Details
DAVIS, JEFFERSON, President, C.S.A. Autograph letter signed ("Jefferson Davis," with psotscript initialled "J.D.") TO GENERAL MARCUS J. WRIGHT, Beauvoir, Mississippi, 13 October 1883. 1 1/2 pages, 8vo, in purple ink.
DAVIS AND HIS OLD LETTERS TO ROBERT E. LEE
Davis here writes to a former Confederate Brigadier General who had been appointed to collect Confederate war records for publication in the monumental U.S. government series, The War of the Rebellion: Official Records (1864-1927). "When your memo was received with request that I would furnish copies of some of letters written to Genl. Robert E. Lee, I had no one at hand who could be employed in making the copies.
"Now that a person to do so has offered, I find the memo in some places indecipherable, and in others suppose there may be an error in the date given for that of my letter. A few more word's of Lee's letter might solve a doubt; if the error of date was in his letter. Let the memo be fairly written, so as to be read by one not educated to your clerk's hieroglyphics & abbreviations....." In a postscript, Davis adds: "Can you give me a copy of a letter from Genl. R. E. Lee, to which I sent a telegraphic reply Aug. 10. 1864[?] The letter not probably written a very short time before the date of the reply, which indicates that the subject was the appointment of a commander for the cavalry in So. West Virginia...." The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, ed. C. Dowdey and L. H. Manarin, contains no Lee letter to Davis corresponding to the one described by Davis.
DAVIS AND HIS OLD LETTERS TO ROBERT E. LEE
Davis here writes to a former Confederate Brigadier General who had been appointed to collect Confederate war records for publication in the monumental U.S. government series, The War of the Rebellion: Official Records (1864-1927). "When your memo was received with request that I would furnish copies of some of letters written to Genl. Robert E. Lee, I had no one at hand who could be employed in making the copies.
"Now that a person to do so has offered, I find the memo in some places indecipherable, and in others suppose there may be an error in the date given for that of my letter. A few more word's of Lee's letter might solve a doubt; if the error of date was in his letter. Let the memo be fairly written, so as to be read by one not educated to your clerk's hieroglyphics & abbreviations....." In a postscript, Davis adds: "Can you give me a copy of a letter from Genl. R. E. Lee, to which I sent a telegraphic reply Aug. 10. 1864[?] The letter not probably written a very short time before the date of the reply, which indicates that the subject was the appointment of a commander for the cavalry in So. West Virginia...." The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, ed. C. Dowdey and L. H. Manarin, contains no Lee letter to Davis corresponding to the one described by Davis.