Archive spanning three generations of the Ayers Phillips Merrill family, including over 500 personal and business papers, c. 1857-1887, plus extended family letters and business documents, c. 1820’s-1850’s. The central figure of the archive is A.P. (“Ayres”) Merrill Jr. (1825-1883), a southern planter, Harvard-educated lawyer (1845), and United States Minister to Belgium under the Grant Administration (1876-1877). A Unionist native of Natchez, Mississippi, Merrill’s landholdings included Elms Court, the Hedges and Scotland plantations, and the St. Genevieve, an estate received through his wife, Jane Surget Merrill, daughter of Captain Frances Surget, a prominent Natchez landholder in the antebellum South.
Merrill’s family fled Natchez for New York City during the Civil War, with direct assistance from Ulysses S. Grant. Lot includes loyalty oaths and amnesty-related correspondence with Grant’s secretary, Gen. Adam Badeau.
Once established in New York City, Merrill formed the law firm of Goodman & Merrill, a General Commission House specializing in cotton and land transactions. Lot includes metal document box, CDV of Merrill by famed photography studio Jeremiah Gurney, and receipts including Manhattan Club dues, signed by political figure and lawyer, Hon. Augustus Schell. Extended family letters include correspondence and medical guidance from Merrill’s father, Dr. Ayers Phillips Merrill (1798–1873), an influential physician and educator with ties to Massachusetts, Tennessee, and New York. Lot includes a letter written by Merrill Sr. on treating cholera in enslaved people. See lot 86 in this auction for a related archive of Charlotte Jane Ferguson Buckner family papers. Buckner was the grandmother of Charlotte Pauline “Lena” Stewart Merrill, wife of Merrill’s son and namesake, Ayers Phillips Merrill III.
1st item: Elms Court Plantation scrapbook/operational guide, with recipes and processes for preparing a variety of homeopathic remedies, treatments, recipes, and cures and included handwritten instructions for feeding infants; recipes for hash, sausage, soap/honey soap, hair wash, quinine, strychnine, and chloroform; and remedies for bronchitis, whooping cough, flatulence, “for the ear,” and “cough in horses,” among many others. First entry dated 1853 and last entry dated 1888, with 1883 Merrill obituary clipping. Later 19th c. documents and clippings inserted in subsequent pages.
2nd item: Notebook with over 300 pages of letters, notes, documents, and other communications primarily written by Merrill and transferred from the originals Mann’s Parchment Copying Paper, an innovative 19th-century copying technology used for duplicating originals. Includes slave-related documents pertaining to life on the Merrill plantations of Natchez, MS and Concordia, LA, especially “Rules for ‘St. Genevieve’”: a list of 32 rules and guidelines, some pertaining to enslaved people and their working and living conditions. A related ledger book with names of people enslaved at St. Genevieve and other Merrill plantations was sold in Case Auctions Summer 2025 auction, Lot 502.
3rd item: 25 personal and business letters and documents that include correspondence signed by [MR?] Clark, 3rd Brig. Gen. NY; US Secretary of State William Seward; Thomas E.G. Ransom; and L. Thomas, likely Lorenzo Thomas, Adj. General under Abraham Lincoln; also with photograph of Merrill as “Minister to Belgium” and inscribed by Merrill en verso plus photocopy of letter from President Grant to Leopold II, King of Belgium, that discusses his selection of Merrill as Ambassador. Housed in a three-ring binder and encapsulated in protective, transparent plastic coverings.
3rd-4th items: Two scrapbooks with correspondence from Merrill’s time in Brussels, including invitations and correspondence from European dignitaries and American peers.
1st-4th items housed in a metal document box with paper labels with law firm name on side and interior lid, “Ayers Phillips Merrill, Jr.” hand-painted on the front and side. Metal box: 7 1/2 in. H x 16 1/2 in. W. x 11 1/2 in. D. 5th item: 12 in. H x 11 1/2 in. W x 3 3/4 in. D.
Condition
With wear, toning, ink bleed, and dampstaining consistent with age and use. All with expected toning and creases, some with foxing and losses. 2nd item with marked staining and detached front and back covers, most pages remain in readable condition
Provenance
By descent through the family of Ayres Phillips Merrill, Jr.
