About the Collection
The Langdon Cheves Papers, 1777-1864, collection contains the personal, business, and legal papers of Langdon Cheves Sr., 1776-1857, a South Carolina attorney, judge, plantation owner, state legislator, U.S. Representative, and president of the Bank of the United States. In the collection are records of the Bank of the United States and other financial records, and plantation records and correspondence.
Also included are the papers (1835-1864), mainly correspondences and military records, of Langdon Cheves, Jr. (1814-1863) during the Civil War discussing the Confederate air balloon, rations, military service vouchers, confederate bonds, fears of invasion from Union troops, letters to General Thomas Drayton (1808-1891) and General Edward Alexander (1835-1910), and the removal of 250 enslaved persons from the Cheves’ plantation from fears of invasion by Union troops.
Records of enslaved persons include bills of sale, mortgages, a suspicious death of four enslaved persons on Delta Plantation, punishments towards enslaved persons, runaways, lists of enslaved persons, their parents and their roles on the plantation, a measles outbreak, a petition from Cheves’ enslaved persons for tobacco and repairing their cabins, a newspaper clipping on the sale of 170 enslaved persons owned by Langdon Cheves, and medical bills for treatments of enslaved persons.
