FYI on Stringfellow

[John Fazio]

Roger:

Regrettably, it is not. Here's what Tidwell, Hall and Gaddy say about the letter: "Stringfellow to Davis, Stringfellow Collection. This nine-page typescript bears only the date 1880 and was apparently made from a copy kept by Stringfellow. It is one of forty-two items given to the society (The Virginian Historical Society) in 1955 by a Stringfellow descendant, Alice Stringfellow Shultice. The location of the original letter to Davis has not been learned. The typescript is the basic source used here (Come Retribution, pp. 411, 412) to describe Stringfellow's Washington mission and related movements." (CR, p. 425)

Comment: I believe we may safely assume that the original letter was destroyed by Stringfellow, Davis or another Southern partisan because of its sensitivity. A mission to Washington at the behest of Davis, approximately one month prior to the attempted decapitation of the United States government (Lincoln, Johnson, Seward, Stanton and Grant, at least, and as many as "15 yankees", per the Confederate agent "Johnston"), a mission that involved constant communication with an officer occupying an important position about Lincoln, to whom (the officer) Stringfellow made "a proposition", could not have been for a purpose other than one relating to the decapitation. The typescript somehow preserved the substance of the letter and is likely all we are ever going to have.

John

That doesn't make any sense. Why would Stringfellow make his own copy of the letter, save it for at least a couple decades and then he or a descendant go through the trouble of making another, typed, copy of the letter only to later decide that it's contents were too sensitive and destroyed the first copy?

If anybody's interested, I tracked down the information about this collection at the Virginia Historical Society website. Unfortunately, their website is a little wonky, and the only stable link I was able to find for the collection is a little difficult to read, but it does have a description of what Shultice donated and the call number:

http://vhs4.vahistorical.org/star/downlo...129521.dat

Does anybody know if the other letters in the collection are later typed copies?

Steve:

I do not know the provenance of the typescript. I doubt that anyone does. Maybe it was made from a copy of the original made by Stringfellow; maybe from a copy of the original made by Davis; maybe from the original itself. The typescript may not have been made with the knowledge of the correspondents, or perhaps it was made after they were both deceased. The only certainty is that the original or a copy of it was available to the person who prepared the typescript, or at least had been read, at some time, by that person, who then remembered its contents with some precision, and that the typescript was prepared after the invention of the typewriter. The destruction of the original, because of its sensitivity, may not have been in any way related to the preparation of the typescript.

John