Christopher Hughes papers, 1801-1908 (majority within 1814-1884)

Summary

Creator:

Hughes, Christopher, 1786-1849

Abstract:

This collection primarily consists of correspondence of U.S. diplomat Christopher Hughes; his twin sister Peggy Hughes Moore; his in-laws the Moore family; his spouse Laura Smith Hughes (1792-1832); their daughter Margaret Smith Hughes Kennedy (1819-1884); and Anthony Kennedy (1810-1892), his son-in-law. The papers largely date between the War of 1812 and the U.S. War with Mexico. Christopher Hughes corresponded with U.S. Presidents, Secretaries of State, and a large circle of friends and family on both sides of the Atlantic. The papers reflect American diplomatic policy in Europe after the War of 1812, particularly in Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, and France. They also present the lives and experiences of the social and personal lives of women and children who traveled as part of the duties of an American diplomat.

Extent:

5.5 linear feet

Language:

English
Swedish
French
Dutch
German
Latin

Authors:

Collection processed and finding aid created by Clements Staff, Robert E. Lewis, Barbara DeWolfe, and Cheney J. Schopieray

Background

Scope and Content:

This collection primarily consists of correspondence of U.S. diplomat Christopher Hughes; his twin sister Peggy Hughes Moore; his in-laws the Moore family; his spouse Laura Smith Hughes (1792-1832); their daughter Margaret Smith Hughes Kennedy (1819-1884); and Anthony Kennedy (1810-1892), his son-in-law. The papers largely date between the War of 1812 and the U.S. War with Mexico. Christopher Hughes corresponded with U.S. Presidents, Secretaries of State, and a large circle of friends and family on both sides of the Atlantic. The papers reflect American diplomatic policy in Europe after the War of 1812, particularly in Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, and France. They also present the lives and experiences of the social and personal lives of women and children who traveled as part of the duties of an American chargé d'affaires.

The Correspondence Seriescomprises the bulk of the collection. These letters range from 1801 to 1903 and are divided into three groups: A. Correspondence addressed to Christopher Hughes Jr. (unless noted), arranged by correspondent (from 1801 to the end of 1849, the year in which he died); B. Correspondence from Hughes, arranged by recipient (from 1817 to his death in 1849); and C. Family Correspondence after Hughes’s death, from 1850 to 1903 (all letters addressed to Anthony Kennedy unless noted).

Group A includes all correspondence of a personal, family, financial, and professional nature addressed to Hughes during his lifetime, as well as letters written by one correspondent to someone other than Hughes during the same period. This qualification covers letters from one of his relatives to another, occasional copies of official correspondence that were of special interest to him, and the like. Hughes was proud of his association with famous and politically prominent people, and frequently added his own comments on their letters. He also had a habit of collecting autographs, and correspondents, knowing this, would often send him examples for his collection.

Hughes’s official diplomatic correspondence to his superiors is held by the National Archives, Records of the Department of State, Foreign Posts, in Washington, D.C.. The correspondence by Hughes in Group B was written to family members (his wife, his children, his sister and her husband, and his brother George), to diplomatic and professional colleagues, and to a few others. The main reason why most of the family letters still exist is that his daughter Margaret Hughes and his sister Peggy Moore and her husband Samuel Moore chose to retain them.

Hughes seldom made or kept copies of the letters he himself wrote, but Group B is where the extant ones can be found. They are indicated by “copy” or a similar expression in parentheses following the letter sent, for example:

• John Bell, Secretary of War, 1 letter: 6 April 1841, Stockholm (copy; acknowledges receipt of funds to pay Count Gyldenstolpe for the “Batteries” [of artillery] ordered at the Forge of Finspong)
• James Buchanan, 1 letter: September 1845, Astor House, New York (copy; Hughes announces his arrival back in the United States)
• General De La Sarraz, 1 letter: 23 August 1845, Liverpool (copy; Hughes turns down the honor of knighthood conferred in letter of 24 July because it is against “The Institutions of my Country”)
• Baron Albert Ihre, 1 letter: 6 September 1841 (2), [Stockholm] (in French; invitation to a meeting with the Queen today immediately after meeting with the King; Hughes’s reply, probably a draft, written at end)
• Baron Antoine de Knobelsdorff, 1 letter: 17 May 1845, The Hague (in French; copy of letter giving his official notice; will give up his house on 30 September 1845)
• S. Pleasanton, 1 letter: 2 March 1842, Washington (copy of letter only to a statement of account for salary from 30 September 1838 to 1 October 1841)
• Baron [Vertstoeck] de Soelen, 1 letter: 25 January 1830, The Hague (a draft or copy)
• Daniel Webster, 2 letters: 10 June 1842, Washington (draft or partial copy; acknowledges his letter of appointment as Charge d’affaires to the Netherlands and is about to “repair to my Post”); and 23 June 1842, Baltimore (copy; will go to New York on the 27th; hopes to call on Webster this evening or tomorrow morning in Washington)

Group C contains family correspondence after Christopher Hughes’s death, from 1850 to 1903. Most of it is of a political, professional, or family nature addressed to Anthony Kennedy, along with correspondence to and from Margaret Smith Hughes (later Kennedy) and correspondence between other members of the Kennedy or Hughes families.

The correspondence series contains 2164 separate entries, plus an additional 5 untraced letters following, but the total number of individual items is higher, as the following practices by Hughes and some of his family members indicate. These practices add 37 items, making the total number of letters in the collection approximately 2200.

