ABSTRACT
The Peter McKellar letters are complex. They begin in the previous volume, with two letters from Peter’s brother, Duncan, who was serving in the military, to Peter before his emigration. In this volume and the next, he is in America and his siblings are writing to him from Scotland. Other letters are written to him from other family members also in America. The McKellars were Scots. Peter was a cotton hand printer near Glasgow but lost his job a number of years before he emigrated (probably in 1838, with their relatives, the McLeish family) and turned to farming in America. Their extended family and marriages make it challenging to follow the family history. Some siblings remained in Scotland. Peter cleared his own farm in Iowa and wrote to his son, Archibald, who worked for a blacksmith at Taylor Falls. The letter to Peter, in Vermont, from his sister’s husband – a blacksmith in Charleston, South Carolina – offers extraordinary insight into life in the American South. The encouragement to learn a trade, because ‘farming is a slavish business’, is interesting, as are the references to the barter economy. The comparisons between life in Vermont and in South Carolina capture something of how diverse the United States was in the years leading up to the Civil War. By February 1849, it is apparent that the siblings have moved. Archibald urges his brother to join him in Charleston. The 1848 letter indicates that brothers Duncan and James also emigrated, but that sisters Janet and Ann were still in Scotland. The letter of 12 July 1859, printed later in this volume, gives details of land they purchased in Iowa. See the headnote in Volume 4 for the McKellar letters in that volume.
