it should not draw the eye.”

Conservators are forever asking themselves when to treat an object and when to leave well enough alone. Both Johnston and Blodgett agree that nothing should be done about the water stains that appear on the top half of many of the pages. As Johnston puts it, “The dramatic water stains are part of the history of the document.”

Steven Tice is a project archivist in the Manuscripts Department at The Huntington.