Occasionally blank pages from received letters were used to write other letters. Christopher Hughes often used blank pages from letters, or the backs of letters (and in one case the actual letter) sent to him, either for copies of letters that he had written or, occasionally, for actual letters written to others; his brother-in-law Samuel Moore also did this, though much less frequently.

Examples of this practice include:

• Letter to Samuel Moore, 18 May 1834 (with P.S. and additional note on 19 May); written on the same large sheet of paper on which John Adams wrote to Hughes on 18 May 1834
• Letter to Christopher Hughes from Baron Albert Ihre, 8 September 1841, Stockholm (in French; invitation to meet the Prince and Princess Royal today at 5:45 p.m.; sent on to Baron Brockausen saying, in English, that Hughes will come to dinner with him precisely at 5 p.m.)
• Letter to Louis McLane, 18 August 1845 [London]; written on a blank page of the Marquess de Casa Yongo’s letter to Hughes of the same date along with “N.B. Return this Letter”
• Letter to Henry Rabineau, 31 October 1845, Baltimore; written on the back of the letter from C.A. Stetson to Hughes of 23 October 1845
• Letter to Margaret Hughes, 26 February 1847, Washington; written on the 3 blank pages of a 4-page letter of invitation from Hülsemann to Hughes dated 25 February [1847]
• Letter to Miss M. Patterson, invitation to dinner “today” [8 March 1848] to meet your Anglo-Dutch cousin; written on a letter from Charlotte (Mansfield) de Tuyll to Margaret Hughes of [early March 1848])
• Letters of Samuel Moore to John Tyler, 25 October 1842 (1), no place (draft or copy; this and the next are written on the back of Moore’s letter of 19 October); 25 October 1842 (2), no place (draft or copy)

The Correspondence Series also includes examples where a single letter was addressed to two recipients.

Examples of this practice include:

• Margaret Smith Hughes to Peggy Moore (her aunt): 27 August 1842, Havre (pages 1-2 are to Peggy Moore; page 3 addressed to “Dear Polyphemus,” which may be a pet name for her uncle, Samuel Moore, to whom the outside of the letter is addressed)
• Margaret Smith Hughes to Samuel Moore (her uncle): 27 August 1842, Havre (page 3 is addressed to her uncle, Samuel Moore, to whom the outside of the letter is addressed. For pages 1-2 see letter of same date from Margaret Hughes to Peggy Moore, 27 August 1842)
• Nancy Clayton Kennedy to Margaret Hughes Kennedy (her daughter-in-law): 21 March 1852, Martinsburg (beginning of letter to Margaret, but on page 3 she begins a new letter to her granddaughter Agnes)
• Nancy Clayton Kennedy to Agnes Kennedy (her granddaughter): 21 March 1852, Martinsburg (letter begins on page 3 of letter of this date addressed to Margaret Hughes Kennedy)

Some letters were written by two different writers to one single recipient.

Examples of this practice include:

• Christopher Hughes to Mary [Hughes] Armstrong (his sister): 8 January 1817 (part 2) [London] (for part 1 see letter from Laura Hughes to Mary Armstrong)
• Laura Smith Hughes to Mary [Hughes] Armstrong (her sister-in-law): 8 January 1817 (part 1), London (for part 2 see letter from Christopher Hughes to Mary Armstrong)
• George A[ugustus] Hughes to Christopher Hughes (his brother): 26 April 1845, Baltimore (he ends about halfway through this 4-page letter and calls in his daughter Sidney to complete it as he is suffering too much)
• Maria Sidney Hughes (Hughes’s niece, daughter of George A. and Mary Pleasants Hughes): 26 April 1845, Baltimore (see George A. Hughes’s letter of same date; Sidney writes the second half and signs the letter)
• Peggy Moore to Christopher Hughes: 10 July 1843, no place (2nd half written by Peggy, 1st half by Samuel Moore)
• Samuel Moore to Christopher Hughes: 10 July 1843, Cumberland (1st half written by Samuel, 2nd half by Peggy Moore)

At other times letters might be written to one recipient but signed by multiple persons.

Examples of this practice include:

• Samuel Moore et alii to Andrew Jackson: Undated [but probably early in 1829], no place (a two-page draft, written to President-Elect Jackson advocating Hughes’s appointment as Minister to the Netherlands; notes that Hughes’s current nomination will not be acted upon “before the 4th March next” and that a new nomination will be needed; the names of the signatories are listed at the end, including, in addition to Moore, Carroll of Carrollton, Robert Oliver, Thomas Tenant, Roger B. Taney, Reverdy Johnson, and nine others)
• Fanny H. Hughes Kennedy et alii to Benjamin P. Howell: 20 June 1885, no place (copy; the “alii” are Francis [sic] H. Kennedy, H.W. Howell, Adelaide Carnischall, F.B. Forbes, John M. Forbes Jr., Mrs. Ellen Griswold, Alfred Howell, and Mary Campbell)

One letter may also have been written, but copies of it were sent to multiple recipients.

