MATT WHITAKER RANSOM PAPERS, #2615, 1845-1914
Correspondence of Ransom, lawyer, planter, state official, Confederate general, U.S.
Senator, and minister to Mexico. Papers relate to the political, economic, and racial aspects
of the Reconstruction; management of plantation and former slaves (1880- 1885); the conduct
of African-American plantation workers (1890- 1892, 1897); racially motivated complaints of
whites about black postmasters (1887, 1893); the political tide among African Americans in
North Carolina (1894-5); a letter written by William Cawthorne, an African American lecturing
to Good Templar lodges in Philadelphia, concerning the racial prejudices of the North versus
the South (1874); the resignation of a student at West Point, in part induced by the
necessity of close association with an African-American cadet (1875); the desire of John H.
Collins, an African-American official, to become minister to Haiti (1877); and
African-American leader Garland H. White's desire to confer with Ransom about plans to
organize an African-American Democratic group in North Carolina.
