D.[irck?] C.Russell. 2 Autograph Letters Signed. Houston, Texas, January 25 and February 20, 1858. 3pp., and 4pp. To his wife, Albany, New York. With original mailing envelopes.
Probably a young Salem, New York lawyer whose brother, an Army General, was later killed during the Civil War, Russell had gone to Texas for three months, partly on business, but also for his health in the beneficial warm southern climate, as he suffered from coughing fits of Asthma as well as some unnamed “severe illness” which had left him “low and weak”s. But he then fully recovered thanks to the “watchful care” of the landlady of his boarding house,and his nurse, a “kind hearted niger woman... In Yellow fever times, she gets $10 a day. She was once owned by James Monroe, a former President of United States. I have no doubt she made 50 little [misses?] for me some days, they were all faithful and saved my life and I am satisfied, though it has made an awful hole in my pocket.”
He goes on to complain of huge Doctor’s bills and being “robbed my every man I have met since I came into Texas and now if I get a little better I am going to work and swindle every body I have any thing to do with till I get square again. That is on the principal when they smite you on one check turn turn round and smite them on the other.”
President Monroe had died in 1831, owning some 40 slaves on his family’s tobacco plantation. He was a relatively benign master, insuring that hits slaves had ample food, clothing, shelter and medical care; best-treated were his domestic servants, who may have included the “kind hearted” nurse who tended to Russell in Texas 25 years later.