Papers relating chiefly to Webster's carriage business in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, and California where he had agencies. Correspondence during the Civil War period concerns the servering of business ties between the North and the South, the difficulty of collecting debts, and the determination of the South to resist coercion. Correspondence after the war pertains to the difficulties connected with the hiring of freedmen, poverty, the rapid rebuilding of Atlanta, Ga., and the destruction of a Georgia plantation by Confederate soldiers. The early correspondence consists of letters from "Sanford," also a carriage maker, to his girlfriend, Sarah M. Webster, describing Springfield, Gallatin, and Nashville, Tenn.; a slave auction he witnessed; and cholera, mosquitoes, lack of a sewerage system, steamboat accidents, the arrest of two former slaves manumitted by their white father, a printers' strike, and entertainment in Nashville.
