?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
"THE YANKEES TURNED THEM LOOSE ON THE WORLD" (CIVIL WAR--LOUISIANA.) Pair of letters to Austin Phelps from his daughters in Louisiana. 16 pages on 5 sheets, various sizes, minor soiling and wear at folds. Bayou Beouff, Cheneyville, LA, 28 July 1863 and 24 December 1865
These letters are addressed to Austin Phelps (born 1796) of Scipio, NY. Two of his daughters had married and moved to Louisiana. The younger of them, Columbia Miriam Bennett (born 1839), wrote a heartbreaking letter home in 1863. She reports at length on the death of her young son Austin while the family was on the run from advancing Federal troops, and describes two friends who nearly starved in the siege of Port Hudson. The Union Army had attempted to lure the slaves from her father-in-law's plantation: "His negros all stayed with him and went along as usual except for one poor old man they forced away to drive a teem." The second letter was from an older Phelps daughter, Elizabeth Ann Scofield (1825-1885). Writing from her Catalpa Grove Plantation during the first months of Reconstruction, she assessed the lot of freed slaves: "The negroes in this region of country have been a very dissatisfied people since they obtained their freedom, not that they did not want their freedom, but they wanted something more: land, houses, horses, homes, mules, farming implements, at least a year's supply of provisions, in short a little capital to set up on." These articulate letters offer an unusually nuanced picture of the wartime South by two young women with mixed loyalties.
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