“When you find him out for me just tell him to write to me your say so is sufficient recommendation if he is not worth a dollar I don’t care so he does not drink whiskey to and excel play cards and has business qualifications I want the jewel to consist of himself. I want him to be handsome intelligent polite good natured no profusion of fob chaines necktie or big words need apply for they cannot fill my eye” (Harriet Binford, May 11, 1860)

 “the banks have nearly all suspended and what little money a person can get is doubled and discounted.... gloom and despair seems to have over every branch of business … yesterday we had a very large meeting of the citizens of this County to have an expression of their feelings and greatly to my surprise about half were in favor of a disolution of the union and thereby destroying the fairest fabric ever reard by mortal hands and on that I consider second only to the religion we profess I consider that all that this country has suffered by all the plagues pestilence and bankrupsy as small in comparison to a disolution of this union” (Josiah Parker, November 30, 1860)

 “we are at this time just about half way between tow large contending armeys the one at Cairo numbers at this time I suppose about 30000 the one at New Madrid about 18000 and it was expected yesterday that they would meet in Misouria.... we are in daily expectation when we will have an army in this part of Kentucky perhaps and most likely at Hickman it is thought that as soon as the election is over which is tomorrow that there will be something disisive done in Kentucky I fear she has waited to long for it is now thought that she will again become the dark and bloody ground which if it should will be fearful to contemplate....”  (Josiah Parker, August 4, 1861)

“Things are getting along here pretty nicely since the President’s Proclamation declaring all slaves free after the first of January 1863. The niggers are leaving quite fast and it does make their owners so mad. There is nothing scarcely that pleases me so well as to see how awful ugly it makes them feel to see their darkies toddle.”

A substantial and well written collection during and around the Civil War from an Illinois soldier and later officer of the active 107^th U.S. Colored Troops Infantry. Despite the racist language, Safford was strongly anti-slavery and volunteered to lead colored troops.

“Read what they say…  Abraham Lincoln has usurped power, violated the Constitution, and put in peril the liberties of the people, but Jeff. Davis has not…. The South may make war on the North, but the North must not defend itself.... They have not a word to say in behalf of the Union, and our own imperiled liberties…”

The Peace Democrats, or Copperheads, were a vocal minority of Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War and the administration of President Abraham Lincoln, and were willing to recognize an independent Confederacy. This anti-Copperhead broadside, probably printed for the 1863 Connecticut gubernatorial, turns the resolutions of the February 1863 Hartford Convention against the Copperheads.

At top, a caricature shows Copperheads attacking Lady Liberty, who is holding a Union shield. First published in Harper’s Weekly on February 28, 1863, over the title, “The Copperhead Party.—In Favor of a Vigorous Prosecution of Peace!” this cartoon came to symbolize all those who opposed the Lincoln administration’s conduct of the war.

“your best quality of ornamented revolvers…”

President Abraham Lincoln often presented gifts to foreign heads of state or dignitaries, and Samuel Colt’s pistols were excellent examples of American ingenuity and craftsmanship.

“The only public office I have held since the war was the Presidency of the Maryland Agricultural College which I resigned at the expiration of the first year…”

More than a decade after its destruction, the first commander of the CSS Virginia responds to a request for an autograph. On March 8, 1862, Captain Franklin Buchanan and the crew of the CSS Virginia gave the U.S. Navy its worst defeat to that point, and not eclipsed until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor nearly eighty years later. Wounded during the battle, Buchanan did not participate in the second day of the Battle of Hampton Roads, when the USS Monitor confronted the CSS Virginia in an hours-long battle of the ironclads.

“The Harriet Lane under your command having been detached from the Collection District of New York & assigned to duty under the Navy Department You are hereby instructed to proceed to within ten miles due east from, and off Charleston…”

By April 1861, federal troops at Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, were running out of supplies. President Abraham Lincoln authorized a relief expedition, including ships with supplies and five hundred soldiers, escorted by four Navy steamers, including the former revenue cutter Harriet Lane. On April 11, the appointed arrival day, she became the first U.S. Naval ship to fire a shot at the beginning of the Civil War.

“we had but one object in view that was to prevent the Merrimac from running the blockade, which we reasoned she desired to do in order to visit Yorktown and play the old harry with our gunboats there. Directly opposite our hospital within a half mile lay the Nangatuck and on her left our iron gunboat which I heard called 5 different names [the Monitor]…We now have confidence in our ability to sink her if we could have her where we want… our commodore is determined not to attack her off Sewall’s point or about there, as there is not water enough to maneuver his large vessels as well as the risks of their getting aground…, she is certain to be sunk if she ever passes fortress Monroe.”