An example of this practice includes:

• Fanny H. Hughes Kennedy to Fanny H. Kennedy (her aunt): 9 July 1885, Ellerslie (copy; she is underage until October, but she will see her attorney and trustee, who will consult with her grandfather and guardian, Anthony Kennedy, about signing a document pertaining to the Howell estate; this letter, along with copies of the two letters from Fanny H. Hughes Kennedy to B.H. Campbell and a copy dated 14 July 1885 of the letter from 20 June 1885 addressed to Benjamin P. Howell with a document that the younger Fanny is to sign, are written consecutively on four pages of legal-sized paper)

The Prose Writings and Poetry Series is sub-divided into A. Prose and B. Poetry. The first seven prose pieces are written in English and are accounts of trips, speeches or drafts of speeches, and formal papers written by specific individuals; the last one is a passage copied by Margaret Hughes from a book of letters in French. The nineteen poems are primarily in English, but some are also in Swedish or French. Included among the poetry are birthday poems, toasting poems, love poems, and an English translation of a passage from Horace’s Odes.

The Photographs and Portraits Seriesincludes pencil sketches of four of the five peace commissioners at the Treaty of Ghent negotiations in Belgium, by Dutch artist P. van Huffel, January 1815. The portraits include John Quincy Adams, James A. Bayard, Henry Clay, Albert Gallatin, and Christopher Hughes (as secretary of the delegation). A lithographed portrait of Christopher Hughes, by Jean Baptiste Madou, from 1829 is also present in the collection's oversize materials, with a lithograph image of "le capitole a Washington" below the portrait of Hughes. It features an autograph presentation from Christopher Hughes to Prince Henry of the Netherlands, July 12, 1845. A group of 24 photographs from the early 1930s depict the grave of Laura Smith Hughes (1795-1832) and the church where she was buried, Bromme Church in Akershof, near Stockholm, Sweden, and a variety of other people and places.

The Documents Serieshas been sub-divided into six groups, A. Land and Property; B. Military Documents; C. Education-Related Documents; D. Personal Documents; E. Inventories and Lists; and F. San Pedro Company Documents. The Land and Property Documents contain surveys, leases, deeds of sale and trust, lists of property bequeathed, and the like. Military Documents contain reports of battles and casualties, charges against officers, prices of cannons, etc. Education-Related Documents contain appointments to and regulations at West Point and announcements from schools. Personal Documents contain diplomatic commissions and appointments for Christopher Hughes, passports, extracts from books of baptisms, acknowledgment of copyright for members of the Hughes family, and various announcements, resolutions, and the like regarding the family and their friends. Most of the Inventories and Lists are in Hughes’s hand and usually refer to goods sent to him in Europe or from him back to the United States.

The San Pedro Company Documents relate to the salvage of the Spanish warship San Pedro de Alcantara, which exploded and sank between the islands of Coche and Cubagua off the northern coast of Venezuela on 24-25 April 1815. Some fifty men were killed in the explosion, and many others were drowned; 800,000 silver pesos were lost, along with munitions, weapons, and cannons. Salvage operations began at once, and the San Pedro Company from Baltimore joined the search in 1843, contracting with Lewis Howell (Christopher Hughes’s nephew) to be the agent for the Company in its attempt to salvage whatever it could of the treasure and cargo on board. The Company carried out two expeditions: one from November 1843 to May 1844 and the other from May 1844 to the beginning of the war with Mexico in May 1846. The documents in this collection include the existing 45 letters between the various parties involved in the two expeditions, as well as ten related documents setting out instructions to Lewis Howell, formal answers to his questions, and the texts of the agreements between parties. The letters (including copies) have been cross-referenced “as letters written by one correspondent to someone other than Hughes” in the Correspondence Series but are not counted in the total number there.

The Financial Papers Series consists of two groups: A. Account Books and B. Individual Items. The account books appear in two formats. The first combines expenses along with other kinds of notes, like Account Book 1. The second type records periodic household and personal expenses or wages paid for various tasks, like Account Books 2 through 8. The Chronological Financial Papers consist of individual bills, receipts, bank accounts, promissory notes, etc., arranged both by family and chronologically, from the first Hughes family receipt in 1825 through 1850, followed by receipts for the combined Hughes and Kennedy families from 1851 through 1908, and ending with undated material. Occasionally notes or letters are attached to these items. Likewise, financial documents are at times also attached to letters written to Hughes in the Correspondence Series. They have been divided between that group and this one according to which component is presumed to be primary.

The Printed Items and Ephemera Series consists of 27 small books, pamphlets, newspapers and clippings or extracts from newspapers, reports, essays, and the like, often represented by more than one copy. Ephemeral items include materials such as Invitations and Wedding Announcements (19 printed items, with 16 in French and 3 in English); Calling Cards (7 items, both handwritten and printed); Advertisements, Concert Programs, etc. (10 items, all printed but the last); Recipes and Prescriptions (11 handwritten items, in English Latin, and French).

Autographs and related memorabilia contains 11 items, of which 7 are autographs. Hughes was a known collector of autographs, and correspondents would often send him examples for his collection (as noted in the Correspondence Series). Hughes acquired the autographs in this group in other ways: from autographs given to him, from letters sent to others, or from empty envelopes addressed to him. In addition, the collection includes part of a ribbon that Napoleon wore “on his escape from Elba & his return to France” in 1827, a bust (reference only) given to Hughes originally by Sir Thomas Coke, a reproduction of the seal of C.J Fox also given to him by Coke, a small drawing of a flag given to Hughes’s daughter by “an old friend” in 1840, and a drawing of a man’s head and torso, with this text inside the torso: “This gentleman represents the Bridge of Sighs. With the compliments of the two great Unknowns” and this line below: “That lofty brow where Thought stands throned.”

