The Moore and Gatling Law Firm ofRaleigh, N.C., a law partnership between B.F. (Bartholomew Figures) Moore(1801-1878) and his son-in-law John Thomas Gatling (1840-1888), was established in1871. Just prior to Moore's death in November 1878, Gatling went into practice withHenry A. Gilliam, with whom he partnered until roughly 1883, when he then joinedwith Spier Whitaker in a partnership that appears to have ended in 1886. The collection documents the Moore and Gatling Law Firm,as well as Moore's legal practice before the firm was established in 1871 andGatling's later partnerships with Henry A. Gilliam and Spier Whitaker. Thecollection chiefly concerns legal and financial affairs, politics, and family lifeof the Reconstruction era, but also includes antebellum materials documenting thesetopics, as well as slavery and the Civil War. Legal materials consist of deeds,agreements, proceedings, statewide correspondence with clients; they chieflydocument estate settlement, marriage, bankruptcy and financial losses forslave-owning families during the Reconstruction era, property transactions, laboragreements, and other routine legal matters. Financial materials include bills,receipts, and account books, and chiefly concern the Moore and Gatling law firm;personal finances; farm expenses; and labor, including slave labor and the buyingand selling of enslaved people. There are also personal papers of Moore and Gatlingthat document political views before, during, and after the Civil War; businesspartnerships; farm operations, especially marketing of cotton crops; and family andsocial news. Of note are letters from Civil War soldiers and accounts of the battlesof Manassas and Fort Fisher and of skirmishes on the Neuse River; Gatling's serviceas assistant quartermaster with the 52nd North Carolina Infantry Regiment andletters to him from friends in the 13th Mississippi Infantry Regiment; account booksof North Carolina Confederate supply officers; typed transcriptions of letters,1866, exchanged by Moore and North Carolina Governor W.W. Holden regarding an 1863discussion they had with Governor Zebulon Baird Vance on their differing views ofunionism; original letters and typescripts of correspondence between Moore andKenneth Rayner that provide detailed descriptions of their roles andresponsibilities in the surrender of Raleigh, N.C., to General Sherman in 1865, andan account of the surrender and its immediate aftermath; and documents relating tothe Kirk-Holden War. Other topics include the lives of African Americans, asdocumented where enslaved and free people appear in legal and financial documentssuch as wills, labor agreements, and court materials, and in personal correspondencethat discusses business dealings, crimes, and perceptions of work and religioushabits; an 1855 dispute over teacher salaries in Hyde County, N.C.; railroads,especially regarding Gatling's role as receiver for the Midland North CarolinaRailway Company and the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad Company; and to theplanning and construction of the Atlantic Hotel in Morehead City, N.C., in the1880s. The collection includes three photographs, circa 1875, of Moore familymembers.
