Remarkably, This Letter Was Written By Stephen Douglas' Nephew With References to the 1860 Campaign

Stephen “Selby” Fish enlisted in the 17th New York Infantry in May 1861. Not long after his arrival in Virginia, Selby contracted typhoid and was hospitalized for two months. The disease left him permanently weakened and he was again hospitalized in May 1862 with an unspecified illness. By that summer, Selby had recovered sufficiently for active service, and under McClellan, took part in the Peninsular Campaign (the siege at Yorktown and the Seven Days Battles) and in Pope’s campaign in northern Virginia (including 2nd Bull Run). In 1863, Selby returned to Williamson to study law. He was admitted to the bar one year later and, in November of 1864, moved to New Orleans where his uncle Wright R. Fish was a probate court clerk. Wright Fish was a member of the Southern Rights Secret Association, a secessionist group active during the war. While attending a radical Republican convention in 1866, Selby was shot twice and severely beaten when a violent mob of citizens and police disrupted the meeting. Four page letter by “Selby” to his friend, datelined “Williamson, New York, September 22nd 1860. In part, Armina is indeed on earth, or was yesterday, as you are aware by the reception of her letter, as she wrote you a week or more ago. Uncle Stephen 1 you say is nowhere. No if you could have seen him at Clifton last week surrounded by twenty thousand (according to his own statement) eager listeners grasping each word as crystals from the pure fountain, perhaps you might change your opinion. What gave him such success there was the fact that he had succeeded in at last fingering his affectionate mother. He must be a very ungrateful son indeed who could not gain inspiration from such an occasion. Think of scores of carloads of Irishmen arriving from both Syracuse and Rochester to hear the illustrious man and then talk of his being “nowhere!!” … You say that Chicago is a good Republican city and in the next breath say that the morals of the place are at the lowest point. These statements are incompatible with each other. Which shall I credit? … Old Wayne witnessed the largest general assemblage of its sons and daughters ever known last Tuesday at Palmyra in the form of a Republican Mass Meeting. The number present was estimated to be not less than fifteen thousand coming from the various towns in processions formed of teams of from one to eight horses. With banners flying and Rails and Buttis waving. Among the speakers was Senator Wade of Ohio—a noble specimen is he. In the evening following I had the honor to be one among seventeen hundred who promenaded the streets under the Wide Awake Banner. …”