Miscellaneous Notes and Fragments consists of 16 items of various kinds. Five are dated notes: (1) notes and jottings in Hughes’s hand, probably from his first stint in Sweden, dated 24 August [ca. 1820s?], mentioning, among other things, the surnames Gibson, Gilmor, and Rehausen; (2) notice of a leave of absence of 10 November 1838 for [Charles John Hughes] “received at Wacissa on or about Dec 5th Left Tallahassee Dec 11th”; (3) a note on the order of toasts to Daniel Webster [on his retirement as Secretary of State] on 18 May 1843; (4) notes in Hughes’s hand of names and addresses in Paris and London dated July and August 1845; and (5) two notes on the reverse of a piece of twentieth-century notepaper of Jesse S. Reeves’s wife referring to Bishop [Philander] Chase’s trip to England in 1823-1824 to raise funds for a new diocese in Ohio and a book catalogue of Henry Stevens dated 18 March 1834 (on the front side of the notepaper are 6 scanned lines in Greek of Ovid’s Fasti). In addition, there are some directions for various activities (e.g., for traveling to places in France); a listing of subjects taught in an elementary school; a page with three Latin quotations from St. Paul’s letters; a series of aphorisms or proverbs; and a few fragments that are without context.

Please see the Christopher Hughes Indices and Notes for an index of letter writers and inventories of non-correspondence materials.

Biographical / Historical:

The basic outlines of Christopher Hughes Jr.’s life and diplomatic career are clear and well known, but they can now be supplemented with the help of the materials in the Hughes Family Papers at the Clements Library. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on 11 February 1786 to Christopher Hughes. Sr. (1745-1824; silversmith from County Wexford in Ireland, banker and real estate investor in Baltimore), and Margaret “Peggy” Sanderson (1760-1825; from an old Pennsylvania family). He was one of fourteen children, six of whom survived into adulthood. One of the six was a twin sister, Margaret “Peggy” Hughes, with whom Hughes was very close until her death in December 1843. After secondary schooling in Maryland, he entered the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1803, taking his first degree in 1805 and then a law degree in 1809. Two years later (on 17 December 1811) he married Laura Sophia Smith (1792-1832), daughter of Samuel Smith (1752-1839; Major General of Maryland militia, U.S. Congressman and Senator from Maryland), and Margaret Spear (1759-1842; from an old family with roots in Virginia and Pennsylvania).

Hughes served in the War of 1812 as captain of militia artillery at Fort McHenry, where his brother-in-law Major George Armistead was commander during the famous bombardment in September 1814. After leaving the militia he applied for a position with the federal government, and subsequently President James Madison appointed him secretary of the American commission to negotiate a peace treaty with England, which began its work in August 1814 in Ghent, Belgium, and ended with the treaty being signed in late December 1814. The commission included: John Quincy Adams, Ambassador to Russia; Senator James A. Bayard of Delaware; U.S. Congressman and former Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky; Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin; and Jonathan Russell, Charge d’affaires and acting Minister in London. As a result of Hughes’s interactions with the members of this commission, and probably also because of his personality and his political leanings, he became lifelong friends of both Adams and Clay.

In 1815 Hughes was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates, where he served for one term. Shortly after the term ended (in early 1816) Secretary of State James Monroe sent him to negotiate with the Spanish authorities of New Granada (now Colombia) for the release of American crew members who had been imprisoned there after a dispute about a blockade. Those negotiations concluded with the release of most of the remaining crew members in June 1816.

Hughes’s next appointment came in the following month, July 1816, when Monroe named him secretary of the American legation to the Kingdom of Norway and Sweden, whose king was Charles XIII of Sweden. Hughes arrived with his wife Laura in Stockholm, the seat of government, in April 1817 and carried out his duties there under Minister Jonathan Russell until he was officially named Charge d’affaires in June 1819, his first official opportunity for a leadership role now that Russell had returned to the United States.

During this stint in Stockholm (1817-1825) all four of his children were born: Charles John Hughes (14 December 1817; named for the Swedish Crown Prince and heir presumptive), Margaret Smith Hughes (8 January 1819), George Edward Hughes (20 February 1820), Laura Sidney Hughes (24 January 1823). During this same stint, however, the two youngest children died: George on 30 May 1823 and Laura on 28 September 1823.

In 1825 Hughes requested a new, more southerly posting, and the newly elected President, John Quincy Adams, nominated him for the post of Charge d’affaires to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. After a leave of absence from late 1825 to early 1826, spent primarily in Baltimore, Hughes with his wife and two remaining children moved to Brussels, one of the two capital cities, in mid-1826. As a diplomat, Hughes was obliged to entertain, and he found the cost of such obligations in Brussels, as well as the cost of living in general, very expensive. His salary was less than that of a minister, but he frequently gave costly and valuable gifts, and his wife Laura, even during their early years in Stockholm, commented on his “expencessive habits” (letter of 12 September 1818 to her sister-in-law Mary Hughes Armstrong). Later in his life Hughes himself referred to these “habits,” especially during the early 1840s when he was corresponding with his sister Peggy Moore about retirement.

In December 1828 President Adams recommended Hughes for a promotion, as Minister to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but the Senate postponed its decision on this promotion because a new President, Andrew Jackson, had been elected in November, and his administration would not be in place until the new year. In May 1829 the new Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren, informed Hughes that President Jackson had recommended someone else (William Pitt Preble from Maine [1783-1857] as Charge d’affaires, with Auguste Davezac [1780-1851] as secretary of the American legation), but he asked Hughes to stay on until Preble arrived and then to resume his old position as Charge d’affaires in Sweden.

