Description:

Western Expansion

Bleeding Kansas Era Army Clerk at Fort Leavenworth Wants to Return East

 

3pp ALS inscribed overall and signed by U.S. Army clerk Henry Clark of Hudson, New York as "Henry" at the center of the third page. Written at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas on March 19, 1859. The Congress embossed cream blue-lined bifold paper is in very good to near fine condition. With expected paper folds, and a few minor closed tears near top edge. Each page measures 7.75" x 9.875".

 

Henry Clark, then serving as a U.S. Army clerk at Fort Leavenworth, wrote a decisive letter to his father in the spring of 1859. Clark keenly felt the limitations of his army status; while soldiers and officers could easily be promoted, there was little opportunity for career advancement among army bureaucrats.

 

Clark wrote in part:

 

"…I have clerked in the Army about long enough…I may obtain a good situation in some good business where there is some promotion and where one is not always obliged to remain a Clerk (as is the case here.) Should I give up my present situation here I would probably have to be content with a smaller salary. Yet the social privileges, and the knowledge of business I would obtain elsewhere (which I am deprived of here) would more than compensate me for the loss in wages…The Army is no place for me and unless a person has got a commission or is enlisted he has no business to be near it or connected with it, as a man without the Epaulettes here is a little below par."

 

Fort Leavenworth, located in the northeastern corner of Kansas Territory and first established in 1827 to protect western trailheads, policed the region during the era known as Bleeding Kansas (1854-1861). The fort was at once an arsenal and outfitting station for the U.S. Army. It was also in the middle of a region rife with civil violence. Conflicts between pro-slavers and abolitionists, whites and Indians, and Christians and Mormons continually threatened law and order.

 

Clark wanted to return East to help his father with his steam boat business. Clark's father might have been part of the firm Haviland, Clark, & Co., a steamboat-operated freighting company that plied the Hudson River between New York City and Albany. The Columbia, described in this letter as "a good old craft (what there was of her)" was first launched in June 1841.

 

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