Correspondence

The correspondence includes Francis Lieber's personal letters with family and friends and correspondence related to his teaching and professional career. The personal correspondence include family letters, many in German, and letters with friends, some spanning decades. The professional letters include those written from South Carolina College and Columbia College, which deal with various school related issues. There is a large amount of letters written in the years leading up to and during the American Civil War; Lieber served as an advisor to Abraham Lincoln's government concerning the treatment of the Rebel army and prisoners of war. The letters also cover many of Lieber's other interests and activities, including prison reform; political science; constitutional law and history; international law and copyright; and immigration. Lieber often pasted newspaper articles onto various letters, which he annotated with titles or comments. Some of the letters contain various penciled notes and locations, in unknown hands, possibly made by earlier Huntington catalogers; also, there are letters with editor's marks and line outs, probably done for the various publications of Lieber's letters. The letters are written by or addressed to Francis Lieber unless otherwise noted; other correspondents include, among others, Samuel Austin Allibone, Edward Bates, Dorothea Lynde Dix, Hamilton Fish, James A. Garfield, Ulysses S. Grant, Simon Greenleaf, Henry Wager Halleck, George Stillman Hillard, Édouard Laboulaye, Carl Joseph Anton Mittermaier, Charles Sumner, Martin Russell Thayer, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Theodore Dwight Woolsey.