[A remarkable ALS relating to the fate of an enslaved family in North Carolina.]

£3,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A remarkable letter, testament to the confused and brutal realities of slavery in the 1840s, as a prominent lawyer describes the fate of an extended family, “given” to him in the will of an old family friend. The letter was written by Darius Henry Starbuck (1818—1887), from a prominent Quaker family in North Carolina. A graduate of Guilford College and lawyer, he was a delegate to the North Carolina state constitutional conventions of 1861 and 1865. After the War President Andrew Johnson appointed him to the federal district court, President Ulysses S. Grant making him State Attorney in 1770. Significantly, the letter is addressed to Gerrit Smith (1797—1874), the abolitionist and philanthropist, host of the Fugitive Slave Convention of 1850 and one of the “Secret Six” who gave financial support to John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. Smith’s house ‘Peterboro’ (misspelt by Starbuck here as ‘Petersborough’) in Madison County, New York, would become a famous stop on the Underground Railway. Smith’s fame was such that Starbuck, more than 700 miles away to the south, felt he could appeal to him for help and support when all of his other avenues were exhausted. Starbuck writes that the family group had been the “only property” of a man of Salem called Thomas Adams. Starbuck continues that although Adams had expressed “ a desire that I should emancipate them ,” the labyrinthine debts on the estate had meant that he had only been able to keep the family together by paying off

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