Heading: (African American, 1861)
Author: Adgate, Edwin Hawley
Title: Letter by a paper mill worker in 1861
Place Published: York, Pennsylvania
Publisher:
Date Published: 1861
Description: Autograph Letter Signed. 4 pp. To his mother, probably in Chesterfield, New York, on the Vermont border. March 21, 1861Adgate had been away from his wife and two children all winter, working in Maryland because of the hard times, which he blamed on the political crisis which "caused a great deal of suffering, it stagnated all kinds of business and thrown hundreds out of work". While in Maryland, he had observed the "sistem of slavery" which he extolled.Slavery, Adgate wrote, is "the greatest possible blessing to the black because it elevates him from a vagrant to a useful member of society; you in the extream north know nothing of the negro as a race, you have verry few thare and they are the exception, the verry best of their kind", but "here, whare we have a population of about 1000 in this town... we find 9/10 of them to be drunken thieving vagabonds, how they live nobody can tell because they will not work, our jail and poor house is full of them, besides to confine them in jail is no punishment to them." Int the South, "they are made to work and for crime or vagrancy they are whipped which is the only punishment that a negro feels any whare, either North or South". On the other hand, slaves were given support when they "become helpless through age or other cause, and if the confounded abolitionists would let them alone would be the happiest people on the face of the earth..." Adgate was representative of small-town, semi-literate, working-class Northern whites. He had married his 15 year-old cousin who could neither read nor write, and their life was hard - a second child died in infancy. His view of life was clear. He advises an unmarried female relation to "give up her romantic ideas and settle down to the realities of life." There is no record of him serving in the Union Army, during the War when he would probably have been a "Copperhead", pro-Southern Democrat.

Moderate foxing and staining, especially last page where the ink had faded but the writing still discernible.