Series: 19 VV (Volume 19)
Scope and Content Note: Miscellaneous correspondence, 1846-1885, by and to Draper during his tireless search for descendants of and data on Sumter and his soldiers. Notes from periodicals and newspapers are occasionally interspersed among the letters. A few autograph collectors or dealers and a few historians are numbered among the correspondents. Although many of the letters and notes are insignificant in content, there are biographical or genealogical references to the following persons and families: James Adamson and his son John; John Fisher, a Loyalist; William Fludd; Burr Harrison; Henry Lyon and his wife Sally; Jane Morrow; and Edmund Sumter. A detailed genealogical chart traces the Lewis family descended from John Lewis (circa 1640?-1726) and his son David (1685?-1726) of Albemarle County, Virginia. Of nineteenth-century interest are two letters: one (1872) by South Carolinian Thomas W. Glover discussing the 1872 presidential campaign and Reconstruction and defending the Ku Klux Klan; the other (1870) by a Madison physician, Dr. Joseph Hobbins, commending Draper on the publication of A Helping Hand, the household encyclopedia compiled by Draper and William A. Croffut.