LETTERS: 9 ALS: Correspondence to her husband, William Leete Stone, and one letter from Francis Wayland to daughter Susan. (2 files)
Brown University Family
[Education] Stone, Susannah Prichard and Francis Wayland. Correspondence to her Husband, William Leete Stone. Saratoga Springs, New York (most). 1840-41.
Nine letters, primarily 9 x 15 inch bifolia; 30 pp. total.
Together with:
Wayland, Francis. Autograph letter signed to his daughter, Susan, Saratoga Springs, New York, March 7, 1843; 10 x 15 ½ inch bifolium, 3 pp.; wax seal.
Susannah (aka Susan) Prichard Wayland (1798-1852), whose brother, Francis Wayland, was President of Brown University, wrote these newsy letters to her husband while visiting family away from him and also when he was traveling. Stone, an historical and political writer, edited the New York Commercial Advertiser, through which he became involved in a libel suit brought by James Fenimore Cooper in 1840. In 1838 Stone originated and introduced a resolution in the New York Historical Society to the New York Legislature, requesting the appointment of an historical mission to the governments of England and the Netherlands for the recovery of papers and documents essential to a correct understanding of the colonial history of New York. This was the origin of the collection known as the New York Colonial Documents, made by John Romeyn Brodhead, who was sent abroad for that purpose by Governor William H. Seward in the spring of 1841.
Susan’s letters are full of family news, along with political events and commentary. In one letter to Stone in Albany she described a commencement she attended in Schenectady: “I wish you could have seen Dr. Nott. He sustained his office with so much dignity and simple grandeur...” In another, to Stone in New York, she mentions the high profile guests she entertains: “Mr. Shaw called here on Monday eve. He was very agreeable. Gov. V. Ness called yesterday. Gen. Talmadge and his daughter are here.... Mr. Shaw disliked and disapproved of the Clay speech which inflicted upon some such a severe dispensation. They are all the time rallying me for my [ ] address to your political principles when you are absent...” – i.e., mostly likely, the presidential campaign of 1840.
Several of the letters written to Stone at his New York newspaper office at 46 Pine Street allude to the libel suit brought by James Fenimore Cooper. She writes: “My revenge would be never to speak his name or allude to his books. You have been too magnanimous in regard to his literary labors. If everybody would leave him quite alone in his glory, he would be more likely to come to the right use of his senses. We all feel very much for you and this persecution makes us with other people besides Cooper.” In the same letter, she writes of a nightmare in which the whole house caved in, but seems to be alluding to an actual flood in their basement.
Other letters refer the “the bubble article” published by Stone, one detailing her illness and of drinking the waters, a reference to Stone’s dislike of the current President, family news and a stream of visitors to the house.
In her letter of July 19, 1841, Susan refers to Stone’s investigation of Maria Monk, a Canadian woman who claimed to have been a nun who had been sexually exploited in her convent and who subsequently wrote a best selling book. Stone had, in 1836, discredited Monk’s sensational book and concluded that she had never been to the convent she described. Her French friend, Le Fericice (?), was familiar with the case. “Who could have imagined I should ever have aided or abetted in favor of the R. Catholic faith. Le Fer. wants me to send him all you have written and also the others besides [ ] to human responsibility.”
Stone’s father, William, was a soldier of the Revolution and afterward a Presbyterian clergyman, who was a descendant of Gov. William Leete. But Stone himself took to publishing at an early age and remained and editor throughout his career. At the age of seventeen, he became a printer in the office of the Cooperstown Federalist, and i
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