Jun 12 at 12:00 PM - Sale 2708 -

Sale 2708 - Lot 61

Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(CIVIL WAR--CONFEDERATE.) James T. Aldrich. Letter to college president Robert E. Lee, requesting "words of counsel and encouragement" for his newly-enrolled son. Autograph Letter Signed (retained draft?) to Robert E. Lee as president of Washington College. 3 pages, 10½ x 7¾ inches, on one folding sheet, with no docketing; folds, minor foxing. Barnwell, SC, 11 September 1869
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Additional Details

This letter dates from four years after the war, when Robert E. Lee was serving as president of Washington College in Lexington, VA (later renamed Washington and Lee University in his honor). The letter writer, a wealthy South Carolinian, refused to send his son to the University of South Carolina, which had just been integrated under Reconstruction rule. He evokes the veneration which southerners still felt for the General.

"James Aldrich, my only son, will hand you this communication. I send him to Washington College to be educated, for the sole reason that you are its president. The So. Ca. College, under present circumstances, is not to be thought of as a fit place for the education of a Southern gentleman. . . . I feel assured you will occasionally give him words of counsel and encouragement, and I know they will not be lost upon him." After discussing tuition details, he concludes "Hoping you may long be spared to your country, I am, General, very respectfully your obed't servant."

The letter writer was attorney and prolific author James Thomas Aldrich (1819-1875). His son James Aldrich (1850-1910) enrolled at Washington in 1869, became a lawyer, and served for many years in the South Carolina legislature.

Provenance: found in the estate of the consignor's grandmother-in-law.

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