LETTER: Autograph Letter Signed, To Gratz, November 7, 1814.
[Gratz, Rebecca]. Hays, Slowey. Autograph letter signed. Richmond: To Rebecca Gratz, November 7, 1814; 4to: 15 x 9-1/2", folded to 7-1/2 x 9-1/2", 4 pp.; off-white writing paper (self-envelope); addressed at the last sheet, "Miss Rebecca Gratz / 258 High Street / Philadelphia" with the additional note (in an unknown hand), "Nov. 7, 1814 / Slowey Hays / to / Becky".; 1/2" x 1" piece lacking at third/fourth leaf where torn away by the seal (still present).
Holograph letter from Slowey Hays, daughter of prominent merchant and insurance broker Michael Hays, to Rebecca Gratz. Moses Michael Hays (1739-1805) arrived in Boston with the Revolution of 1776. Despite the tumult, the insurance company he established prospered. He and his wife also established themselves among Boston's foremost citizens such as Harrison Gray Otis and Thomas H. Perkins; their house became synonymous with gracious hospitality and intelligent company. Reverend Samuel May, the distinguished Unitarian minister and abolitionist leader, described the "great excellence of his wife, his son Judah, and his daughters—especially Catherine and Slowey". Judah Hays left Boston a permanent reminder of his liberal impulses in the Boston Athenaeum, of which he was a founder.
Slowey (1779-1836), then thirty-five, writes a warm, affectionate letter to Rebecca Gratz, upon return home from a visit to Philadelphia. She vividly describes the difficulties which a heavy rain threw them into:
We were benighted the moon denied her promised aid and in crossing Gun Powder Falls our difficulties increased to something like danger. One solitary man at the Ferry found his efforts vain in endeavoring to get the scow over... Our driver was obliged to give his horses to our only Protector and lend his strength to moving us one — The two leaders became timid and on leaving the scow took fright — broke their chain and ran away leaving us sitting in the carriage with only two horses to ascend a monstrous high hill - rugged & wet - it was the first adventure I had ever experience in all my travels...
Around their passage to Richmond looms the shadow of the War of 1812. The British had taken Washington, DC that August, burning the White House and the Capitol. Slowey excuses herself for not extending her stay in Philadelphia:
I should have volunteered my society to you for the winter, but my mind for the last twelve months has been exercised in a variety of sufferings. I have beheld my nearest kindred, my earliest friends, in danger - having part of my family in Virginia increased my solicitude because I knew them exposed to enemies that could not reach me.
Even the pangs of her brother's departure to "a foreign land" are ameliorated by reflections on "the unhappy state of my own country". Slowey tells how they passed by the camp of "my Pupil Ben" and "beheld only the stillness of night"; "[they] told us that those that were there were sleeping in peace — Ben has always been a darling with me - and I wish he was any thing but a soldier". Movingly, she tells Rebecca "your cheerfulness to my sorrow I see has forsaken you". When the war is over and "we again are blessed with a quiet home", she promises to "become a comfort to you". "The rest of my life I mean to devote to those whom I love..." An exceptional letter, from one of America's most prominent Jewish women to another, amidst a time of national peril and uncertainty.
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