PBA Galleries

1 pp. + stampless leaf. Written to James Goodwin of Hartford. Goodwin was an insurance company executive who was married to J.P. Morgan's aunt.

“We are surprised, at Cincinnati, to learn from a distance that the city is sickly. I… am in the city every day, and I have not heard one of the citizens speak of its being unhealthy; on the contrary…I do not know that I have ever known it to be more healthy than it now is, at this season of the year….” Justice McLean had lived in “healthy” Cincinnati for nearly fifty years, since he began his legal career there at the time of the Louisiana Purchase. After representing Ohio in the US Congress during the War of 1812, he served in Washington as Postmaster General in the cabinets of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams. Andrew Jackson appointed him to the US Supreme Court in 1829 and he remained on the bench for more than. Five years after he wrote this letter, McLean was one of two dissenting Justices in the Dred Scott fugitive slave decision who maintained that free Negroes were citizens of the United States. In 1860, McLean sought the Republican nomination for President, but lost to Abraham Lincoln. A year later, he died – in Cincinnati – the week the Civil War began.