Autograph Note, Signed ("H B Stowe") to Mr. [James Wallace] Black, photographer of Boston, arranging a portrait of her daughter "for her brother [the author's son Frederick] who leaves for the seat of war on Saturday"

One page, pen and ink on paper. 8vo. The author of Uncle Tom's Cabin writes to well known Boston photographer James Wallace Black (1825-1896): "Mr. Black, My daughter Miss Stowe I wish if possible to have taken this morning for her brother who leaves for the seat of war on Saturday. You will oblige me if you will find a place for her HB Stowe" Arranging a photographic portrait (of her daughter Georgiana?), this tersely worded note belies the profound unease Stowe felt at the prospect of her son Frederick's imminent departure "for the seat of war." The unsettled Frederick had dropped out of medical school to enlist in the First Massachusetts Regiment. "Publicly Stowe rejoiced that the young men 'embrace [the cause] as a bride, and are ready to die [for it]'; privately she prayed with Fred and tried to prepare herself for the worst. In her vivid imagination, Stowe pictured her son in an army camp, subject to the temptations of a soldier's life; there were some things worse than death" (Hedrick). And in truth the war proved a devastation to Frederick, who transferred to the Seventy-Third Ohio Regiment in March 1863 and was wounded at Gettysburg; he returned home an alcoholic and subsequently disappeared in the West. An excellent Stowe autograph. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, pp. 299-300, 306-7. Provenance: Collection of James W. Hunnewell, Cambridge, of the firm of Fields, Osgood & Co Old folds, tipped onto album leaf. Clean and fresh One page, pen and ink on paper. 8vo. …