Edward W. Hoffman

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-life-of-col-samuel-m-wickersham-based-on-his...

More of the correspondence of my great-great-grandfather, a Pittsburgh iron merchant who married his third wife, my great-great-grandmother, in 1860 as the Civil War loomed. She seems to have been very diligent about keeping his correspondence; none of hers to him or to anyone else survives, but we also have a few letters from the daughters of his earlier marriages, addressed to “Mother” (ie their stepmother).

The first volume in this series dealt with the courtship between Samuel Wickersham and Fanny Belt; they lived most of their subsequent lives together, so the only other substantial amount of correspondence comes from his six months of service in the Civil War (briefly in charge of the Pennsylvania 22nd regiment and then second-in-command of the Pennsylvania 169th), and then settling back into the swing of things immediately after when she was spending a lot of time in Philadelphia – partly due to her father’s illness, but also their relationship seems to have had the occasional rocky patch.

Wickersham did not have a terribly dangerous civil war. The Pennsylvania 169th lost a total of eleven men in the few months of its existence, all through disease and none in combat. The closest they got to serious action was pursuing the defeated Lee southwards after Gettysburg, but at that point the Confederates were too busy running away to shoot back. Most of Wickersham’s letters to his wife complain that he has not been paid yet, that she hasn’t written recently and/or that he has got diarrhoea again. There is also some rather sweet commentary on the children, including my great-grandmother getting her first teeth.

Trigger warning: racism

The most interesting thing for me is that although he was fighting in a war to end slavery, he was still pretty racist. From the 7 December 1862 letter:

"4,000 contraband [freed slaves] are quartered about the town in tents or shanties. General Nagle says the best houses in these parts are occupied by them, and woe betide the officer who would displace them to accommodate the soldiers. I told him that if the needs of comfort of my men come into collision with those of the negroes, I fear I shall be recusant to any such orders."

From 13 February 1863:

"I hope to do my whole duty to my country under all circumstances, but the negro I never did and never will acknowledge but as an inferior race. I am not and never was an abolitionist, but now to end this war, I would take from our enemies all that strengthen their arms to strike us and if we could afterwards deport the entire negro race to some other clime a source of the most wicked crimes and demoralising influences on our own race would be removed."

From 21 July 1863, after the post-Gettysburg pursuit:

"The backbone of this heinous rebellion is broken and the end of it appears. Let us thank God for this. The reign of the n****r in the South ends with it and white man will take his proper place there and Virginia will yet be what nature has so fitted her to be the great state of the union."

It is quite an extraordinary leap to describe the antebellum South as being under the “reign of the n****r”. And I am left not quite understanding why he was so enthusiastic about the war, if he was so prejudiced against African-Americans and actually opposed to Abolition. I guess that there is context here that I have not seen.

One more point of historical mystery: on 25 October 1866, he writes to Fanny,

"I have just been tendered the appointment of Asst. Secretary of War & asked for my acceptance. What say you? Mr. Stanton retires & Gen. Sherman takes the position of Secretary of War & ’tis under the new Secty that the offer is made to me."

President Johnson was in perpetual conflict with Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, and indeed his attempt to fire him in 1868 would eventually lead to his impeachment. In October 1866, Johnson must have been hoping that the November elections would give him more room to manoeuvre. Wickersham was friends with Andrew Curtin, the Governor of Pennsylvania, who presumably would have recommended him in Washington.

In fact, the radical Republicans, who felt (entirely correctly) that Johnson was being too soft on the former rebels, won a crushing victory in the 1866 elections and we hear no more of Wickersham’s ambitions in the Executive Branch. (Forty-odd years later, his son was appointed Attorney-General by President Taft.)

There are some interesting personal glimpses as well. There is a mysterious incident where Wickersham fauxpologises, twice, to Fanny for destroying a photograph of her that he did not like, and then tries to guilt her into coming home from her parents, a pattern that is all too familiar to students of human nature. Wickersham’s oldest daughter, Katie, writes several letters to her stepmother about her courtship with a boy we know only as Will G. She never married and died of tuberculosis in her forties. A number of Wickersham’s sketches have survived, as has a single faded flower plucked from the fields of Virginia in the spring of 1863.

