Letter by a woman (Morgan, Caroline F.R.) who owned a large Mississippi slave plantation, asserting her legal right

Letter Signed, 2 pp. folio letter sheet + stampless address leaf. Two full pages of text. Folds, with a couple of small tears or holes at folds, normal aging and browning; otherwise very good.The letter is by Caroline F.R. Morgan to A.J.Walker, in Milton, North Carolina. Probably written in another hand, but apparently her own verbiage, with underlinings for emphasis and corrections. A strong legal statement by the widow Morgan of her rights as administrator of the Estate of her "late lamented husband" and his father responding to a Doctor's claim in a property sale in Milton, North Carolina. Stating equivocally that "I administered his estate" with "Double powers of attorney (if I may so express myself)" and refusing to send a copy of her husband's will, which "I consider a foolish request" and "would not do…for only the small amount of property in Milton but not for the whole of Milton."Most slave-owning women in the antebellum South were the widows of slave plantation owners who relied on overseers to manage often distant estates. A very few were more actively involved in the business affairs of the estates they had inherited. In Yalobusha County, Mississippi, two widows owned plantations with hundreds of slaves. One of these was Sarah Childress Polk of Tennessee, widow of the 11th President of the United States. But her slave-holdings were exceeded by those of 42 year-old Caroline Fitz Randolph Morford Morgan of Lynchburg, Virginia. Born in New Jersey to the grandson of a Quaker founder of Princeton University, she had married a Virginia medical student whose father owned much of the city of Lynchburg, as well as having real estate and slave holdings throughout the South. When he died in March 1847, she was left with three children and vast property in which she took an active interest, not common "for a woman of her time and station." While she had many charitable interests – she was a charter member of a Female Missionary Society – records indicate that she personally bought and sold slaves, both for the Morgavin Plantation in Mississippi and for her Virginia properties, owning more than 100 African-American men and women, including one "Aunt Sally", aged 104. She remained a widow for two years until she re-married, to a younger man, a Doctor who had come to Lynchburg to treat her family and slaves during an epidemic of yellow fever. That marriage ended contentiously in the 1850s and by the start of the Civil War, she resumed her legal status as an independent woman ahead of her time. Apparently impoverished by the War, she died in 1883. gavegarden.org