Beschreibung:

(African American, 1867 Letter from an Abolitionist Quaker to the mastermind of the post Civil War Freedmen’s Bureau Author: Cope, Francis R., Place Published: Philadelphia Date Published: March 28, 1867 Description: Autograph Letter Signed. From the Vice President of the Freedmens Union Commission, Pennsylvania. 3 pp. To his “esteemed friend”, Maj. General O.O. Howard, Chief of Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. With original envelope, addressed but not postally used. Cope was writing on behalf of his friend Isaac Hartshorne, who hoped to reclaim his family’s property after he had proven his wartime loyalty to the Union. Cope, his lifelong friend, knew him and his wife, a native Virginian, to be “thoroughly and unflinchingly loyal”, having always refused to own slaves on principle, and now “using their influence to promote the cause of equal rights.” Cope asked General Howard, chief and mastermind of the Reconstruction era Freedmen’s Bureau, to assist Hartshorne in restoring his property, if this was “consistent with the public interest.” Cope was a Maryland resident whose wife owned property near Lynchburg, Virginia which had been taken over by the Government as Camp Davis, a former Confederate Army base transformed into a refuge for African American ex-slaves, including a Freedmen’s Bureau School and a Black Methodist Episcopal church. During Reconstruction, thousands of Southern ex-Confederates sought to use Washington influence to reclaim their property from U.S. Government confiscation by swearing newfound loyalty to the Union. But, in this case, Hartshorne’s request, as relayed by Cope, had merit. Cope himself was a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker, active in the anti-slavery cause before the Civil War and, postwar, a founder of the Freedmen’s Union Commission, organized by former Abolitionists to support educational and economic aid to emancipated slaves in their “transition from slavery to freedom”. His friend Hartshorne was also a Quaker, son of a prominent Philadelphia Doctor, and had moved to Maryland for his health to become a farmer, but never, indeed, with slave labor. His wife, also a Quaker, was the daughter of a Washinton, D.C. druggist and amateur scientist who did own three women slaves as house servants before the War, though the daughter abided by her husband’s disdain for slavery. Condition: Very good. Item#: 347030 Headline: Reconstruction era letter to the Freedmen's Bureau