Anne King Gregorie papers relating to Thomas Sumter, ca. 1930 | WorldCat.org (original) (raw)

Summary:Collection mainly consists of Gregorie's transcriptions of the correspondence of Gen. Thomas Sumter dating from 1763 to 1832 (bulk 1779-1800), taken from various sources, including the Horatio Gates papers in the New-York Historical Society, the Thomas Sumter papers in the Library of Congress, and the Draper Collection in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Letters written during the Revolutionary War concern military operations mainly in South Carolina; correspondents of this period include General DeKalb, Major Thomas Pinckney, Gen. Horatio Gates, William Smallwood, John Rutledge, and Gen. Nathanael Greene. Much postwar correspondence concerns financial, legal, and political matters. Includes a transcript of Thomas Sumter's speech (1798) about a provisional army. Also noteworthy are his letters concerning John C. Calhoun (1824). Several letters dating to the 1830s deal with the issues of states' rights and nullification, one of which (published in newspapers, and possibly written or edited by his grandson Thomas De Lage Sumter) speaks of a political party "in favor of a national consolidated government...no longer in harmony with the spirit of our constitution" (25 Dec. 1830). In a letter by Thomas Sumter published as an open letter (Nov. 1831), he characterizes this party as a "relentless majority, whose object is to prostrate, at their feet, the interests of the Southern States. I have known this party from the date of the Constitution, and believe me...every act of theirs has hitherto marked them out, as hostile to our interests and to those principles of liberty, for which so many eminent men have suffered." Also included are two letters (1930 and 1931) to Gregorie regarding papers of Thomas Sumter in the Clements Library at the University of Michigan and in the New York Public Library