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Partial Autograph Letter Signed as first Secretary of the Colorado Territory, on official stationery. 2 pages only – the first and last – of what was apparently a long letter to Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase.

To Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, sending “certain facts which gravely affect the proper administration of Government here…the disposition of the Public Printing in this Territory…in consequence of the well known difficulties which had heretofore arisen in the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska…the matter has assumed the present complications…very detrimental to the public interests…a matter which may appear trivial, but…a question vital to the importance and effectiveness of the Federal rule in this Territory…” Written weeks after the disastrous Union defeat at Bull Run, fraud-free contracts for the first government imprints in Colorado Territory (costly rarities today) must have seemed trivial indeed to Washington, but were a burning issue to Weld, the 28 year-old Connecticut Yankee, Yale graduate and anti-slavery lawyer who had crossed the plains from Kansas as President Lincoln’s appointee to administer the newly-established Territory.  Weld resigned two years later to join the Union Army as Captain of a just-created “Colored” regiment.  While commanding his Black troops in action in Virginia, Weld became sick and died of pneumonia in January 1865, at age 32.  His wartime letters from Colorado are rare.