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Autograph Letter Signed. 3pp.+stampless address leaf.

To a business partner, Moses Taylor, New York. After quitting the powerful sugar merchant firm of Brooks & Co. in New York, Shelton moved to Boston to open his own firm, “leaving me without interest as a Capitalist.” He discusses the competing output of the Louisiana and Cuban sugar crop, which would be reduced if the “Planters commence grinding one month later…should the rains set in at the usual time.” He did not expect sugar prices to rise, though they might well fall, “in which cases all will do a bad business…I agree with you that Muscovado [Barbados molasses sugar] will be at low rates in the spring, as the importers of Pto.Rico will push them off at whatever price they can obtain…” Also mentions goods “destroyed in the great fire” [of 1835 in New York]. A Connecticut Yankee, Shelton soon partnered with an Englishman to establish the firm of Wright, Shelton & Co. which remained a "great house" in the Cuban sugar trade for nearly half a century, acquiring such wealth that his family was able to buy "a few Guano islands" off the coast of Venezuela. An archive of 100 earlier Shelton-Taylor letters is now held by the Mystic Seaport Museum.