1801

Escape from New York.

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles Start Price:80.00 USD Estimated At:160.00 - 220.00 USD
Escape from New York.
Dramatic, eloquent letter lamenting the fearful cholera epidemic raging in New York. From William N. Chadwick, who has fled to Greenfield Hill (Conn.), Aug. 2, 1832, 2 pp., 8 x 9 3/4. Chadwick was an officer of New-York Fire Insurance Co. with Cornelius Vanderbilt, and, with John Quincy Adams, William Colgate, Peter Jay, Francis Scott Key, John Marshall, descendant Peter G. Stuyvesant, et al, an officer of American Bible Society. To Henry Leverich, Pearl St., N.Y., merchant in brandy, gin, sugar, ginger, tobacco, gunpowder - and cotton financier for the vast Dr. Stephen Duncan Plantation in antebellum Natchez. By 1850, Duncan became perhaps the largest cotton planter in the world; Natchez boasted more millionaires than Manhattan. Docketing by Leverich or his secretary. Integral address-leaf with red Fairfield, Conn. c.d.s. "...I hope it will prove...that this most afflicting dispensation of Providence will soon leave our devoted City & we shall all shortly be permitted to return to our homes. The accounts from various parts of our country exhibit a most melancholy picture. It seems as if no portion of it is to be exempt from this dreadful pestilence...The appearance of our City must indeed fill the mind of the beholder with gloom...at the scenes of such heartrending distress & misery...The extent of affliction, incident to such a calamitous event, must be great indeed... Those who have left the City are alarmed at the breaking out of the disease, in places all around them... It is the opinion of many that it will spread over every part...I regret to hear that Mr. Remsen has had symptoms of another attack, and it has been found necessary to bleed him...My best respects to all in the counting room...." Very fine.