James V. Mansfield Letters from San Francisco, 1862-1864. Approx. 3,000 pages.
$6500
One of the greatest treasures of the James V. Mansfield Papers are the voluminous letters he wrote home to his wife and children while living in San Francisco during the Civil War. He ruminated on spirit photography, séances, his own and others’ spiritualist activities, costs of living, natural disasters, indigenous peoples, the Civil War, fashion, and the Chinese, Irish, and German immigrant population, and much more. His prolific writing habit, keen observational skills, and deep interest in the people, flora, and fauna of California, make his letters a particularly rich resource for scholars.
About this Collection: The James V. Mansfield Papers
The William L. Clements Library had the unprecedented opportunity to acquire a large portion of the papers of James V. Mansfield (1817-1899), his wife Mary Hopkinson Mansfield (b. ca. 1827), and their children John Worthington Mansfield (1849-1933) and Mary Gertrude Mansfield (1854-1922). James Mansfield was born in 1817 in Massachusetts and worked as an itinerant penmanship teacher and a dry goods merchant in Boston before establishing himself as a spiritualist medium in 1857. James Mansfield’s services included delivering séances in person or acting as a writing medium. You were able to send to Mansfield a letter to a deceased family member or friend, and he would channel the departed, who would then respond to the unopened letter. Mansfield would return the reply and the original letter for a fee. For this service he gained the moniker “spirit postmaster,” and is now recognized as one of the founders of the American spiritualist movement, alongside Charles Foster and Henry Slade.