?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(CALIFORNIA.) Edwin Stanton. Letter written en route to California to make his national reputation, with CDV and related report. Autograph Letter signed to his legal associate Peter H. Watson. 4 pages, 8 x 6 1/2 inches, on one folding sheet; folds, light soiling to final page. Aboard the steamer Sonora in the Gulf of California, 13-17 March 1858
Edwin McMasters Stanton (1814-1869) is best known as Secretary of War during and after the Civil War. He was a successful Pennsylvania attorney with no national reputation until 1858. With a friend serving as President Buchanan's attorney general, Stanton was selected to travel to California to represent the administration in the complex Limantour land claims. This letter was written on a steamship, six days before his arrival in San Francisco. He discusses preparations for a high-profile patent case, McCormick vs. Manny, in which the famous inventor of the reaper was suing Stanton's client. Stanton discusses the difficulty of writing out legal briefs on an ocean steamer during a gale, and documents his journey at length: "Our engine had the same accident during the gale of Monday & Tuesday that occasioned the loss of the Central America, but it was discovered early . . . to prevent disaster. . . . We suffered no other ill consequence as yet but being badly frightened--that I consent to." Four days later, just before arriving in San Francisco, he describes another storm in which "the sea sloshed over our hurricane deck, knocked in the ports, poured into the state rooms, and frightened everybody generally." Stanton's work in organizing and analyzing the existing Spanish land records soon gained him the trust of the Washington insiders, leading to appointment as Buchanan's attorney general just two years later.
WITH--a related printed report on Stanton's expedition: "Expenditures on Account of Private Land Claims in California," 56 pages, unbound, uncut, and unopened. 36th Congress, 1st Session, House Ex. Doc. 84,. Washington, 22 May 1860.
AND an undated carte-de-visite portrait of Stanton by Coddington & Davidson of Warsaw, NY.
