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Online Finding Aids Lucretia Carter Sibley, Correspondence, 1841-1876 Contents List About this collection Folder Contents Number of Items       1 n.d. 10 2 1841 - 1845 8 3 1846 - 1847 7 4 1848 - 1851 7 5 1852 - 1853 9 6 1854 - 1859 8 7 1860 7 8 1861 - 1862 8 9 1863 - 1864, July 9 10 1864, August - 1870 12 11 1871 - 1873 8 12 1875 - 1876 6 13 Processor's Notes   About this collection Lucretia Carter Sibley (1798- ), the daughter of Ezbon Carter (1765-1803) and Rhoda (Cargill) Carter (1771-1806), was born in Dudley, Mass., on 23 August 1798. She married, in Uxbridge, Mass., on 28 October 1819, Royal Sibley (1793-1822). They had two children: George Henry (1821- ) and Anna Maria (1822-1865), who married Rev. George Lewis Hovey (1810-c.1878), a Congregational missionary. This collection of approximately one hundred letters, for the period 1841 to 1876, were written to Mrs. Sibley (and her daughter) primarily by cousins Mary Ann (Cutler) Waterman (1800-1863) of Clear Branch, Va., and Samary Stedman (McClanathan) Sherman (1805-1898) of Sterling Bottom, Ohio, and their children who settled in various parts of Kansas, Illinois, and Missouri. The letters contain family news and vital records, comments on the weather and crops, religious verses, land and housing policies, recipes, and cures for various diseases, including consumption. There are also rich descriptions of the Sherman and Waterman children's "pioneering" in Kansas and Illinois, including Indian troubles and crop failures, and references to temperance, the coming of the railroads, and the "necessity" for the anti-Roman Catholic movement. Of special note are the many allusions throughout the letters from Northern and Southern cousins to the crisis of the Civil War era, including Mary Ann Waterman's frequent defense of slavery, her reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and belief in the South's need for better roads and schools, Mrs. Sibley's sending of abolitionist tracts to her cousin, descriptions of slave beatings and slave rentals, and references to Harper's Ferry, Lincoln's election, the outbreak of war, secession troubles in St. Joseph, Mo., and enlistments of family members. After 1861, only letters from Northern cousins continued, with comments on the war's progress and deaths of family members on the battlefield. Mrs. Sherman copied for Mrs. Sibley the last letter of her grandson, Lyman Stedman White (1843-1864), written during the battle of Ball's Bluff with a full account of the action. After the war, letters written by cousins from both North and South refer to their growing families, the many improvements in Kansas since the 1850s, and a trip to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876.

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