Documents in the Attic

Wendy (left) and William James found Confederate government official Colin J. McRae’s papers in boxes in the attic of their home. The documents illustrate ties between the South and England during the Civil War

Civil War documents in the attic
Found papers detail England's involvement in war

By Brian Hicks
The Post and Courier
Monday, July 16, 2007

Grace Beahm
The Post and Courier

When Colin J. McRae sailed for London in 1863, it seemed the War Between the States might go on forever.

But the South's supplies most certainly would not.

McRae — one of the Confederacy's chief financial officers, a member of its Congress and a signer of its constitution — left the country that winter on a secret mission to maintain the clandestine supply line of guns, ammunition, food and raw materials flowing from England to Charleston and other Southern ports by way of blockade runners.

Union forces had set up a line of Navy ships along the entire Southern coast to cut off supply lines and effectively strangle the rebel forces. President Lincoln called it the Anaconda Plan.

But an intricate network of Charleston businessmen and underground diplomats were buying supplies secretly from British merchants — who violated their country's alleged neutrality — and smuggling them into the country on fast ships that slipped through the Union Navy's grasp.

Every week, these blockade runners brought Enfield rifles, Blakeley shells and even clothes into Charleston, Savannah and Mobile, Ala. The entire South depended on these deliveries, but by late 1862, McRae and Confederate President Jefferson Davis feared there were problems with the system. Something had to be done.

McRae's mission would keep him in London for the remainder of the war, and away from his beloved Alabama forever. But his papers, and hundreds of revealing Confederate documents from his London office, would find their way back to the United States, where they lay undiscovered in an attic for more than a century.

Now, the McRae family letters and papers have been purchased by a South Carolina museum, and historians say the collection might be the most important cache of primary source material about the Civil War in nearly a century.

" The significance of this collection is that it is an example of the Confederacy's lifeline to England," says W. Allen Roberson, director of the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum in Columbia. "It's a very unexplored aspect of the war, one of the last of the Civil War. Several books will come from this."

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the documents, however, is that they were found at all.

The Jameses

A few years ago, William and Wendy James bought the Kate Shepard House, one of Mobile's most historic Victorian homes. Shepard was a well- known educator who ran a school out of her house for much of the first half of the 20th century.

The Jameses wanted to turn the home into a bed-and-breakfast inn while preserving its history. So when the previous owners mentioned there was a lot of junk in the attic, the Jameses said it was fine to leave it behind. Perhaps, they thought, some of Kate's belongings were among the stuff that had accumulated during the past century.

" It didn't look like much, just heaps of old boxes," Wendy James recalled during a recent visit to Columbia. "But we told them not to throw them out."

After nine months of unpacking their own belongs, the Jameses turned to the attic. Much of the material in the boxes was worthless, but they soon found letters from Shepard's family, some going back a generation or more. Wendy James became fascinated, and spent hours poring through the letters, lying in bed at night reading passages from them to her husband.

The letters were mostly filled with family news, and Wendy James grew to know the family. But nothing in the letters explained why the Jameses were finding, mixed in among other papers, documents dating back to the Civil War.

There were invoices and receipts for cotton, beef, rifles, 40 cannon shells. William James was most intrigued by the record of a payment to a blockade runner's captains for his personal belongings, which had been confiscated by Union sailors. James recognized the names of some of the ships named in the papers — the Confederate schooner Stephen Hart is mentioned in one.

But the Jameses couldn't understand why an old spinster educator would have these records in her house. The story came in pieces, and only by first tracing the story of the papers' apparent owner, McRae.

Colin McRae

An Alabama businessman who became involved in the highest levels of the war effort, McRae had gone to London in the middle of the war to investigate the South's own purchasing agent, Caleb Huse. Confederate officials thought Huse might be profiting at their expense, or else not managing their accounts well.

Although the charges were unfounded, McRae stayed in London to manage the South's business. He was in close contact with George Alfred Trenholm of Charleston — the man said to have been the model for Rhett Butler in "Gone With the Wind." Trenholm and other Southern businessmen were supplying much of the payment for the Confederacy's black market supplies.

By the final years of the war, McRae was so powerful that he chose what went into the hold of each ship that met blockade runners in the Bahamas.

When the war ended, McRae was stuck, a man without a country. He was a ranking member of the Confederacy and faced jail time if he returned to the United States. So despite the urging of his family, McRae sailed for Belize.

For 12 years, McRae lived as an expatriate in Central America. A family story unearthed by the Jameses seemed to tell the rest of the story.

Kate Shepard's connection

Years after the war, McRae's siblings John and Catherine sailed to Belize to visit their brother. John McRae said he had to see Colin once more before he died, and he just barely made it. John died the day after arriving. When Colin passed away a few years later, in 1877, Catherine apparently took possession of all of the personal and business papers he had carried out of London in 1865. These included records of the British connection to the Confederacy — a dirty little secret England had done its best to bury.

The final question was answered with a little genealogy: The Jameses found that Kate Shepard, the original owner of their house, was Colin McRae's niece. And she had kept her uncle's papers.

Individually, these Confederate documents, some of them nothing more than a list of artillery shells on a company letterhead, could fetch thousands at auction.

But the Jameses wanted the papers to remain together and available for scholars, historians and authors. They found the Confederate Relic Room through Corky Huey, a retired educator in Columbia.

To the museum

The museum had the collection appraised at $304,000 and bought it for $250,000. Roberson says the museum still is collecting private donations to fund the purchase. There should be little problem, state officials say. Huey says anticipation is building among scholars for the details in the documents, which could change some assumptions about the war — including the myth of the poorly dressed Rebel soldiers. Evidently, the Confederates wore British clothing on the battlefield.

It might be awhile before all questions are answered. Roberson says it'll be at least a year before the collection is fully catalogued, and a major exhibit on the papers is planned for 2011, the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Already some invoices are on display with what might be corresponding items: an Enfield rifle used in the war alongside a receipt for Enfields, a Blakeley shell found in Columbia alongside a bill for the artillery.

Roberson says the collection, the largest ever purchased by the museum, will provide valuable glimpses of the state's, and the nation's, defining era.

And even though the collection's discovery and sale makes for the kind of "cash in the attic" story of urban legend, Wendy James cried when they came to take the papers, and Shepard's history, away from the house.

" There were three Kates in the family, and I had gotten to know them so well that I could tell which Kate they were talking about in each letter," she said.

Reach Brian Hicks at 937-5561 or bhicks@postandcourier.com.

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