Mar 30, 2023 - Sale 2631

Sale 2631 - Lot 89

Price Realized: $ 406
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
(AFRICA.) Hopkins W. Erskine. Letter by a notable Liberian minister requesting school books for his students. Autograph Letter Signed to Walter Lowrie of New York. One page, 7 1/2 x 7 3/4 inches; unevenly trimmed and inscribed twice with the recipient's filing number. With detached postal cover (separations at folds) bearing encircled 6 stamped in red ink, and note "pr barque Edgar" and later pencil note "Letter from Liberia, West Africa, 1850." [Liberia], circa December 1850
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Hopkins W. Erskine (born 1820) was born to formerly enslaved parents in Tennessee, and emigrated to Liberia with his parents as a child. He became a Presbyterian minister there, and was also active in politics. This letter requests schoolbooks and educational supplies from the Missionary Board of the Presbyterian Church back in New York. It was written to Walter Lowrie (1784-1868), a former United States Senator who served on the Missionary Board of the Presbyterian Church from 1836 until his death. In full:

"In my last letters to you, I asked you to please to send me a work styled The Treasury of Knowledge. Please add 1 doz. Smith's Grammers & Geography and atlases and a celestial atlas and globe for myself. Please send them and charge them to me. I received with pleasure the memoir of your beloved son, the Rev. W.C. Lowrie. I had read much of his labours, sufferings, and death. I thank you for your kindness. It has encouraged me much in my labours. It will prove a source of encouragement to young men destined for missions, I trust. Please pray for me in this land of moral darkness."

The letter was delivered to New York via the ship Edgar, which was chartered by the New York Colonization Society to deliver emigrants to Liberia, arriving in December 1850 and arriving back in New York in February 1851. The book Rev. Erskine refers to was "Memoirs of Walter M. Lowrie: Missionary to China," published in 1850.