Civil War-era letters auctioned
For months, 11 folders of old papers rescued from his parents' closet sat in Thomas Willcox's sports utility vehicle. Then he realized some were signed by Confederate General Robert E. Lee and might be valuable.
They were: The three letters written by Lee during the Civil War sold at auction on Saturday for $61,000.
That was far off the record $630,000 a Lee item sold for in 2002. But it was an improvement from last year, when two letters from the general who surrendered in 1865 sold for $5,000 and $1,900, said Patrick Scott, director of rare books and special collections at the University of South Carolina's Thomas Cooper Library.
The letters were among more than 400 documents Willcox put up for auction after a protracted fight with the state, which claimed ownership of the documents that had been in Willcox's family for years. Neither Willcox nor the auction house had specific figures, but estimates placed the total sales at less than $400,000.
The collection details life in South Carolina from 1861 to 1863. Many of the letters are correspondence between generals and the Confederate government and Govs Francis Wilkinson Pickens and Milledge Luke Bonham.
"The strength of the enemy, as far as I am able to judge, exceeds the whole force that we have in the state," Lee wrote to Pickens on December 27, 1861. "It can be thrown with great celerity against any point, and far outnumbers any force we can bring against it in the field."
Other letters are from residents asking for help defending their communities or for the return of slaves taken from plantations to help build fortifications. Some document the grisly details of war.
Agencies
(China Daily 10/01/2007 page6)
