William Alexander Graham of Hillsborough, N.C., was a lawyer, legislator, United States senator, Secretary of the Navy, Whig vice-presidential candidate in 1852, Confederate senator, trustee of the Peabody Fund, and member of the board of arbitration for the Maryland and Virginia boundary dispute. The collection includes William A. Graham's correspondence with prominent persons about state and national politics. Correspondents include George E. Badger, Thomas Bragg, T. W. Brevard, James Buchanan, Duncan Cameron, Paul C. Cameron, Henry Clay, Dorothea L. Dix, Stephen A. Douglas, James Fenimore Cooper, William Gaston, James Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, W. W. Holden, Sam Houston, William Preston Mangum, Charles Manly, Matthias E. Manly, Elisha Mitchell, B. F. Moore, James T. Morehead, J. Johnston Pettigrew, J. L. Pettigru, Leonidas Polk, Thomas Ruffin, James A. Seddon, Cornelia Phillips Spencer, David L. Swain, William Tryon, Martin Van Buren, Zebulon B. Vance, Hugh Waddell, Daniel Webster, and Jonathan Worth. Also included is material relating to legal business; the Graham family;iron foundry; plantations, slavery, and overseers in North Carolina and South Carolina; affairs at the University of North Carolina, the Revolutionary War history of North Carolina, and letters from sons serving as soldiers in the Confederate army. Later papers are of other Graham family members, especially Augustus Washington Graham, lawyer of Hillsborough, N.C., and Oxford, N.C. Volumes are personal accounts, school notebooks, and legal notes. Also included are typed carbon copies of letters, 1823-1877, to and from William A. Graham in this collection and in collections at other repositories that were compiled for an editing project in the 1960s.
