Creator: Cheves and Wagner family.
Collection number: 147
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Abstract: Members of the Cheves and Wagner families lived in South Carolina and Georgia. Prominent family members included Ann Hrabowska Wagner (fl. 1814-1818) of Charleston, S.C.; Langdon Cheves (1776-1857) of South Carolina, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (1814-1815) and president of the Bank of the United States (1819-1822); Mrs. Charles West (fl. 1879-1919) of Baltimore, apparently Langdon Cheves’s daughter; and Charlotte McCord Cheves (fl. 1853-1878) of Savannah, Ga., wife of Cheves’s son, Langdon Cheves, Jr. The collection is chiefly family correspondence. Also included are financial and legal papers, genealogical materials, newspaper clippings, and other papers of the Cheves, Wagner, and related families. The collection includes letters from Ann Hrabowska Wagner of Charleston while she was travelling in in New York, Pennsylvania, and New England, 1814 and 1818; correspondence about the Cheves family and plantation affairs, 1819-1846; transcriptions of letters from members of the Dulles family, in-laws of Langdon Cheves; and personal correspondence of Langdon Cheves’s daughter-in-law and daughter, 1853-1919, including letters from Mary Custis Lee. There is little political material. Other topics include the War of 1812, members of a slave family who had been separated from each other, conditions around Charleston during the Civil War, the Charleston earthquake of 1886, and activities of the American Expeditionary Forces during and after World War I.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection
Collection Highlights: Contains letters (1819-1846) discussing negotiations to unite a Cheves household slave, Harry, with his wife, who was owned by another family in Georgia (See Folder 2).