Have you ever noticed just how different handwriting is between generations? Your parents wrote for different purposes than you do, and their parents did too. Different systems and forms of writing have fallen in and out of favor for hundreds of years, a trend which continues to this day, as many schools phase out cursive entirely. Because of this constant state of change, there are quirks of handwriting in documents from less than 200 years ago that are unfamiliar and sometimes confusing to a modern reader. One of these quirks is the long s.

Originally, in modern English, there were two ways to write the letter s: “long” and “short.” The short s is the s which I am currently using to write this sentence, and which has become the only s used in today’s writing. The long s resembles, as suggested by the name, a stretched version of the short s. In print, it looks like this: ſ. 

You’ll notice that this is similar to a lowercase f. The same is true for the handwritten long s, which extends above the median and below the baseline, much like a lowercase cursive f does. This means that reading manuscripts from the 18^th and 19^th centuries can be difficult, and might give you the impression that people from that time lisped constantly.

The list of rules for the use of the printed long s is extensive. For example, the terminal s in a word had to be short, as did the s before an apostrophe; if the word started with an s it had to be a long s; a long s was used before a hyphen at a line break, even if otherwise the s would have been short…the list goes on. Luckily, the rules were much simpler for handwritten texts. The only place in which a long s was used in handwritten manuscripts was when there was a set of two s’s together within one word. The first s of a double s would be written as long, and the second would be short (e.g. Mississippi would have been written as Miſsiſsippi).

By all accounts, in the United States, the long s fell out of favor in print by the 1820s. However, it appears to have persisted in handwriting for decades afterwards.

Ogden Official Bonds

I first came across the handwritten long s in a series of historical records from the city of Ogden. These records range from 1851 to 1890, and many of them are written by hand. The long s can be found all over these records, but the most useful set of documents for looking at the evolution of the long s are the bonds of elected officials. 

Officials were required to take an oath and give a bond before entering into the discharge of their duties. The purpose of the bond was financial security for the city: if the official neglected to perform their duties, then the money in the bond would be paid out to the city.  These bonds were written in standard legal language, which contained the phrase “we bind ourselves jointly and severally in the whole our heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns.” Because there is a double s in the word assigns, the first s can be written long (aſsigns). Some of the scribes writing these documents chose to use the long s, and some did not. This makes the documents a useful tool for ascertaining just how popular the long s was, and when it began to fall out of favor. 

The handwritten bonds range from 1851 to 1872, after which all of the bonds were completed on printed forms. From 1851 to 1854, all of the bonds were written with the long s. From 1855 to 1866, the majority of the bonds were written with the long s, but there were some bonds which only used the short s sprinkled throughout. In 1867, use of the long s began a trend of decline, and it fell off precipitously, so that by 1869 none of the bonds used the long s.

We can only speculate about why there were instances of both types of writing within the same years, and why there was such a steep drop off. Although we typically know who in the city government created and handled the substance of the documents, it is nigh impossible to determine who actually wrote them. Professional copyists would have written most of the government documents which would be printed today, and because they did not sign their work, it is difficult to determine anything about their lives or who they were. I would guess that in Ogden at this particular point in time, the long s’s were becoming increasingly rare, and were only being preserved by the work of an older generation of scribes and copyists. As that generation retired around this time, so did the long s. 

Resources: 

• CSUN University Library. 2019. “The Long S.” California State University, Northridge. 2019. https://library.csun.edu/sca/peek-stacks/esses.
• Kratz, Jessie. 2021. “The Long S.” Pieces of History. National Archives. 2021. https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2021/12/14/the-long-s/.
• West, Andrew. 2011. “The Rules for Long S.” TUGboat 32 (1): 47–55. https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb32-1/tb100west.pdf.
• Utah State Archives, Series 26381