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3pp. On personal stationery with coat of arms. To Colonel Jerome Bonaparte, [Baltimore].

The future Supreme Court Justice writes: “…the box of terrapins arrived yesterday. The creatures were frozen and hard and stiff as the North Pole… I can truly say, I never ate finer… It was very kind of you to remember me in this way. Perhaps your better half’s dislike of the dish is the result of her Northern prejudices, leading to the belief that Small Negroes have been disposed of to furnish forth the feast….” Blatchford, a millionaire New York lawyer, wrote this letter while a Federal judge to his close friend, the grandson of French Emperor Napoleon’s youngest brother whose family had lived in Maryland since the days of slavery. Colonel Bonaparte, a West Point graduate, had resigned his US Army commission to serve in the French Army under his cousin, Emperor Napoleon III, but had recently returned to America to marry Caroline Appleton Newbold, a widow who was the grand-daughter of Daniel Webster. Judge Blatchford had attended their wedding four months before. Reading between the joking lines of this letter, the bride, a Bostonian, was probably more sympathetic to the plight of recently-emancipated slaves than her aristocratic husband. Judge Blatchford’s jest about “small Negroes” would seem mild enough, given the blatant racism of the times, but eleven years later, appointed a Justice of the US Supreme Court by President Arthur, Blatchford voted with the court majority to invalidate the federal Civil Rights Act, a ruling which “virtually ended Federal attempts to protect the Negro against discrimination by private individuals” and set the stage for the Court’s “separate but equal” doctrine that legalized segregation.