Raab has sold the recently discovered archive of Moses Sherwood Stuyvesant to The Huntington Library
In collaboration with The Huntington Library, Raab announces the sale of perhaps the most vivid and complete Civil War archive to reach the market in many years, containing hundreds of confidential, unpublished letters written by U.S. Naval Academy graduate and Lt. Commander Moses Sherwood Stuyvesant.
The manuscripts span his Academy years through the Siege of Fort Fisher in 1865 and detail his service aboard several Navy ships, as well as reports of tensions with cadets over slavery and succession, his thoughts on President Lincoln, the Mexican Reform War, and Civil War battles such as the Peninsula Campaign and the scuttling of the USS Merrimac.
“It is a fantastic collection,” said Olga Tsapina, Norris Foundation Curator of American History at the Huntington Library. “The Stuyvesant papers are a perfect complement to the Huntington’s collections of maritime history which support the special Kemble Fellowship in Maritime History.”
Discovered by Nathan Raab within a family collection stretching back centuries, the Stuyvesant archive also contains diaries, photographs, uniform effects, a bullet that wounded him, and his diploma from the Naval Academy at Annapolis.
Stuyvesant graduated with the Class of 1860, what would be the Naval Academy’s last graduating class before the war. The Huntington’s purchase also included Stuyvesant’s complete, signed yearbook. Both the archive and the yearbook have been formally acquisitioned but are not yet available to researchers until cataloging is completed.
Stuyvesant continued to serve in the Navy after the war as Commander of the U.S. Steamer Miantonomoh, and he traveled to Russia on a diplomatic tour upon the orders of President Andrew Johnson.
