Autograph Letter Signed. 4pp.+ stampless address leaf. To her Mother, Mrs. Eleanor Worthington, c/o General J. T. Worthington, Chillicothe, Ohio.
Written ten months before her death from tuberculosis, the writer was the daughter of the US Senator from Ohio and niece of an Ohio Governor who had left her native state with her husband David to resettle, for financial and health reasons, in Florida.
But they had also found that territory uncongenial, because of its slave culture (”you must own Niggers here to be respectable and have your bales of cotton to show for they speak of nothing, think of nothing, but cotton, cotton, cotton… men… will look down upon you because as they say 'Lord, who is he, he hasnt got no niggers'…”) as well as the threat of imminent Indian attack. Thousands of Seminole, Creek and Cherokee warriors were “less than a hundred miles from us…determined… to retake Florida as they have positively refused to remove farther west.” While praying that the US would send troops to drive the Indians back, some 200 Tallahasee settlers, “poor fellows”, had gone off to fight the Indians, “leaving their wives and children in the care of some friend with the gloomy presentiment that he will never return... scenes that have made my heart ache”; she herself had barely restrained her teenage son from joining the fight against “the ruthless savage”, as “I told him I could not spare both him and his father.” Indeed, her husband was not with her to share in the “great alarm”. David Macomb had gone to Texas to explore their resettlement in a territory that was in the throes of breaking away from Mexico. Knowing that David had miraculously “escaped unhurt” from two battles with Mexican troops and had already become a hero of the Texian revolution, Mary expected to move there in a few months, “as soon as all is quiet and safe” and “the Texians have beaten off Santa Anna's forces, made a declaration of their rights, seceded from the Empire of Mexico” and formed an “Independent Government”. The Macombs did move to Texas, where he became a high-ranking officer of Sam Houston’s Army and a signer of the declaration of War against Santa Anna and the provisional constitution of Texas, though Mary did not live to see his rise to glory.