Stewart sending thanks, urging General Walker to visit.

Davis expresses his hope for a future Union based on Confederate principles:  “…The sentiment to which you refer as ‘common,’ is I hope the utterance of time serving self seekers, rather than of the people who dared and did and sacrificed so much for principle, and the rights their Fathers left them.  I trust your four boys will imbibe the patriotism of their Father and when in the fullness of time the restoration shall come that they may enjoy the blessings of liberty and community independence which the Constitution of the Union was designed to secure.  With this I enclose the autograph for which you asked…”

After the North’s retreat from Reconstruction, Davis’s vision of individual rights, limited government, and white racial superiority still held great sway in the South.

“Rachel went to Princeton last week. Thanksgiving Day – to witness the ball play – the day was horrid and she has been under the weather ever since having taken cold.”

Sherman, during an affair with a young widow, advises her on handling her teenage daughter: “Let her play her own game…Tell her to take her own way and you choose yours. If she becomes a nun she can do no harm and is dead to the world” while criticizing the power of the Catholic Church. He also muses about his own mortality, complains that he “shall not stay long” at his Senator-brother John’s home because “there is too much politics there to suit my taste,” and relates that his daughter caught a cold at the Yale-Princeton Thanksgiving Day football game.

“As you and I have both expressed friendly sentiments towards the citizens of the Flowery Kingdom, we may hope to be in high favor should we live till that time.”

“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.”

“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.

Jacob da Silva Solis-Cohen served in the Civil War and went on to become a pioneer in the field of head and neck diseases and surgery.

“I suppose you have ere long this heard of the destruction of the city of Chicago. 20,000 houses burned and 200 to 300,000,000 dollars loss  It was the biggest fire on record  Gid Hornish lost about 75 dollars by Insurance Companies breaking up since the great Chicago fire. The Company I am insured in, has gone up the spout.”

The Fifteenth Amendment provides that voting rights could not be based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude (slavery). It was ratified by enough states to become part of the Constitution on February 3, 1870. Maryland rejected it on February 26, 1870 – but finally did ratify it on May 7,1973.

An image of an older Garrison, as he appeared after his life’s work of abolition had been successfully completed.

In this brief note, Ogden thanks the famous Springfield, Massachusetts dictionary publishers the Merriams for a gift of a copy of their Pictorial Dictionary. Ogden references one “Mr. Gamble” as having stated that the volume was intended as a personal gift, but notes that the dictionary has “the name of our institution inscribed upon, or rather in it, from which I infer you intended it for the institution.” He then asks the Merriams to “decide the quarrel.”

Sherman turns down an invitation to a “Grand Reunion of the Western Armies at Chicago.”

This copy is stamped “THE PRESIDENT” at the top of the front page, indicating it belonged to President Andrew Johnson. The President would have read this copy of the act before Congress submitted it to him with some amendments on July 25. The report uses the early variant spelling of “Aliaska” for the territory and peninsula.

“My impression is … that Mr Wade will not offer me any place, if he shall become Prest… You can hardly tell how we all feel humiliated & mortified here at home, that the vote of Mr. F[essenden]. is the subject of bets on the street by gamblers.”

The Commander of the Department of the Missouri and the future Commanding General of the U.S. Army is not about to show favoritism to family when it comes to duty. He has some stern advice for his younger foster brother, Charley, delivered through his older brother.