Processing Information

There is a finding aid (for Series 1-4) in the Reference notebook, in Virgo and online through ARVAS at http://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaead/published/uva-sc/vivadoc.pl?file=viu03614.xml . The collection (Series 1-4) is also available on Microfilm M-2379)

Biographical / Historical

Elizabeth Oakes (Prince) Smith, author, lecturer and reformer, was born in North Yarmouth, Maine, in 1806. She was raised with strict religious discipline by her parents, David and Sophia (Blanchard) Prince. The family moved to Portland, Maine, in 1814 and there, in deference to her mother's wishes, Elizabeth abandoned her plan for a higher education and a career as a director of a school for girls and married newspaper editor and political satirist Seba Smith in 1823.

Elizabeth devoted the early years of their marriage to raising her family. Their fortune was lost when Smith fell victim to the land boom which culminated in the panic of 1837. The family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1839, where Smith hoped to regain his losses by selling cotton cleaning machines to planters. This venture failed and they moved to New York where they lived until 1860.

This move proved to be the start of Elizabeth's long and notable public career as a writer. To assist her husband she began to contribute sketches, essays, and poems to the popular periodicals of the day, such as Ladies' Companion , Southern Literary Messenger , Godey's Lady's Book and Graham's American Monthly Magazine . Her poem, "The Sinless Child," (1834), drew wide acclaim from critics such as Edgar Allan Poe and Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Many of her works were penned under the pseudonym Ernest Helfenstein.

In addition to her poetry, she wrote seven novels, had two of her plays produced, and authored many short stories and children's stories. Her writings, which often portrayed religious and sentimental themes, became tremendously popular; one novel, Bald Eagle , was a best seller in Beadle's dime novel series.

Oakes Smith's articles in support of woman suffrage, written for the New York Tribune in 1850, launched her successful career as a lyceum lecturer from 1851 to 1857. Social and moral issues dominated her public speaking. She argued for temperance and equal suffrage and lectured on the social ills of advancing capitalism and slothfulness and the necessity of religious faith. In 1877 she served as the minister of the Independent Church in Canastota, New York. She continued with her writing throughout her later life, adding such publications as Ladies Home Journal , Baldwin's Monthly , The Cosmopolitan , Portland Transcript , Woman's Words , Truth and The Great Republic Monthly to the long list of journals which clamored for her contributions.

Fourteen years her senior, Elizabeth's husband Seba Smith (1792-1868) was also a native of Maine. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1818 and was working as assistant editor of the Eastern Argus , an important Democratic newspaper in Portland, Maine, when he wed Elizabeth Oakes Prince. Smith achieved notoriety by writing daily letters in the newspaper under the pseudonym Major Jack Downing, a Yankee adventurer who drew attention to current national events by satirically criticizing the administrations of President Andrew Jackson.

Smith used the newspaper which he founded in 1829, Maine's first daily, the Portland Courier, as a vehicle for publishing these letters. They were first reprinted in Boston and later circulated throughout New England. Smith soon gained a national audience and in 1833 the letters were published in a volume entitled The Life and Writings of Major Jack Downing of Downingville. Smith published his second series of Jack Downing letters in the Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.) starting in 1847. They appeared in book from along with the best of his earlier letters under the title My Thirty Years Out of the Senate in 1859.

Smith published articles and verse in a variety of popular journals of the day, most notably Southern Literary Messenger and Ralph Waldo Emerson's United States Magazine . His most famous works aside from the Downing letters include the epic verse "Powhatan" (1841) and an original mathematics dissertation entitled New Elements of Geometry (1850). The Smiths moved to Patchogue, Long Island, in 1860 where Smith retired from public life.

Elizabeth and Seba had four sons between 1828 and 1836. The children bore the name Oaksmith, a change made in the early years of their marriage. Appleton, their eldest son, was a ship broker and head of an importing house in Brussels called Frear Et Cie. He also served for a brief time as the United States foreign minister to Nicaragua. Appleton and his second wife, Augusta, resided with their many children in Hollywood, North Carolina, where Elizabeth lived much of the time after her husband's death in 1868.

Another son, Edward, shared his parents literary interests and worked as a writer and drama critic of the London Mercury where he authored his own plays and short stories as well. Sidney, a lawyer given to adventure, worked as a commercial agent at Porte-Au-Prince, Haiti. In 1869 he was lost at sea while he was in command of a U.S. gun boat on a voyage to Haiti. Not much is known about a fourth son, Alvin, who apparently was a farmer in Maryland and was beset by many troubles-heavy debts, a sickly wife and his own lameness (Alvin Oaksmith to Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Nov. 14, 1893).

