Oct 02, 2012 - Sale 2287

Sale 2287 - Lot 292

Price Realized: $ 3,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 300 - $ 400
(MARITIME.) Carpenter, Orville. Archive of family letters relating to trade in New Haven, Baltimore, and Haiti. 56 manuscript letters, most of them from Orville to his mother and siblings, and 5 from brothers William and Horace; various sizes, condition generally strong. Vp, 1811-25
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Additional Details

Orville Carpenter (1790-1825) went to New Haven, CT to enter the mercantile trade as a young man, where he wrote the first 19 letters in this collection. One describes a "riot between the students of the College [Yale] and the boys of the town" in which "the mayor and others were struck & beaten by the students & Mr. Morse knocked down for dead" (29 April 1812).
In November 1812, Carpenter went to Baltimore to manage his employer's storage and commission business. He complains that Baltimore is home to "multitudes of the most corrupt, abject, depraved beings I ever met with. There is not perhaps on earth a more complete Sodom than Fells Point" (26 November 1812). From that point on, he spent most of his time in Baltimore; many of the letters discuss the War of 1812. He later made a specialty of trade with Haiti. A business visit to Haiti made an impression: "Those persons who form their opinions of the people here from what they have seen of coloured people in the States will certainly be under eroneous impressions. . . There was a grand ball in the evening . . . with a degree of splendour & elegance that I have never before witnessed" (23 August 1816). A later trip to Gonaïves, Haiti was less agreeable: "There are not more than twelve or fifteen white persons in the place, all merchants, all rivals & all jealous that another will get a bag more of coffee than himself" (6 April 1818). He also reports on the suicide of King Henri I of Haiti and the resulting upheaval in his 3 January 1821 letter.
In addition to the 51 Orville Carpenter letters are 5 written by his brothers Horace and William. The final letters in this collection are by William, reporting on Orville's death at sea while returning from Gonaïves in June 1825.