Hughes moved his family to Stockholm in late 1830, where he remained until 1841, the longest stint of his diplomatic career. During the summer of 1832, when he and his wife Laura were living a few miles outside of the city, in the Chateau of Akershof, she died of tuberculosis (on 7 August) and was buried in the nearby Bromme Churchyard. That fall Hughes travelled to England in order, first, to install his daughter Margaret (age 13) at Diggeswell House in Hertfordshire, the home of his wife’s sister Mary Buchanan Smith and her husband John Edward Mansfield; and then to enroll his son, Charles John (age 15) in a small private class run by a tutor named Sinkler in Docking, in Norfolk, only ten miles from Holkham Hall, the home of Sir Thomas William Coke and his second wife Lady Anne Keppel, both of whom Hughes had met earlier (in 1823) and who promised to look after Charles John while he was in Docking. From England he went to the United States, where he had leave to spend the winter and spring of 1832-1833, and then back to Stockholm through England.

During this stint in Sweden Hughes began to plan for his retirement, which he intended to spend in a remodeled suite of rooms in the house of his sister Peggy and her husband Samuel Moore in Baltimore, and many letters were exchanged about the remodeling of these rooms between him and Peggy (and sometimes also with Samuel). In addition, Hughes consulted with them in person when he was in the United States from the fall of 1838 to the spring of 1839. He returned through England, where his first stop (on 28 May 1839) was at Longford Hall in Derbyshire, another estate owned by Sir Thomas Coke (who was not in residence at the time), then on to London and back to Sweden.

In 1837 the United States had recognized the Republic of Texas as a separate nation, and in 1839 Hughes began arguing for the same among his colleagues in Europe and in talks with Foreign Secretary Palmerston and Prime Minister Melbourne in London, with Prime Minister Marshal Soult and the Duke of Orleans in Paris, and with King Leopold I in Brussels. Belgium was the first to grant recognition, after the Treaty of London was signed (19 April 1839); France granted “semi-official recognition of Texas” on 25 September 1839; and in the fall of 1840 Britain signed a treaty (ratified December 1841) recognizing Texas. Hughes was justly proud of the outcome and of his work in helping to bring it about. In July 1839 he wrote to John Forsyth, the United States Secretary of State, about what he had accomplished with the French government (along with the relevant documents) and sent the same to Edward Pontois, French Minister to the United States, and to Gen. J. Pinckney Henderson, Republic of Texas Minister to France, and a few years later, in 1846, to Gen. Sam Houston, former Republic of Texas President and then-United States Senator from Texas, from whom he received a thank-you letter for doing so much to bring about the outcome.

During this same period Hughes, now living alone in Stockholm without his wife or his two children in residence, began to complain of depression and anxiety, and during the summer of 1839, much of which he spent in mainland Europe, primarily Paris, he traveled to Marienbad in early August, where he spent four weeks “taking the waters.” He left Marienbad on 11 September, spent three days in Carlsbad and another three days in Dresden, where he “consulted a very celebrated M.D. Dr Carus” [Albert Gustav Carus, 1789-1869] for his condition. After Dresden he stopped for six days in Berlin (22-28 September) and expected to arrive back in Stockholm during the first week of October.

Meanwhile, his son Charles John, having finished his schooling in Docking and then gone on to West Point, had now become a lieutenant in the United States Army. In early July 1839 Hughes visited him in Deadman’s Bay, Florida, where he had begun a new posting at Fort Frank Brooke. (The Fort had only been established the year before, in 1838, by General Zachary Taylor for the purpose of driving out the Seminole Indians during the Second Seminole War [1835-1842] and was abandoned two years later.) A letter from Charles John was waiting for Hughes in Berlin, and two days later (24 September 1839) he wrote to his sister Peggy Moore that his son “had been ill, with ague & fever & I really am very uneasy about him. I excessively grieved that his Reg[imen]t has been continued in that horrid climate, & in the brutal & disgraceful murderous strife not to be dignified with the name of War. I shall never be happy until he is more North!” Charles John in fact had died on 22 August 1839, but Hughes only learned about it in Stockholm two months later (on 22 October 1839).

Hughes left Sweden for the United States in late August 1841, traveling via England, and after the presidential election in the fall, he fully expected that he would be replaced as Charge d’affaires by newly elected President William Henry Harrison. He was back in the United States by December 1841, and in Baltimore by January 1842, where he spent the winter and spring of 1842. He continued to complain that the Moores wanted to dictate the way he arranged and decorated his rooms in their home, but he agreed with their criticisms that he had been extravagant with money, had not prepared for the future, and hoped to do better. By this time, however, Vice President John Tyler had replaced President Harrison, who had died in office in April, and thanks to the intervention of influential supporters, including his friend and contemporary at Princeton, Representative Joseph Reed Ingersoll of Pennsylvania (1786-1868), and probably Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts and Senator Henry Clay of Tennessee, Tyler reappointed Hughes Charge d’affaires in June 1842, but this time to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and he left New York the following month for his new posting, accompanied by his daughter Margaret.

