The implements employed by Gibson’s army of scriveners were commonplace, though specific to the task: inkstands, steel pens, pen wipers, blotting paper, paperweights, pen racks and holders, pencil sharpeners, rulers, copying brushes, sealing wax, penknives, hones, pencils, erasers, blotters, leather-bound ledgers, letter books, and loose-leaf paper. With these tools, they produced hundreds of volumes, including “Weekly Reports of Letters Addressed and Referred to the Commissary General of Subsistence,” “Docket of Claims (Choctaws),” “Miscellaneous Records Concerning Contracts (Creeks),” “Decisions on Claims of Attorneys Against the Cherokee Nation,” “General Abstract of Valuations and Spoliations Allowed and of Balances Due,” “Ledger Recording Debts of Indians,” and so on, some cross-referenced with each other, others in triplicate, organized once by name, a second time by date, and a third time by account number. On the final page of four volumes of letters sent by the commissary general, an elated clerk wrote, “Finis—!!!”—a joyful exclamation, tempered by the fact that somewhere there was always another stack of letters to copy.
Their Sisyphean labor was a testament to the administrative ambitions of the Republic. The scale of the effort can perhaps be grasped by measuring the subset of “Settled Indian Accounts and Claims” that date to the decade of deportation in the 1830s and belong to the Office of the Second Auditor in the Treasury Department. If stacked atop the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal, they would surpass the height of her torch. The entire series of accounts and claims, covering the century between 1794 and 1894, would rise nearly twice as high as the Empire State Building. The paperwork was indeed monumental.
And consequential. It is not an exaggeration to say that Gibson and his clerks made life-and-death decisions. “Where medical aid shall become indispensable, you can procure it,” Gibson’s assistant J.H. Hook wrote to an officer supervising the deportation of the Choctaws. But the commissary general’s frequent admonitions against unnecessary expenditures discouraged officers from allocating funds to medical care. Medicines should only be purchased “when actually required or danger from sickness is apprehended,” advised Gibson. Officers were forbidden from acquiring full medicine chests and employing doctors, except in individual instances of illness or in case of epidemic. For the employment of a physician, warned the commissary general, there “must be the most satisfactory evidence of the necessity.” J.T. Sprague filed an invoice to be reimbursed for $35 for medicine he deemed necessary to keep native people “from perishing upon the road when sick.” The invoice was rejected and returned with an explanation: “The expenditure mentioned seems to have been irregular and the authority or propriety of having made it is not known.” The auditor left his initials and job title: “J.W.—Clerk.”