Civil War letters being auctioned

A Mansfield, Ohio, man said he will bid on about 100 of the letters today.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Thomas Willcox tooled around for months in his Land Rover as 11 manilla folders filled with documents plucked from his parents’ closet shared the space with his hunting rifles and other clutter.

It wasn’t until his wife went to the beach for a day about six years ago that he got bored and went through the old papers, and realized that three of them were signed by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

“I said, ‘This is something,’” recalled Willcox, a 69-year-old former real estate developer. “I said, ‘These are not just run-of-the-mill stuff.’”

And so began a journey that has led Willcox and his 440 Civil War-era letters into a court fight with the state, then bankruptcy and — today — to an auction house where experts say they could fetch the Columbia resident more than $2 million as the documents are sold one by one.

The collection details life in South Carolina between 1861 and 1863. Many of the letters are correspondence between generals and the Confederate government and Govs. Francis Wilkinson Pickens and Milledge Luke Bonham.

“The strength of the enemy, as far as I am able to judge, exceeds the whole force that we have in the state,” Lee wrote to Pickens on Dec. 27, 1861. “It can be thrown with great celerity against any point, and far outnumbers any force we can bring against it in the field.”

Other letters are from residents asking for help defending their communities or for the return of slaves taken from plantations to help build fortifications. Some document the grisly details of war.

Battle of Manassas

“But shall I tell you now of the battlefield?” Sgt. Maj. William S. Mullins of the 8th Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers wrote in an Aug. 6, 1861, letter about the first Battle of Manassas. “Of the dead hideous in every form of ghastly death: heads off, arms off, abdomens protruding, every form of wound, low groans, sharp cries ... convulsive agonies as the souls took flight. It is useless to write. I know something of the power of words to paint and I tell you that a man must see all this to conceive it.”

When historical documents are sold, their content, age and condition determine their value, said Patrick Scott, director of rare books and special collections at the University of South Carolina’s Thomas Cooper Library.

“An individual who owned original documents from a significant figure in the Civil War, particularly Southern collectors, would feel very, very triumphant if they were able to purchase something that they wanted in a sale like this,” said Scott, who regularly purchases rare manuscripts for the university’s collection.

The most that any Robert E. Lee letter has sold for was $630,000 in 2002, Scott said. Two letters by the confederate general were sold last year at $5,000 and $1,900 each, he said.

Legal fight

Willcox’s letters first were to be auctioned in 2004. But the state stepped in and sued, claiming they were written as part of official state business and were the property of South Carolina. A federal judge ruled last year that Willcox owned the collection, which were in his family for generations before he discovered them in his parents’ home after they died.

The legal spat led Willcox to file for bankruptcy, but he said he now hopes to finally see a return on the investment.

“It’s sort of a culmination of seven or eight years of wondering if it’s ever going to happen,” Willcox said.

Cal Packard, a private buyer from Mansfield, Ohio, said he will bid on about 100 of the letters today.

“My interest in them started five years ago,” Packard said as he examined the letters Friday. “I see documents like this all the time, but to have a concentration like this is unusual.”

One entity that won’t be trying to get a hand on the documents Saturday is the state, in part because of they have been recorded on microfilm.

“To spend the state’s money on something we believe already belongs to the state goes against principle,” said Charles Lesser, senior archivist for the Department of Archives and History.

The state’s decision was a surprise for auction house owner Bill Mishoe. “They went through a lot of trouble to get them, so to give up now is something I have trouble understanding,” he said.