Elizabeth Boyer Coolidge. Autograph Letter Signed (with initials, E.B.C.). Winsdsor (Vermont), Aug. 20 [1816]. 2pp. + address leaf. To her mother, Mrs. Elizabeth (Bulfinch) Coolidge, care of Joseph Coolidge Jr., Boston.
19 year-old Elizabeth Boyer Coolidge wrote her mother while traveling with her grandfather, Joseph Coolidge II, from their Boston home through Vermont (where the colleges were “not to compare to Harvard, or the students either”) to Montreal (where “many of the inhabitants speak nothing but French”). "G Papa called me just now to enquire if I recollected a certain Gent in the entry [hall], I was just going to exclaim black Charles” – an old family servant who “enquired particularly about Ma’am” – but then remembered that her grandfather had “requested us to call them gentlemen of Colour”
This delicacy in polite reference to free northern Blacks not long after Congress outlawed the Southern slave trade was not surprising given that the aging grandfather, a veteran of the Boston Tea Party and prosperous merchant, was an humanitarian and active Boston philanthropist.
The senior Coolidge lived to see his grandson, Elizabeth’s brother Joseph, graduate from Harvard the following year, but he died before that young man, returning to America after European travels, was invited to the Monticello estate of former President Thomas Jefferson for a dinner honoring the visiting Marquis de Lafayette. There he met and fell in love with Jefferson’s granddaughter, Ellen Wayles Randolph; they were married in 1825. So the Coolidges of Boston, so solicitous about African-American freemen, became allied with the family of Virginia’s most illustrious slave-holder.