It turns out that even the transcription of Washington's words alters the conditions: In the actual letter, a facsimile of which appears in the volume, Washington uses the word "particular," not "peculiar." Words matter, and this difference transforms the meaning of Washington's declaration.

The inclusion of selected outside material raises additional and equally troubling questions. If you are going to publish a book celebrating a collection, it seems logical that all the material should be from that collection. The Met does not sneak a Ben Shahn from the Whitney into its American Wing catalogue just because it does not have a good one. But that is precisely what Davis and Mintz do here, and they justify the action as insuring "an accurate and coherent view of a given subject."

More than forty of the documents are from outside the GLC. Most of them are used to strengthen the pre-Revolutionary sections, where the GLC is especially weak. Even for the nineteenth century, which Davis concedes "constitutes the heart of the anthology," it is the outside documents that provide relief from the numbing cadence of elite male discourse that suffuses the volume. Here is Susan Huntington in 1815: "Dear children! I tremble for you, when I reflect how dangerous is the path in which you are to tread, and how difficult the task of directing you in safety." Here is Kale, one of the Amistad captives, writing in 1841: "If America give us free we glad, if they no give us free we sorry." Here is William Smith, an immigrant, writing in 1850 about the transatlantic voyage: "The passengers being sea sick, were vomiting in all parts of the vessel." Thus the inclusion of non-GLC documents in this volume ironically serves to highlight the lacunae of the Gilder Lehrman Collection itself.

With the incorporation of texts outside the GLC, the rationale for the volume disappears. Davis and Mintz want to provide an "interpretive anthology," but the holdings of the GLC, impressive as they are, cannot begin to encompass the diversity, complexity and cacophony of American history. The scattershot additional sources that Davis and Mintz import to the book are insufficient to bring this anthology anywhere close to the claims they make for it.

And even with those documents brought on board, there are curious elisions and omissions. Spellings are often silently modernized, and ellipses sometimes mangle the text. To take a specific example, a section on "Nat Turner's Insurrection," Samuel Warner's "Authentic and Impartial Narrative," owned by the GLC, is included, while Turner's own Confessions, apparently not in the GLC, is left out. There are other lost opportunities as well. Images from the GLC are dispersed throughout the volume but receive no commentary or interpretation at all. The Civil War section includes two photographs of African-Americans that help illuminate how the pressure for emancipation came from the "slaves themselves," as the editors suggest, but readers of the anthology will come away thinking that Lincoln alone steered the ship of state across a boisterous sea toward emancipation.

The deeper problem, however, is not what Davis and Mintz do with the documents; the problem is the kind of documents that are available to them in the GLC. If asked to provide an anthology of American history using a variety of collections, they would undoubtedly produce a volume that offered a multidimensional portrait of America. But that was not their assignment. It was risky enough for them to stow on board some forty outside documents; any more and the voyage might never have left drydock.

The Boisterous Sea of Liberty offers passage in first class only. Most social and cultural historians, however, prefer the close quarters of steerage. Fortunately, there are other boats worth boarding for a documentary journey through American history: Peter Nabokov's Native American Testimony, Linda Monk's Ordinary Americans, Al Young's We the People and Ira Berlin's Free at Last. There is also a seaworthy vessel commissioned twenty years ago: Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretive Anthology. One of the best primary-source readers ever constructed, it navigates the tensions and ambiguities of the decades before the Civil War. It was edited by David Brion Davis with Steven Mintz's help.

Gilder and Lehrman might also do some traveling in less-charted waters. If they surf the Net, they will find at www.bibliofind.com a first edition of Thomas Skidmore's radical treatise The Rights of Man to Property. Compared with the tens of thousands of dollars they paid for a letter from Lincoln, it is a steal at $200.

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