In 1997 the wife of editor Richard Upsher Smith Jr. was gifted with “two garbage bags full of old letters” by Emily Brooks, widow of Frank P. Brooks, former chief of gastroenterology at the University of Pennsylvania (xii). An avid book collector, Brooks likely purchased the collection of more than one thousand letters, later identified by Smith as the Emma Taylor Lamborn Papers, sometime in the mid-twentieth century. In A Quaker Colonel, His Fiancée, and Their Connections, Smith has transcribed and edited 269 of the 646 Civil War–era letters written by Emma Taylor, her fiancée Charles Burleigh Lamborn, and various family members.Smith divides his book into five sections with each section corresponding with one year of the war. This division highlights, as Smith notes in his introduction, how “each year of the war had a character of its own” (xix). Each section is further divided into two or more chapters except for “Part III: 1863.” Few letters survived from that year, so the third section contains only one chapter. Within each section, chapter divisions “delimits a major phase of the correspondents’ activity” (xix). For example, chapter 11, which is part of “Part V: 1865,” contains letters from Charles Lamborn’s homecoming and marriage to Emma as well as other events related to the end of the war.To provide important context and additional information, Smith includes an introduction, photographs, and an extensive bibliography. In his beneficial introduction, Smith provides a summary inventory and provenance of the full collection, the language used in the letters, including a brief discussion of Quakers’ use of the second person singular, and the editorial policies he adopted for this volume. In his summary inventory, Smith divides the original collection into 6 groups with 5 of the 6 likely collected by Emma Taylor Lamborn. Smith’s discussion of the provenance of the collection, describing for readers how the collection likely left the family and later came to be collected by Brooks, provides an important lesson in how archival collections are created, sold or given away to collectors, and sometimes given to an archival repository. Significantly, the collection is now part of the collection of the Chester County History Center in West Chester with groups 1 through 5 as the Emma Taylor Lamborn Papers and group 6 as the Schenck Family Correspondence.The Taylor and Lamborn families were well-known in Chester County and beyond. Emma Taylor’s older brother was the famous journalist, poet, novelist, translator, and travel writer Bayard Taylor. Cedarcroft, Bayard Taylor’s estate, welcomed luminaries such as Secretary of War Simon Cameron and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Charles Lamborn’s parents had equally impressive connections. His father, Robert, was related to several successful merchants in Philadelphia. His mother, Rachel Peirce Lamborn, was a member of an impressive circle of female reformers, including Abigail and Martha Kimber, Sarah Pugh, Mary Grew, and Lucretia Mott. Charles and his brother Robert had extensive connections to the iron and steel industries through their close friendship with William Jackson Palmer, who would go on to found Colorado Springs after the Civil War. Thus, historians of nineteenth-century Pennsylvania will find familiar names, places, and events mentioned in the Taylor and Lamborn letters.A Quaker Colonel, His Fiancée, and Their Connections has appeal for a broad group of scholars, readers, and students interested in other areas of history beyond Pennsylvania. For historians of Quakerism, the Taylor and Lamborn letters provide insight into Quakers’ individual responses to the Civil War. This is seen most poignantly in the opening letters of chapter 1 as Charles Lamborn wrestled with the decision to enlist: “I have been thinking that a man might do worse in this crisis than fight” (3). His father responded reminding him that patriotism may be demonstrated in many ways other than fighting. “I . . . very earnestly desire thee will not consent to join any volunteer Company—or any other band whose main object is to kill men” (4). Charles, however, persisted, writing his father, “A man like myself can be better spared than one on whom depend the lives and comfort of a family . . . Look at the matter in the face as I do and thee will see but one course” (5).The Taylor and Lamborn letters hold great research value for Civil War historians providing first-hand accounts of life on the home front and the battlefield. Charles described for Emma and other family members the people and places he encountered. He had sharp words for southern women, who were “bold and disgusting in their expressions of hatred” (26) and without conscience drawing rations from the commissary, “dependent upon the government, that their legal protectors still seek to destroy, and they accept its bounties not as a charity, but demand them as a right” (202). On July 4, 1863, in a letter to Emma written from Tennessee, Charles noted the news he had received the night before that there had been a battle near Gettysburg. Worried about the “Great struggles” in Pennsylvania, he worried about Emma’s brother Charles Frederick Taylor at Gettysburg: “What have you from Fred?” (163). Charles also described his encounters with the enslaved men and women he encountered and the impact of the war on slavery: “The country is almost depopulated of slaves. those not carried away by their masters in the hasty retreat southward. have made tracks in the opposite direction” sic (94) and “Slavery is doomed wherever our Armies have gone” (95).A Quaker Colonel, His Fiancée, and Their Connections would make a useful volume for an upper-level history class. Students could use the Taylor and Lamborn letters to explore a broad range of topics, including gender, race, religion, and military history. Smith’s volume could also serve as a primary source reader for students.Emma Taylor, Charles Lamborn, and the other correspondents in Smith’s volume are articulate, observant writers. This combined with Smith’s thoughtful editing and copious notes make A Quaker Colonel, His Fiancée, and Their Connections a highly readable first-hand account of one Pennsylvania Quaker family’s experience of the Civil War.
Julie L. Holcomb (Thu,) studied this question.