Autograph Letter, signed. 4 pp. including integral address leaf.

To “my dear Willy” [her son, William] New Brunswick, New Jersey. “…I see by the paper they have had some warm talk in Congress about the… subject of Abolition petitions; the Southern members was warm whenever that subject is brought up, they have got rid of it for the present Session…only to be brought up with more violence and strength at the next, and I hope it will be, and that the Abolitionists may succeed so far as prohibiting it in the District of Columbia, as I do think it is a scandal that it should exist in the Capital of our country, but as to any further measures, I do not believe they can ever be brought about but by a dissolution of the Union, for…while there is so much to be made by the toil of the unfortunate slave, and while Southerners retain the opinion of them that they do, they never will concede their right to holding them in bondage; they do not hesitate to say that they consider the African race as very little removed from the brute creation, and as being intended by Providence always to be Slaves, and as for considering Slavery as an evil, but few of them do this, I assure you…” Remarkable words from a patrician woman in the South 25 years before the Civil War. Jane Eliza Neilson Paterson (1788-1858) had been widowed three years when she wrote this letter to one of her twin sons, a lawyer in New Jersey, where his grandfather, a signer of the Constitution of the United States, had been US Senator, Governor, and a Justice of the US Supreme Court. Through the Patersons, Jane Eliza was also related to Stephen Van Ransselaer of New York, one of the ten richest Americans, for whom her other twin son was named. And while she herself had been born in South Carolina, she was also related, through her step-sister, to Charleston Abolitionist, pioneer feminist and Suffragette Angelina Grimke. Though less celebrated than Grimke, Jane Eliza Patterson was another passionate opponent of slavery living in the heart of Dixie.