ROSETTA ALEXANDER TO WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD, 1866

William Henry Seward received thousands of letters over the course of the Civil War. In his capacity as Secretary of State, Seward arranged positions of patronage for family friends and political allies. Letters poured in from foreign consuls and European capitals. Letters from afar did not drown out letters from home. During Seward's time in Washington, D.C., Seward's wife, Frances Miller, and his daughter, Fanny, wrote almost daily when at the family home in Auburn, NY. These public and private letters form a rich source of archival material for students and researchers.

One dated April 11, 1866, is particularly arresting. It comes from Rosetta Alexander, of Macon, Georgia. Her hand tells us that she gained emancipation recently. She, along with over four million other enslaved African-Americans, assumed the role of free and independent people with the adoption of 13th Amendment on December 18, 1865. Twelve days later, pursuant with federal law, Secretary of State Seward provided testimony to the validity of the Amendment and affixed his official seal to it.

Rossetta Alexander was uninterested in Seward's testimony or his position as a political patron. Rather, she told Seward that since her childhood she had "been taught to claim you as my Father." In this moment of uncertainty in the post-emancipation South, Alexander expressed that she had "a right to call on" Seward for aid, as she worked to support eleven children, black and white. Below her signature she explained that she can write in her own hand because her mistress taught her to do so. In the second to last line, before closing, Alexander wrote, "I forgot to say I am nearly white."

As for Alexander's claim that Seward fathered her, it is not proven, nor is it implausible. Alexander tells Seward that she was born nearly forty-five years ago, in roughly 1821, at a time when Seward had left Union College in Schenectady, NY to serve as a schoolmaster on the Alexander's Putnam County plantation. More work is yet to be done to determine the veracity of Alexander's paternity claim and in what way, if any, Seward responded. We will continue to comb through the Seward Papers in the University of Rochester's Rare Books and Special Collections to learn more about his trip South in the 1820s and his financial records in the 1860s.

Even without those next steps, this letter demonstrates how emancipation and enfranchisement raised new questions about household government during Reconstruction. In addition it has the potential to open new avenues of research into a man who built his career and subsequent legacy offering answers to the slave question.