Sep 30, 2021 - Sale 2580

Sale 2580 - Lot 111

Price Realized: $ 594
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(CIVIL WAR--OHIO.) Family letters of a Cincinnati-area Unionist newspaper editor who was killed by a political opponent. 8 letters to and from the William Tomlinson family, various sizes, condition generally strong. With 7 original postmarked envelopes, most bearing stamps. Various places, 1860-70
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William Tomlinson (1823-1863) was born in England and became a newspaper editor and publisher in Ripley, OH near Cincinnati. Though he had been an active Democrat before the war, he supported the Lincoln administration. After serving as a captain in an Ohio regiment, in 1863 he began publishing the Loyal Scout, a "Union Campaign Paper." On 29 November 1863, he and his son got into a heated political argument with a Kentucky man named Mitchell. Mitchell then shot Tomlinson with a pistol, fatally wounding him. The son then stabbed Mitchell with a pen knife. The family's story has been told in Pat Donohoe's 2014 book "The Printer's Kiss: The Life and Letters of a Civil War Newspaperman and His Family" (copy included), which publishes many of the family's letters but not these.

Offered here are 8 letters between Tomlinson, his widow, their children, and an uncle. Two were written by Tomlinson in Cincinnati in 1860; three were written to him by his children in 1863. One of those was written on the letterhead of the Loyal Scout. Another, by his son William Byers Tomlinson on 8 November 1863, discusses efforts to collect on delinquent subscription accounts in Ripley, and discusses local Unionists: "Sim Myers . . . is still for the cause all the way through. . . . I would like to see that list of Rebel voters in Marion township published." On 17 January 1864, Mrs. Tomlinson received a condolence letter from the Cincinnati Typographical Union upon her husband's death.