ELIZABETH HOOPER BLANCHARD PAPERS, #3367, 1694-1954
Family, professional, and business papers of Blanchard, author, art collector, and interior
decorator of California and New York. This extensive collection contains correspondence,
diary entries, clippings, pictures, and other background materials relating to Blanchard's
book, The Life and Times of Sir Archie: The Story of America's Greatest Thoroughbred, as well
as family letters written from a plantation near Columbus, Mississippi. The correspondence
contains plantation letters from Sarah Amis that routinely mention the welfare of two slaves
named Lethe and Sophia, including an 1840 note stating that Lethe
gave birth to a child who was "right good looking and not black of course"; a letter from
Sophia to Bettie and Sallie Amis (1858); a North Carolina letter
referring to "old negroes" at the end of the Civil War (1867); a
comment from Sallie Amis in Petersburg, Virginia that "the niggas are as impudent as they can
be" (1867); a report from Mamie Amis in San Francisco of Irish
prejudice against free blacks (1869); and discussion of the
political actions of blacks in Louisiana (1870-1876).