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McDowell, Thomas D.

[Autograph letter, signed, by rising confederate politician, arranging to sell an enslaved man without his knowledge.]

Elizabethtown, [North Carolina], 9 November 1846. 1 p. (10” x 8”), with address panel and no postal markings on verso. CONDITION: Very good, with folds and moderate foxing.

This letter by slaveowner and future North Carolina legislator Thomas David Smith McDowell (1823–1898) charges its recipients to sell “my man Harry” as soon as Harry arrives, via raft, in Wilmington:

If you can get five hundred dollars, you can take it, nothing less than that sum, and as much more as you can, for I verily believe he is worth considerable more than that amt to any one who has an overseer. I need say nothing respecting his qualities as you are acquainted with him, being sound and healthy and able to do as much work as any negro I ever saw.

Harry, as McDowell makes clear, has no notion of the real reason he is being sent into town:

I would rather he would not know that I intend selling him. If you are unable to obtain my limit, please give him a pass and send him home immediately.

Having inherited the Purdie plantation from his father, physician Alexander McDowell, Thomas’s objective was evidently to rearrange its ‘assets.’ This letter, apparently McDowell’s retained copy, shows his correspondents as Gillespie and Robeson, who were advertised in the Wilmington Journal the year before as “Agents For the sale of Timber, Lumber, and all other kinds of Produce” since 1814. Both the Gillespies and the Robesons fought in the revolutionary war and were prominent land- and slave-owning families of Bladen and neighboring counties.

McDowell, who had graduated from the University of North Carolina just three years before inheriting Purdie, went on to serve terms in the state House of Commons (now the House of Representatives) from 1846 to 1850, and in the senate from 1852 to 1855 and 1858 to 1860. He initially opposed secession, but after the firing on Fort Sumter changed his mind, and was afterwards elected to both the Confederate Provisional Congress and the First Congress.

REFERENCES: “McDowell, Thomas David Smith,” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, ed. William S. Powell, online; Wilmington Journal, 27 June, 1845, Vol. 1, No. 141.

Item #7418

Price: $2,250.00