Sep 28, 2023 - Sale 2646

Sale 2646 - Lot 127

Price Realized: $ 1,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
(CIVIL WAR--MASSACHUSETTS.) Sherman Converse. An observant civilian reflects on the war in frequent letters to his old friend. 34 Autograph Letters Signed to Yale classmate Rev. Thomas Frederick Davies; various sizes, mailing folds, minimal wear. Monson and Roxbury, MA, 1860-1864
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Sherman Converse (1790-1873) graduated from Yale in 1813 and was a prominent publisher in New Haven and New York through the 1830s. He wrote these letters to friend and Yale classmate Thomas Frederick Davies (1793-1865), a retired Congregational minister and editor from Westport, CT.

Most of these letters include Converse's strident commentary on the war and current events. His 4 October 1860 letter discusses their classmate Augustus Longstreet, president of the University of South Carolina: "I have received no letter from him for a long time. He is very sensitive on the subject of slavery, and I sent him a newspaper article or two which I wrote and which I presume he did not like, and so dropped the correspondence. . . . I supposed you would vote for Lincoln, but I marvel. The signs of the times indicate the early downfall of the Beast." His letters from early 1861 express anxiety but some hope for a peaceful resolution: "Perhaps the slaves of the South are to be as peacefully emancipated as were the Jews from the bondage of the Pharaoh" (7 March). By 14 October he was critical of the war effort: "3-month enlistments--a boy 10 years old would have deserved a flogging for such an absurdity. . . . Next the march to Richmond before Scott was half ready. . . had the movement been postponed till 150 thousand men had been collected and prepared for a campaign with a term of enlistment for 2 or 3 years, the rebellion would have been crushed before October." On 22 October he declared that Lincoln "lacks independence and a mind and energy sufficiently comprehensive for the present emergency . . . our present administration as a whole deficient in talents and honesty." As with almost every American, the war was not just an abstraction. Converse had a nephew in the 15th Massachusetts who barely survived Ball's Bluff: "He would not be taken prisoner and, taking off all his clothes, he tied them up in a bundle and plunged into the river with the bundle on his shoulders, but when halfway across the river the bullets whistled about his head so thick that he was obliged to let go his bundle and dive and swim under water to avoid them, thus he landed on the shore without a rag on him. . . . My other nephew and his cousin are prisoners at Richmond" (23 November).

On the coming Peninsula Campaign of 1862: "A few days will make the Virginia roads passable, and then we shall see the Army of the Potomac in motion. If the Rebels stand their ground, the fight will be desperate and the slaughter great, and if McClellan wins, the bogus reign of Jeff Davis will be mighty short" (6 March).

The letters are not all war-related. On 7 July 1862, he introduces Davies at length to an Abanaki missionary, Peter Paul Osunkhirhine of Pierreville, Canada. On 6 October 1862 he reflects on the death of a later Yale student, Jonathan Prescott Hall of Newport, RI, who "married a daughter of old DeWolf of Bristol, Rhode Island, who accumulated a great estate in clandestine Negro traffic, in violation of our laws, and was said to have thrown overboard one whole cargo of slaves when hotly pursued by one of our cruisers."

On 19 June 1863 he opines that "should the plan of paying the Negroes for their labor succeed in Louisiana and Missouri, it will doubtless lead to its universal adoption, and the curse will be removed." By 28 October 1864, he had gained confidence in the president: "I trust that God will give us the victory and that Lincoln will be triumphantly elected."

With--18 other letters to Rev. Davies, many from other Yale Class of 1813 classmates, many with Civil War content, most 1860-1863