There is no point in sugar-coating the past; our ancestors were people of their time, and it is better to acknowledge the facts of racism and injustice than to pretend that they did not exist. This book is probably of limited interest except to the specialist, or to Wickersham’s (many) descendants.… (más)

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3246303.html

My second cousin once removed, Edward Wickersham “Wick” Hoffman, inherited from his mother a box which had originally contained bottles of Majorska Vodka. On closer investigation, he discovered that it contained a large number of family documents, which he has done us the great service of transcribing and publishing. In this first volume of four, he has collected the early correspondence of Samuel Morris Wickersham, Wick’s great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather. Most of this dates from the years 1859-1860, when he was courting his future third wife, my great-great-grandmother Frances Wyatt Belt, and writing to her in Philadephia and Baltimore from points west and north of there. She obviously kept all his letters (including a rather sweet one from his sixteen-year-old daughter by his first marriage); he doesn’t seem to have kept any of hers.

Sam Wickersham had fallen on hard times in 1859. His first two wives had died young, leaving him with two daughters and two living sons, the youngest of whom, a baby, was the future Attorney-General of the United States (his firm, Cadwallader, Wickersham and Taft, is still going - no, not that Taft, his brother). Several of Sam’s business ventures had failed, and he was locked in a lawsuit with his brothers over their father’s estate (he had died in 1858, a few months before Sam’s second wife died in childbirth). He was based in Pittsburgh, Fanny Belt was in Philadelphia where her father was an impoverished itinerant homeopathic doctor. Sam was born in March 1819, Fanny in August 1833, so she was 25 and he was 40 when they got to know each other in mid-1859. The correspondence ends when they married in early 1861, the Civil War having already started. They had five children over the next eleven years, giving him a grand total of nine. The oldest of the five married the metallurgist Sir Robert Hadfield; the middle one was my great-grandmother (my great-grandfather was also into heavy metal, and also postal chess); the youngest inherited the family papers and passed them to his own daughter, who passed them to her son Wick.

Most of the letters are just the usual passionate communication from a chap who can’t quite believe his luck at scoring with a pretty young woman, but there are a couple of really fascinating moments. In the summer of 1860 Sam heads 1200 miles north to the Keweenaw peninsula in Michigan, to investigate his holdings in the North American Mine at Phoenix, and writes to Fanny with some lovely descriptions of landscape and nature (and the eclipse). He liquidated that investment for $50,000 (the Internet says that’s about $1.5 million at today’s prices), which obviously made the courtship a bit easier. I found it really interesting that he took his son Tommy with him on this trip (Tommy had his 12th birthday during the journey). It seems that that part of Michigan was considered safe enough for Sam to bring a child with him on a business trip, though it had been settled for less than twenty years.

It’s also striking to read of the looming war, which Sam simply doesn’t see coming. On 1 November 1860, he writes that if Lincoln is elected,
I predict then in one year every southern state will say amen to his election and pronounce it the most constructive republican administration since the days of Washington.

As the election results come in (slowly, of course), he writes on 10 November,
Georgia and South Carolina are passing through the usual periodical display of childish petulancy at being disappointed but if they are only left entirely alone and in no way meddled with they will soon feel ashamed of their course and settle down in quiet for another 4 years

It’s really interesting to realise just how unprepared the North was for the war. But less than a month later, on 7 December, Sam stops by Harrisburg and has “a long talk” with the Governor of Pennsylvania, who tells him that war is inevitable.

Sam’s own base when in Pittsburgh is with his friend and lawyer William Shinn at Evergreen Hamlet, which Shinn had founded, planned and built. There is a rather bizarre exchange where it becomes apparent that Shinn’s wife is briefing against Sam, as a wastrel and bankrupt. Once he gets the money from the Michigan mine, we hear nothing more of that.

It is interesting to reflect that this sort of archive will become impossible to reconstruct for courting couples of the 21st century. Emails are pretty ephemeral, text messages and other apps even more so. My own great-great-grandchildren will not have so much to go on.

It is lavishly illustrated with the original documents, but also with Wick’s transcription of the letters. (Wick’s transcription is mostly pretty good, but I’m pretty sure that word on page 34/38 is “intercourse”.)… (más)