Our Collection

At the Institute’s core is the Gilder Lehrman Collection, one of the great archives in American history. More than 85,000 items cover five hundred years of American history, from Columbus’s 1493 letter describing the New World through the end of the twentieth century.

Duncan, Stephen (1787-1867) Collection of letters pertaining to Stephen Duncan [Decimalized .01-.12]

NOT AVAILABLE DIGITALLY Online access and copy requests are not available for this item. If you would like us to notify you when it becomes available digitally, please email us at reference@gilderlehrman.org and include the catalog item number.

Gilder Lehrman Collection #: GLC05339 Author/Creator: Duncan, Stephen (1787-1867) Place Written: s.l. Type: Header Record Date: 1859-1860 Pagination: 12 letters Order a Copy

Written mostly to Charles P. Leverich, a financial agent active in New York and New Orleans. Discusses accounts, supplies, secession, and slavery.

The following biographical information is from an online review of the book, An American Planter: Stephen Duncan of Antebellum Natchez and New York, by Martha Jane Brazy:
Extraordinarily wealthy and influential, Stephen Duncan (1787-1867) was a landowner, slaveholder, and financier with a remarkable array of social, economic, and political contacts in pre–Civil War America. In the first biography of Duncan, Martha Jane Brazy paints a new portrait of antebellum life by exploring Duncan's multifaceted networks among elites in both the South and the North.
Duncan grew up in a well-to-do Pennsylvania family with strong business ties in Philadelphia. There was little indication, though, that he would become a cosmopolitan entrepreneur who would own over fifteen plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana, collectively enslaving more than two thousand slaves. With style and substance, Martha Jane Brazy describes both the development of Duncan's businesses and the lives of the slaves on whose labor his empire was constructed.
According to Brazy, Duncan was a "hybrid," not fully a southerner or a northerner. He was also, Brazy shows, a paradox. Although he put down deep roots in Natchez, his sphere of influence was national in scope. Although his wealth was greatly dependent on the slaves he owned, he predicted a clash over the issue of slave ownership nearly three decades before the onset of the Civil War. A product of both North and South, Duncan illuminates how and when the regions were contradictory and when they could be made compatible.
Perhaps more than any other planter studied thus far, Duncan breaks the mold created by historians to explain the southern slaveholding aristocracy. By connecting and contrasting the networks of this elite planter and those he enslaved, Brazy provides new insights into the "slaveocracy" of antebellum America.
For biographical information on Charles Leverich, refer to the New York Historical Society's Leverich papers.

Duncan, Stephen, 1787-1867
Leverich, Charles P., 1803-1876

Citation Guidelines for Online Resources