JAMES M. MASON - AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED 10/30/1854 - HFSID 3478

JAMES M. MASON
James M. Mason sends an autograph letter to a collector the autograph of his grandfather.
Autograph Letter Signed: "J M Mason", 1½p, 4¾x7¼. Winchester, Virginia, 1854 October 30. To autograph collector L[ewis]. J. Cist Esq. In full: "I have the pleasure to send you, as requested in yours of the 12th inst., an autograph of my grand Father, the late Col. George Mason of Gunston Hall, Fairfax County, Virginia. The papers in his writing I yet possess have [illegible] so much [two words illegible] I regret I am unable to send you one of this nature, than as an autograph." Mason, the grandson of Constitutional Convention delegate George Mason, was a U.S. Senator from Virginia (1847-1861). He was expelled in absentia from the Senate after attending the Confederate Provisional Congress. Appointed Confederate commissioner to Great Britain, Mason and John Slidell, commissioner to France, were forcibly removed from the British mail packet Trent, provoking a major diplomatic crisis between the U.S.A. and Britain. The crisis, which might have led to war, was defused after Britain's Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, rewrote and toned down an angry diplomatic note and the U.S. quietly released Mason and Slidell in January 1862. A recent popular novel by Harry Harrison, Stars and Stripes Forever (1999) and sequels, imagines what might have happened if this crisis had not been peacefully resolved. Docketed, likely by Cist, on verso of blank integral leaf. Lightly creased. Folds, not at signature. Tape remnants at blank left margin on first page and right margin on verso of integral leaf, show through at blank areas at mid-vertical fold. Label of another collector affixed to lower left corner of integral leaf. Overall, fine condition.