by Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist
I’d like to tell you about a small collection at the MHS that includes a truly wild diary. It was written in 1838 by Samuel Leonard of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, as he traveled throughout the Southern United States exhibiting cotton gins to potential buyers.

The diary is wild because of all the historical “timelines” Leonard crossed in just a four-month period. He was like a 19th-century Forrest Gump. It was fun to research and catalog because I never knew what was coming next.
The diary is 48 pages long, and the first four pages are missing, but we join Leonard on 3 February 1838 in Washington, D.C. From there, he traveled to multiple Southern states, including South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Here’s the highlight reel:
- In D.C., he met John Pennington, who had “a moddle and drawing of a machine for flying he is a droll kind of a man but verry good humoured he has to Bear ridicule from all quarters he proposes to give lectures to the citizens of Washington on the possibility of flying by steam power.”
- He also met Anne Newport Royall, “an editores[s] of a news paper she is a woman that is about looking into every boddys business the Congress men seem to be afraid of her for she finds out all or sufficient of their prank to hold a power over them.”
- On 24 February, Congressman Jonathan Cilley of Maine was killed in a duel with Congressman William Graves of Kentucky at the Bladensburg Dueling Grounds in Maryland. Leonard wrote, “I saw the carriage that brought in the corps[e], but I had no inclination to see the body.”
- At a hotel in Charleston one night, Leonard “was awoke by the cry of Murder in the yard.” The cause of the commotion was none other than Junius Brutus Booth, the father of John Wilkes Booth. “Being crazy by liquor,” he had attacked fellow tragedian Tom Flynn with an andiron. Leonard editorialized, “This is what I call a real tradgady.”
- In Florida, he traveled through the thick of the Second Seminole War, writing about a recent alleged attack on white settlers “six or seven miles from this place.” From old newspapers, I learned he was probably referring to the Purify family near Tallahassee.
- He witnessed a fire that destroyed a whole city block in downtown Mobile, Alabama.
- His steamboat nearly capsized into the Mississippi River during “a verry severe tempest […] it was so dark I could not see my hand before me.”
- Not long after, he was on the steamboat Tuscumbia when a fireman fell into the Cumberland River and drowned.
- Lastly, he visited “the old General,” a.k.a. Andrew Jackson, at the Hermitage in Tennessee. Leonard found the former president “verry free and sociable but his health was not good.” It should be noted that this time, the Cherokee people were being forcibly removed from their ancestral lands as a result of the Indian Removal Act signed by Jackson eight years earlier.

Leonard encountered enslaved Black people nearly everywhere he went and witnessed auctions of trafficked Africans. In one instance, he carefully noted the price paid for each person. About one “heartrending” auction, he wrote, “it is hard business to separate husband and wives parents and children, brothers, and sisters.” Given that Leonard made his living selling a machine that helped to perpetuate and expand slavery, there’s no indication that he ever reckoned with his own complicity.
Samuel Leonard’s diary is fascinating for so many reasons. To dive even further into his life, the MHS holds another collection of his papers.