Jun 27, 2024 - Sale 2675

Sale 2675 - Lot 95

Price Realized: $ 2,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
(CIVIL WAR--KENTUCKY.) Thomas W.W. DeCoursey. Letters of an outspoken Kentucky Copperhead to his daughter. 29 manuscript items: 28 Autograph Letters Signed to his daughter Martha Stella DeCoursey (1847-1886) of Liberty, MO, and one partial essay or oration; the essay worn with moderate loss of text, with only minor wear to the letters. Some letters accompanied by original envelopes with postage clipped; some accompanied by typed transcripts. Cold Spring and Newport, KY, May 1861 to November 1863
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Thomas W.W. DeCoursey (1812-1865) was an attorney in Cold Spring, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati. He was a vocal Copperhead opponent of the Lincoln administration.

This correspondence with his adolescent daughter begins on 19 May 1861, with the nation divided but not yet in heavy combat. He expresses hope that Congress will move toward peace, and that "we will not have any fighting anywhere during the summer & I feel strongly not at all." On 3 June he suggests that "the Black Republican abolition scoundrells . . . ought to have their ears cropt as a living example to the rising generation for their infamy, because they are not only Negro thieves, but they are the materials upon which is founded governments of military or any other kind of despotism." He announces his quixotic campaign for a Senate seat on 3 July. The progress of the war is discussed frequently in his letters going forward.

DeCoursey's 5 March 1863 letter describes his attendance at a controversial 19 February Copperhead event in Frankfort known as the "Kentucky Rebel Convention": "The army surrounded the whole square . . . with several thousand soldiers with loaded guns & fixed bayonets. . . . We were thus informed that we were prisoners & ordered to surrender, which of course as we had no arms, were obliged to do . . . and after taking our names & residences & being detained for about three hours we were told by this Lincoln dog that we were at liberty provided that we did not attempt while in Frankfort to make any nominations. . . . We therefore returned home, completely suppressed & subjugated. Here we no longer have the liberty of the speech or the press, but these tyrant scoundrels of this administration are only making the matter worse for themselves."

DeCoursey's 13 May 1863 letter describes attending the trial of Copperhead leader Clement Vallandigham: "I was in the courtroom a while this morning & heard Pugh arguing the habus corpus case in order to release him, but I think the writ will not be allowed & he will still be kept." He advises his daughter to "be extremely cautious in what you say & what you write as it is now dangerous here. . . . We are completely tied down here in every way."

In addition to the correspondence, a 4-page manuscript speech or essay from early 1861 draws the metaphor between the nation and a doomed ship: "Our commander is intoxicated, our clerk excentric & wayward . . . the rudder unshiped and the North Pole refuses to attract the compass." He blames the problems on "the presidential canvass of 1860" and particularly the 1860 Republican convention which embraced "principles of government antagonistical to the Constitution of the U.S. . . . proceeding on the part of the abolitionists of the so-called free states. . . . The revolution, therefore, that is upon us did not come from the South; the South is only guilty of resistance to revolution."