They arrived in late August in The Hague, the seat of government. During this next stint (from 1842-1845, which was to be Hughes’s last in the diplomatic corps), he began to correspond again with his sister about remodeling the rooms in the Moores’ home for his forthcoming retirement, but as early as the winter and then into the spring of 1843 he was again complaining about his situation, his finances, the high cost of living in The Hague, and his health. He consulted a Dr. Wachter, who told him that his “nervous system [was] shaken and disordered by slow circulation of [his] blood” and put him on a liquid diet, with no medicines or pills. He continued to worry about Margaret and her future, and as a further blow, in December 1843 his beloved twin sister Peggy Moore died in Baltimore, though he did not hear about it until 10 January 1844, when he received letters from his other sisters and a cousin.

In the presidential election of November 1844 James K. Polk defeated Henry Clay in a close election, and in March 1845, when Polk assumed office, Hughes knew that he had only a short time left before his current posting would end. His letters from this spring were full of anxiety for his future and for the difficulty of dismantling his house in The Hague and beginning a new life in Baltimore. His successor was again to be Auguste Davezac, who called on him in The Hague on 19 June 1845. Hughes’s appointment officially ended on 28 June, and he and Margaret left the city during the night of 12/13 July, stopping in Brussels on 15/16 July to say goodbye to his good friend the Marquis de Rumigny, the French ambassador there; then on to Paris and environs, to London, and finally to Liverpool, where they embarked for the United States at the end of August or early in September, arriving in New York later in September and informing Secretary of State James Buchanan from his hotel that he had officially returned from The Hague.

Soon after his arrival in the United States, he returned to his home on St. Paul’s Street in Baltimore, but shortly thereafter was in Washington (early November 1845). He returned to Washington twice in 1846 (February and June), but by then his previous health problems must have returned, for in August 1846 he was again “taking the waters,” this time at the spa in Saratoga Springs, New York. He returned to Washington for a short visit in 1847 (late February- early March), and was in New York three months later, where he wrote to Margaret (17 June) that he was “much better now.” But his next letter to her (28 July) was from the well-known Yellow Springs Spa in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, where he remained throughout August and into September, mentioning in one letter to Margaret his “difficulty of breathing” (3 August).

In early May 1848 he consulted a specialist in Philadelphia, Dr. Samuel Jackson (1787-1872; Professor, Institutes of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, 1835-1863), about his heart condition. Dr. Jackson wrote him a long letter containing his professional diagnosis: the sounds of the contractions of Hughes’s heart were reflected in his temperament; his recommended cure was that Hughes should “live” not according to his “impulses & instincts” and “the long habits & indulgences of [his] life” but rather “ca[l]mly, philosophically and rationally,” and “enjoy passively, not actively.” While he was undergoing treatment, he wrote to Margaret that, though Dr. Jackson had found “an evident improvement-in the action of my heart,” he was “better-but very weak” (23 May 1848), and to a friend, the inventor John H. B. Latrobe (1803-1891), that he was “a little better—tho only a little” (31 May 1848).

Hughes’s health continued to decline during the next year, but his old friends Henry Clay and Joseph Reed Ingersoll kept in touch with him by letter throughout 1848 and into 1849. He died on 18 September 1849, and was subsequently buried in the Green Mount Cemetery in north Baltimore. In one of the first condolence letters to Margaret (on 29 September) Clay observed that her father had now “escaped from [the] excruciating pain and suffering” of “more than one mortal disease" and that he [Clay] was now “the only survivor of an important foreign commission, connected with the peace of our country, and of which your father was a member" [that is, the one at Ghent in 1814]).

Clay’s remarks at the end of Christopher Hughes’s life return us to his diplomatic career, which is the primary focus of the Hughes Family Papers. The owner of the Papers, Jesse S. Reeves, was himself a researcher into Hughes’s life and career, and had this to say about his success: “Throughout his life Hughes had a great faculty for making and keeping friends. Handsome, agreeable, a bon vivant and raconteur, he enlivened the dinner table and kept things going. He never missed a chance of making new friends, particularly if they were ‘worthwhile’ by reason of political or social prominence . . . A voluble talker, one wonders how he found time to listen, but listen he must have, for he reported his conversations in formidable letters to his chiefs, Adams and Clay, who . . . admitted the extraordinary quality of his comments upon men and politics” [Reeves, Quarterly Review, 45, 2-3]. “Henry Clay declared that while he was secretary of state, Hughes sent him more news and more important news than all the other diplomatic agents put together” (Whiteley, col. 347a). He “was well liked by the rest of the diplomatic corps” and his “colleagues corresponded with Hughes even after they were transferred from Stockholm to other posts [so that] he received political news from a number of European capitals” (Van Minnen, p. 179). And in a speech to Congress on 4 November 1841 John Quincy Adams said that Hughes had been able to procure a “most secret” document, “with many others, . . . by the art of making friends by his social qualities wherever he goes. I mention this to show what ought to be the qualities of a public minister abroad. If a minister is in the habit of friendly, social intercourse with the other members of the diplomatic corps at the same court, with an ordinary portion of sagacity, he has the key to all their secrets” (Hughes Family Papers, VI. Printed Matter, item 5. [b]).