One month after the Battle of Hampton Roads, in which the USS Monitor confronted the CSS Virginia in an hours-long battle of the ironclads, a Union soldier stationed near Fort Monroe details the CSS Virginia’s attempt to draw the Union navy into battle. The Virginia was finally trapped, and Confederates destroyed it to keep it out of Union hands, on May 11^th.

Grant was determined to take Vicksburg, and retaking the surrounding countryside in Mississippi and across the river in Louisiana were critical parts of his plan. Here, he moves around troops to further his design after an important showing by the USCT a few days earlier. In his Memoirs, Grant observed that “This was the first important engagement of the war in which colored troops were under fire,” and he praised their actions.

“she bore her accumulated miseries with a serene resignation, an intrepid fortitude, a true heroism of soul, of which the history of the world does not afford a brighter example.”

While both armies still occupy the field, General Meade congratulates his soldiers on their “glorious” victory at Gettysburg. This is one of a handful of surviving battlefield copies of the victory message that infuriated Lincoln.

In January 1861, former president John Tyler issued a call for a “Peace Conference” to resolve sectional division and avert Civil War. Here, he writes to Washington D.C. Mayor James G. Berret to thank the City Council and the Willard brothers for providing the concert hall at the Willard Hotel for the meeting. The meeting convened on February 4, 1861 with 131 representatives from fourteen free and seven slave states attended, none from the deep south. Tyler made opening remarks to the audience that included six former cabinet members, nineteen ex-governors, fourteen former senators, fifty former representatives, and twelve state Supreme Court justices. But seven southern states had already seceded, and representatives were already meeting in Montgomery to form a new Confederacy.

With General John Foster’s Implementation Order, Signed by AAG of First Regiment, New York Engineers, Who Saw Extensive Action during the War. Although the order does not actually mention mules, Sherman later ordered that the army could lend mules to the new settlers, providing the origin of the common phrase, “40 acres and a mule.” In one development arranged by General Foster, the Freedmen’s Colony of Roanoke Island, 2200 freedmen had settled on household plots. The families who settled these lands were devastated when, soon after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson revoked Sherman’s orders, stripping the emancipated slaves of their homes and in many cases their only source of income. When the Army abandoned the colony under Johnson’s presidency, most of the freedmen had to return to the mainland in search of work.

“You can not possibly regret more sincerely or profoundly my disagreement with members of the administration upon some of the late measures of Legislation than I do myself… [The crops] should be & should have been husbanded & guarded as gold. Not a grain of corn or blade of grass should have been wasted or lost or misapplied… Many plantations have been virtually abandoned to the negroes without any suitable superintendent. Many persons still at home under the uncertainty of getting details are failing to plant their usual crops...”

Vice President Stephens writes the Secretary of War strongly voicing his objections to acts passed by the Confederate Congress and about the economic, social, and military disintegration of the Confederacy.

“June 18. Reached Front Royal, & met there the famous & very handsome, rebel spy, Belle Boyd, who gave to me the rebel flag, waving which, she led the attack upon Kenly in May.”

The “stars and bars” circular canton pattern with eleven-stars was used for First National flags from July 2, 1861, when Tennessee and North Carolina joined the Confederacy, until November 28, 1861, when stars were added for Missouri and Kentucky. The other side of this rare two-pattern configuration is a tribute to the “Bonnie blue flag that bears the single star,” the unofficial first Confederate flag.

Frederic d’Hauteville’s small autograph note has been loosely stitched to the flag: “Confederate flag. Taken by F.S.G d’H. and given by him to E.S.F. in 1862(?). To be given to Freddie d’Hauteville when he is fifteen.” His first wife, Elizabeth Stuyvesant Fish, died in 1863. Freddy, his son by his second wife, was born in 1873, thus dating his note about the second gifting of the flag to between 1873 and 1888. The flag remained in his family, preserved in perfect condition, until 2015, when contents from their Swiss castle were sold, clearing the way for the property to be sold; it is now on the market for $60 million dollars.

“call us not weeds, we are flowers of the Sea.”

“I do not think the Ironclad Monitor deserving of the credit of sea boat although they can stand a great deal…I am rather on the old democratic order – go for the Union always – but religiously believe in observing the Constitution literally – This horrible negro question I ever have deplored and view those in the North as inimical to the success of our Republic who have kept up this strife – of course there is no excuse for the South but certainly the abolitionist is much to blame”