Six letters, including: Sherman, John. 4 Letters Signed as US Secretary of the Treasury. Washington, D.C. February 12 February 15, February 28 and April 21, 1879 (first misdated 1878). 10pp. total,,with 2 original mailing envelopes. To Charles F. Conant, “in charge of the Agency for refunding the National Debt”, c/o N.M. Rothschild & Son, London.. With 3 additional 1879 letters to Conant, all from London, by Ernest Chapin. John Rose and John B.[iddulph] Martin.
The miniscule US National Debt skyrocketed during the Civil War to nearly $3 billion. Bonds issued to finance the debt in the post-war decade sold so rapidly in the United States that President Hayes’ Secretary of the Treasury, John Sherman – younger brother of the famed Civil War General – decided to market some of the bonds in Europe through the powerful London banking house of Rothschild. As his funding agent in Britain, Sherman sent Charles Francis Conant (1835-1886), a long-time Republican Party activist who had risen from a civil service job in the Treasury Department to become its Assistant Secretary. During the three years he spent in England, working out of the Rothschild offices, Conant oversaw European sales of the bonds, working with a “Syndicate” of New York bankers led by J.P. Morgan and Levi P. Morton, later Republican Vice President of the United States. Sherman wrote these letters to Conant shortly before he returned to the United States – apparently because European bond sales were not brisk - concerning such details as tracking a cache of bonds stolen from a New York bank and paying the men entrusted with carrying $10 million in bonds across the Atlantic in four iron safes. The three additional letters to Conant were written by the former Canadian Finance Minister who was Morton’s banking partner, another British banker who was married to Morton’s niece – and a third British financier whose name has gone down in history because he later married notorious “free love” feminist Victoria Woodhull.