When Hughes died in 1849, his only remaining child was his daughter Margaret Smith Hughes, and she had no children of her own. Therefore, when she died in 1884, this particular branch of the Hughes family came to an end. Margaret was born on 8 January 1819 in Sweden during her father’s first assignment there, lived in Stockholm until late 1825, then in Brussels from 1826 until 1830, and in Stockholm again from late 1830 until her mother died in 1832. In the fall of 1832, her father moved her to Diggeswell House in Hertfordshire, the home of his wife’s sister Mary Buchanan Smith and her husband John Edward Mansfield, where she spent her teenage years among children who were about the same age, becoming lifelong friends of one of them, Charlotte Henrietta Mansfield.

Margaret accompanied her father to the United States in the fall of 1841 and back in the summer of 1842 to The Hague, where they lived together for the next three years, during a period when his health was in decline and he was concerned about the high cost of living. She spent much of her time alone, taking piano lessons, practicing, writing letters, and keeping busy with various activities, but was content with her routine. She especially enjoyed attending the balls and dances at court and visiting with friends from out of town. Her cousin Charlotte Mansfield spent two months with Margaret and her father early in 1843, and afterwards they exchanged two letters a week with each other until Margaret went to visit her and the rest of the Mansfield family at Diggeswell House for six weeks at the beginning of August. Their friend Otheline de Tuyll was also at Diggeswell for part of the visit, and early in September Margaret’s father met the two girls in London to accompany them home to The Hague. They embarked for Rotterdam on 13 September, arriving in The Hague on 15 September, and Otheline stayed with them until the end of October, when her parents, Baron Charles Lodewijk and Baroness Marie Louise de Tuyll, returned from their summer home, Chateau de Voorn near Utrecht.

Margaret returned to the United States with her father in 1845, and to the Hughes family home on St. Paul’s Street in Baltimore, where she looked after him during his last years. Whenever he was away from Baltimore, he would write to tell her how he was and what he was doing. In the meantime, her good friend Charlotte Mansfield, who was with her in The Hague in 1843, had married Vincent de Tuyll in 1844. She continued to write to Margaret in 1845 and 1846, and in July 1847 she and her husband and two-year-old son Reginald travelled to Canada, and she hoped to see Margaret “in the course of the winter.” That reunion eventually took place in Baltimore in early March 1848, and while Charlotte was there Christopher Hughes invited a young woman from his wife’s side of the family, Margaret Patterson (1816-1873), to dinner on the 8th “to meet [her] Anglo-Dutch cousin.”

Christopher Hughes died in the next year, and on the day after his death, 19 September 1849, Margaret began to write to her cousin Patrick Gibson Jr., an officer at the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Baltimore, for money to pay her household expenses; the requests continued periodically to the end of 1849, then through 1850, and into early 1851. She continued to live in the same house. Her good friend Mary Wilcocks wrote to her from Philadelphia on 20 October 1849 and approved of her decision to stay where she was, and not to go to live with an aunt or an uncle, but expressed her concern for Margaret’s future and urged her to get out and about and not stay in the house all the time. It is not known how she spent her time during the next year and a half, but in the spring of 1851 her engagement to Anthony Kennedy (21 December 1810-31 July 1892) was announced, and on 8 July 1851, with her uncle, General John Spear Smith (1785-1866), “acting as [her] parent, and . . . giving [her] away,” she was married to him at St. Paul’s Church in Baltimore.

Anthony Kennedy was descended from a Scottish family from western Ayrshire whose male forebears beginning in the fifteenth century were successive Earls of Cassillis (thus the name of the Kennedy family home, Cassilis, near Charles Town, Virginia [now West Virginia]). His father, John Kennedy (1769-1836), came to the United States from Londonderry in Ulster, and subsequently married Nancy Clayton Pendleton (1777-1854) from a family that had arrived in Virginia in the late seventeenth century. Anthony was born on the Shrub Hill estate in Baltimore City, Maryland, but studied law in Charles Town and served in the Virginia House of Delegates (1839-1843). He moved back to Baltimore in 1851, was elected (as a Whig) to the Maryland House of Delegates (where he served from early 1856 to the spring of 1857), and later in 1856 was nominated by the American Party for the United States Senate. In the fall he won the election and served one term, from 1857 to 1863.

Kennedy’s first wife, Sarah Stephena Dandridge, was born on 7 November 1811 at The Bower, an estate in Leetown, Virginia (now West Virginia), which had been built by her father Adam Stephen Dandridge (1782-1821), whose family had emigrated from England in the early 18th century. Sarah and Anthony had three children (Stephen Dandridge Kennedy, M.D. [1834-1914], Philip Clayton Kennedy [1838-1864], and Agnes Spottswood Kennedy [1840-1907]), but Sarah died at a young age (25 October 1846).

Stephen Dandridge Kennedy’s first wife, Frances (Fanny) Hughes Howell (born 1 August 1841), also died at a young age (on 31 October 1864). Their daughter, Frances (Fanny) Howell Hughes Kennedy, was born on 9 October 1864 at Ellerslie, Anthony and Margaret Kennedy’s home and farm near Ellicott City, Howard County, Maryland. She was a granddaughter of Margaret’s father’s sister, Louisa Hughes, and Margaret, having no children of her own, officially adopted her. Margaret died at Ellerslie on 1 August 1884, and was buried in Baltimore, probably in one of the graveyards of Old St. Paul’s Church. Frances (Fanny) Kennedy continued to live at Ellerslie with her guardian Anthony Kennedy for the next two years, until she married William Manly there in June 1886. Anthony himself continued to live at Ellerslie from 1886 until about 1891, when he moved to Annapolis to live with his son Stephen; he died there in July 1892 and is buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.

