Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - October - 2007 Issue
American Historical Documents and Signatures from Joe Rubinfine
President John Tyler cannot explain Senate's rejection of Silas Reed.
Harrison's widow, Anna, had it unbelievably hard. She never made it to the White House, too ill to travel until spring. Spring never arrived for the Harrison administration. But, despite her illness, Anna Harrison not only outlived her husband, but nine of her ten children. Only one was still alive when she wrote this letter to her grandson, J. Cleves Harrison, in 1846. She relays news about several of Cleves' cousins and tells him not to expect her to answer every letter as she is "too old to write much." She admonishes him not to pass up his intended visit to her with the words, "you must remember that I am very old, & as none of us know the time of our death, yet to one, threescore and ten of course, but a few Months, perhaps days are allotted to them." Grandma was laying it on a bit thick. She lived another 16 years. Another of Anna Harrison's grandsons, Benjamin Harrison, would be elected president in 1888. And what's more, Cleves Harrison's other grandfather was American explorer Zebulon Pike, of Pike's Peak fame. There's a lot of namedropping associated with this item. Item 56. $2,500.
Item 57 is a deeply moving letter from Lucretia Garfield, recent widow of President James Garfield, written to two friends in 1882. Her husband had died a few months earlier, the victim of an assassin's bullet. In her writing, she faces the ultimate question -- "I sometimes imagine faint gleamings from the other world do begin to appear but I have been so lost in the night that I scarcely dare trust them. If I only could know that somewhere in the great Universe General Garfield still lives -- my husband -- loving and thinking of me and waiting for I think I could submit to this inevitable which has so changed all my life...if not with happiness at least with patience." $1,250.
Item 21 is an odd presidential signed document. It's a ship's passport, issued in New Bedford, Massachusetts, dated June 5, 1841, and signed by Martin Van Buren as President. One problem here. On June 5, 1841, Martin Van Buren was no longer president. In fact, he had been out of office three months. The entire short-lived Harrison administration had passed and John Tyler now held the office. The evident explanation is that the President had pre-signed some of these forms and the authorities in New Bedford used one of them later on, even though Van Buren was no longer president. $2,250.
Speaking of the new President, John Tyler, on October 28, 1841, he responded to office seeker Silas Reed. Reed had been appointed by Harrison to be Surveyor General of Illinois and Missouri. The Senate had rejected his nomination, but Tyler was baffled as to why. In response to Reed he writes, "...all that I can say in reply is, that I sincerely regretted your defeat before the Senate, but am not able to assign any particular cause for it. Nothing has been communicated to me at any time to alter my good opinion of you. What the Senate may have had before it, or on what view they acted I am wholly unable to say..." Reed's nomination would be brought up again, and this time he was approved. He would be appointed Surveyor General of the Wyoming Territory by President Grant in 1870. Item 20. $4,000.
Joe Rubinfine may be reached at 561-659-7077 or Joerubinfine@mindspring.com.
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