Letters from William Buell Sprague

American clergyman, biographer, and autograph collector William Buell Sprague was born in Hebron, Connecticut, on October 16, 1795. After preparing for college as a protégé of the Reverend Abiel Abbot, Sprague attended Yale College, graduating in 1815. In 1816 he traveled to Woodlawn in Virginia, where he became a tutor for the family of Major Lawrence Lewis, who was a nephew of George Washington. Sprague continued tutoring until he entered Princeton Theological Seminary, where he was a student until 1819.

On August 25, 1819, William Buell Sprague was ordained and installed as an assistant to the Reverend Doctor Joseph Lathrop, pastor of the Congregational Church of West Springfield, Massachusetts. Upon Dr. Lathrop's death in 1820, Sprague became the pastor of Congregational Church, serving for ten years. His second pastorate was the Second Presbyterian Church in Albany, New York, which he assumed in 1829. During his forty years as pastor of this church he became one of the most widely recognized American clergymen of his day. Sprague was known as an eloquent speaker, a scholar of Protestant history and biography, a prolific author of more than 150 titles, and an avid collector of autograph manuscripts.

Sprague's most enduring work, his nine-volume Annals of the American Pulpit (1857-1869), continues to provide invaluable information regarding Protestant ministers in America through 1850. Sprague's other publications included numerous biographies, collections of his sermons and addresses, as well as two compilations of letters, Letters from Europe (1828) and Visits to European Celebrities (1856), which chronicled his travels and encounters during two excursions to Europe.

As a collector of pamphlets, manuscripts, and autographs, Sprague's tenacity was unmatched. At the time of his death, Sprague had amassed more than 40,000 autographs, including 1,500 George Washington letters, which he had been allowed to select during his days at Woodlawn, a collection considered the largest and most valuable in the United States at that time. During his lifetime he had acquired a complete set of autographs of signers of the Declaration of the Independence and the Constitution, as well as generals of the American Revolution.

Although Sprague was zealous in his collecting, his own opinion of collectors is recorded thus: "I would advise you to have as little to do with an autograph collector as possible, for though there are some honorable exceptions yet, as a class, I think they rank A No. 1 in point of meanness. " (DAB, IX, p. 477)

After his resignation at Albany, Sprague made his home with a son at Flushing, New York, where he died on May 7, 1876.

Malone, Dumas (ed.) Dictionary of American Biography. Volume IX. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964. pp. 475-477.