Acquisition Information:

Gift of Jesse S. Reeves family, 1943, and 2020. M-5000, M-7213 .

Arrangement:

The collection is arranged in the following series:

• Correspondence
• Writings, Prose, Poetry, Recipes, and Prescriptions
• Documents
• Financial Papers
• Photographs and Portraits
• Printed Items

Rules or Conventions:

Finding aid prepared using Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS)

Related

Additional Descriptive Data:

Bibliography

Hughes, Sanderson, Smith, Spear, Mansfield, Moore, Armistead, Howell, Kennedy, Dandridge, Pendleton, and other family histories accessed via ancestry.com

Fredriksen, John C., “Hughes, Christopher, Jr.,” American National Biography Online (Feb. 2000), 1-3.

Reeves, Jesse Siddall, “A Diplomat Glimpses Parnassus: Excerpts from the Correspondence of Christopher Hughes,” The Quarterly Review of the Michigan Alumnus, 41 (October 1934):189-201.

________, “Washington’s Autographs and Some Others,” The Quarterly Review of the Michigan Alumnus, 42 (Winter 1936):168-178.

________, “Coke of Norfolk and Lafayette: The Correspondence of Two Great Liberals with Christopher Hughes of Baltimore,” The Quarterly Review of the Michigan Alumnus, 45 (Autumn 1938), 1-11.

________, “Coke of Norfolk and Lafayette—II: A Continuation of the Correspondence of Two Great Liberals with Christopher Hughes of Baltimore,” The Quarterly Review of the Michigan Alumnus, 45 (Autumn 1938), 137-147.

Van Minnen, Cornelius A., “Christopher Hughes (1786-1849),” in Notable U.S. Ambassadors Since 1775: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Cathal J. Nolan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1987), pp. 176-182.

Whiteley, Emily Stone, “Hughes, Christopher,” Dictionary of American Biography, 9 (1932), cols. 346b-347a.

Please see the Christopher Hughes Indices and Notes for an index of letter writers and inventories of non-correspondence materials.

Subjects

Click on terms below to find any related finding aids on this site.

Subjects:

Diplomats--United States--History--19th century.
Father and child.
Legislators--United States.
Mexican War, 1846-1848.
Mother and child.
Parents-in-law.
Women.

Formats:

Account books.
Advertisements.
Clippings (information artifacts)
Documents (object genre)
Drawings (visual works)
Invitations.
Legal documents.
Letters (correspondence)
Lithographs.
Military records.
Pamphlets.
Pencil drawings.
Photographs.
Printed materials (object genre)
Property records.
Visiting cards.
Writings (documents)

Names:

Hughes family.
Kennedy family.
Moore family.
Adams, John Quincy, 1767-1848.
Bayard, James A. (James Asheton), 1767-1815.
Clay, Henry, 1777-1852.
Gallatin, Albert, 1761-1849.
Hughes, Christopher, 1786-1849.
Armstrong, Mary.
Dandridge, Adam Stephen, 1814-1890.
Dandridge, Philip P., 1817-1881.
Henderson, James Pinckney, 1808-1858.
Howell, Benjamin Paschall, 1808-1881.
Hughes, Charles John, 1817-1839.
Hughes, Christopher, 1745-1824.
Hughes, Laura Sophia Smith, 1792-1832.
Ingersoll, Joseph R. (Joseph Reed), 1786-1868.
Kennedy, Andrew Eskridge, 1824-1890.
Kennedy, Anthony, 1810-1892.
Kennedy, Philip Clayton, 1838-1864.
Kennedy, Margaret Smith Hughes, 1819-1884.
Kennedy, Stephen Dandridge, 1834-1914.
Lafayette, Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert Du Motier, marquis de, 1757-1834.
Londonderry, Charles William Vane, Marquis of, 1778-1854.
Mansfield, Margaret, approximately 1818-.
McConkey, William, Jr.
McLane, Louis, 1786-1857.
Monroe, James, 1758-1831.
Moore, Andrew.
Moore, Eliza.
Moore, Peggy Hughes, 1786-1843.
Moore, Samuel, -1845.
Pendleton, Edmund Boyd, 1816-.
Pendleton, Philip Clayton, 1779-1863.
Pontois, Eduard de.
Porterfield, George A.
Ringgold, Cadwalader, 1802-1867.
Roenne, Adelaide de.
Rogers, Samuel, 1763-1855.
Rumigny, H. Marie-Hippolyte Guelly, Marquis de, 1784-1871.
Smith, Edwin Harvie, 1868-1907.
Smith, Samuel, 1752-1839.
Stirum, Louise de.
Tersen, Louise de.
Thruston, Juliana.
Tucker, Beverley, 1820-1890.
Tuylen, Adrienne de.
Tuyll, Charlotte Henrietta de.
Tuyll, Otheline de.
Tuyll, Renee de.
Tyler, John, 1790-1862.
Van Buren, Martin, 1782-1862.
Webster, Daniel, 1782-1852.
Wellesley, Marianne Caton Patterson, -1853.
Wetterstedt, Gustaf de.
Wilcocks, Mary.

Places:

Baltimore (Md.)
Hague (Netherlands)
Stockholm (Sweden)
Sweden--Foreign relations--United States.
United States--Diplomatic and consular service.
United States--Foreign relations--Netherlands.
United States--Foreign relations--Sweden.
United States--Politics and government--1815-1861.