Apr 07, 2022 - Sale 2600

Sale 2600 - Lot 160

Price Realized: $ 1,375
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(MISSOURI.) Correspondence of James F. Mallinckrodt, a St. Louis modelmaker with a literary bent. 119 items in one sleeve; condition generally strong with a few items worn or stained. Various places, bulk 1862-1917
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Additional Details

James Ferdinand Mallinckrodt (1842-1921) was born in Missouri and spent most of his life in St. Louis as part of a distinguished extended German-American family; his Mallinckrodt second cousins founded a famous pharmaceutical firm. James served the Union as a lieutenant in the 17th Missouri Infantry during the Civil War, and then embarked on an eclectic career as a machinist, draughtsman, and scientific model-maker. He also styled himself a literary figure, publishing several pamphlets and frequent letters to the editor, and corresponding with famous authors. In 1915 he removed to Salt Lake City to live with his brother and nephew; he is not thought to have been a Mormon.

This lot includes 74 retained drafts of letters sent by Mallinckrodt, almost all of them from 1868 to 1882. 27 of them are to the noted abolitionist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher from 1879 to 1882, and several more are to Theodore Tilton, 1870-1874; Beecher and Tilton were antagonists in a famous love triangle which was national news in the mid-1870s. At least one of the letters to Tilton mentions free-love advocate and presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull, who also featured in the scandal. 5 letter drafts are to famed Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle from 1878, and another was addressed to theologian Charles Carroll Everett .

This lot's 27 letters received by Mallinckrodt are dated 1862 to 1872 and (mostly) 1897 to 1917. Just one has Civil War content, which a civilian friend wrote in 1862, complaining that Mallinckrodt's letter had taken 39 days to arrive: "It must have traveled about as fast as McClellan's army before Manassas." His closing evokes the favorite general of all German-Americans: "As long as you 'fights mit Sigel' I am your friend." Socialist labor activist William Krech of Minneapolis wrote a very long and intellectually dense letter in 1872.

Rounding out the collection are 16 family letters written in German, 1806-1918; Mallinckrodt's 1874 manuscript essay "Is St. Louis Prepared for the Manufacture of Locomotives?"; and a carte-de-visite of "H.M. at 67," most likely father Herman Mallinckrodt circa 1877.