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Autograph Letter Signed. [Archerton?], Virginia. Feb. 22, 1861. 3pp. To cousin Stephen.

While this letter was obviously written by a politically well-connected Virginian on the eve of Secession and Civil War, we believe that, surprisingly, the writer may have been a woman – sister of the late William Segar Archer, who had served six years in the US Senate, chairing its Foreign Relations Committee and helping draft what would become the Missouri Compromise before his death in 1855. Segar was a Southern aristocrat who owned so many slaves on his plantation that, after Emancipation, the Archer slaves and their descendants would form an entire Black community within the town of Amelia, Virginia. Martha Archer was one of his unmarried sisters and heirs. 
While this letter is historically-significant on its face, it would be the more remarkable if written by Segar’s sister.

The letter forecasts the difficulty of financial transfer from the north in the event that “Monies are stopped and the Southern ports closed by Lincoln” after Virginia’s pending secession from the Union. It advises a northern relative - whatever “you hear of Virginia don’t despair; but wait and hope at present I am sorry to say the prospect is more gloomy than ever, but as all of the Unionists say they will insist on our grievance being addressed or go with the South, and the Republicans seem as determined as ever to make no Concessions, we hope yet that our destiny will be with the Southern, not the Northern States for we do not like the North and love the South.” It mentions a Law Professor at the University of Virginia, “a warm Secessionist”, who had resigned his faculty position to become a member of “our Convention” – the Richmond Secession Convention, then in progress. And while it praises an article on Secession written by Virginia’s Attorney General, surprisingly it adds the caveat that the writer disagrees “with him as to the great blessing of Slavery and its tendency to Civilization.”