All the sons married and letters from their many children appear throughout Elizabeth Oakes Smith's correspondence. The Oaksmith family seemed prone to misfortune and experienced an unusually high number of calamities and tragic deaths. Sidney's disappearance in the Caribbean is a prime example. His brother Edward was stricken with malaria in Cuba and died in 1865. Appleton was attacked with spears and arrows by Africans when his party attempted to navigate the Congo River. He survived the attack, but in 1879 a small boat that he was commanding in Beaufort Harbor near his coastal home in North Carolina capsized with six of his children aboard. His four eldest daughters drowned in this July 4th boating accident. Several other grandchildren died at an early age. Elizabeth outlived much of her family, and died on November 15, 1893 in North Carolina and was buried at Patchogue.

Content Description

The papers contain manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, notebooks, and journals of Mrs. Smith, her husband, Seba Smith, and of their sons, Appleton Oaksmith, Sidney Oaksmith, Alvin Oaksmith and Edward Oaksmith. The literary papers include Seba Smith's column on Major Jack Downing and Solomon Swope, and reviews of his "New elements of geometry"; drafts and copies of numerous poems, short stories, essays and lectures by Mrs. Smith as well as manuscripts of her plays "Destiny, " "Roman tribute, " and "Old New York, " sermons, 1877, from her pastorate of the Independent Church, Canastota, N.Y.; Edward Oaksmith's translations of Moliere's "Miser"; and manuscripts and clippings of poems and short stories by Seba, the sons and granddaughters.

Letters and diaries discuss the publication of the Jack Downing letters and criticism of the geometry; Mrs. Smith's literary career and lecture tours; her efforts to vindicate Appleton from charges of slave trading brought by William H. Seward, Appleton's divorce from his first wife and the drowning of his four daughters in an 1879 North Carolina boating acident; the diplomatic careers of Appleton and Sidney in Nicaragua, Haiti, and Panama; Edward's religious meditations, conversion to Catholicism and Jesuit novitiate in France; Sidney's law practice and death at sea in 1869; and efforts of Mrs. Smith and her daughter-in-law Delfina Oaksmith to run boarding houses.

Other topics inclue the "thermolume" cure, New England literary figures, current events, spiritualism, abolition, Mrs. Smith's interviews with Thurlow Weed and Andrew Johnson on behalf of Appleton, her campaign in behalf of a condemned woman, and her controversy with P. T. Barnum over unauthorized use of her name; and descriptions of life in Portland, Maine, New Mexico in 1885, and Lettsburg, Northumberland County, Va., 1884-1892. Of special interest is her eyewitness account of the 1863 New York City draft riot.

The collection also contains a youthful diary, 1871-1873, of Elizabeth Oaksmith, photographs, and scrapbooks compiled by Augusta Oaksmith containing clippings re the family and their literary output.

Correspondents include: Gales and Seaton, Washington, D.C., Lilly, Wait and Co., Boston, Mass., Benjamin Paul Akers, P. T. Barnum, Edward W. Bok, Elizabeth Bogart, Helen Stuart Campbell, George William Childs, Myron Helley Clark, Cassius Marcellus Clay, Daniel Clement Colesworthy, Auguste Comte, Augustus Whittemore Corliss, Samuel Eliot Coues, Thomas Amory Deblois, Caroline Amelia Smith DeWindt, Julia Deane Freeman, Hamilton Fish, Louis A. Godey, Horace Greeley, Rufus W. Griswold, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Frederic H. Hedge, Salley Helley, Sallie Hollis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Abraham Newkirk Littlejohn, Benson John Lossing, Lucretia Mott, Anna Cora Mowatt, C. A. Munson, David Dixon Porter, Epes Sargent, Mary Schoolcraft, Lydia Howard Sigourney, Frances Springer, Edmund C. Stedman, C. B. Stuart, Charles Swain, S. M. Ware, Sarah Helen Whitman. There are drafts of a letter to Daniel Webster and one to Dom Pedre de Alcantara.

Arrangement

The original collection is arranged into 5 series. Series 1 is Correspondence (Box 1-2), Series 2 is Literary Manuscripts (Box 2-6), Series 3 is Scrapbooks (Box 6), Series 4 is Miscellaneous and Printed (Box 7), and Series 5 is an addition to the collection which is a scrapbook belonging to Elizabeth Oakes Smith.

Related Material

There is a finding aid (for Series 1-4) for the original collection in the Reference notebook, in Virgo and online through ARVAS at http://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaead/published/uva-sc/vivadoc.pl?file=viu03614.xml . The collection (Series 1-4) is also available on Microfilm M-2379)