Miscellaneous Items

This is a collection of some 250 letters written to Franklin B. Sanborn from friends and relatives during his years as a student first at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and then at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts (circa 1852-55). Primarily containing domestic and social news about other family members and mutual friends, the letters include references to contemporary election politics of the 1850s with mention of numerous statesmen including John Bell, James Buchanan, Anson Burlingame, Stephen Arnold Douglas, John D. Freeman, John Charles Fremont, Joshua Reed Giddings, John Parker Hale, Samuel Houston, Franklin Pierce, Samuel Clarke Pomeroy, Julius Rockwell, Winfield Scott, William Henry Seward, Charles Sumner, and Henry Wilson. Related to the politics of the day was the slavery issue with letters referring to affairs of the Kansas Free State and to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, as well as to prominent abolitionists and reformers such as William H. Furness, William Lloyd Garrison, Amos A. Lawrence, Rev. Theodore Parker, Mary Ashton Rice Livermore, and Lucy Stone.

Letters from Stephen Barker discuss at length popular beliefs in spiritualism and mesmerism. Many of Sanborn's friends and cousins mention reading the works of or attending local appearances and lectures by luminaries of Concord, New Hampshire, including Transcendentalist writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthone, and Henry David Thoreau. Finally, the correspondence affords insight into the lives of young, educated men and women of nineteenth-century New England.

The letters of Benjamin Smith Lyman, in particular, delineate the difficulties of finding employment after completing his education at Harvard, much less settling on a career. Through 25 letters we follow Lyman's peregrinations first as an itinerant farmhand and odd-jobs-man, and then as an assistant to his uncle, a geological surveyor. Correspondence from Frank Harding, son of portrait painter Chester Harding (1792-1866), describes his experiences working on railroads and his travels as part of the engineering corps across nineteenth-century Missouri and Illinois. Letters from Exeter and Harvard classmates George C. Sawyer, George A. Wentworth, and S.W. Young express similar concerns about finances and the need to find paying situations.

Teaching appeared to be a popular occupation, either in schools or as private tutors. This was certainly true of Catharine A. Cram who often refers to the school she kept with her husband Mr. Folsom. The letters of Catharine Cram, as well as those of her sister Sarah, provide interesting details about the lives of literate women of the time through references to their reading material, literary societies and clubs of which they were members, and the lectures they attended by Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, and the like. The letters are also testimony to the often precarious health of these young nineteenth-century women who suffered various debilities from common eye strain to the terminal illness of Sarah Cram, the progress of which is charted virtually letter by letter from 1855 to 1856 by her sister Catharine. The Cram family were distant relatives of Sanborn's, and it was through Catharine Cram that he met his wife Ariana Walker.