ABSTRACT
The Andrew Mattison letter of 1843 is notable for the political and social motives behind the emigration. Mattison seems to have been committed to the American form of government (making it a ‘happy land of Universal Sufferage’) long before his emigration. His elite background is hinted at by his references to Clara Thompson, whom he is persuading to join him and whose family included members of the Order of the Bath. (Clara Thompson did arrive later and married him.) First arriving in Kentucky, Mattison settled in Paducah (which in 1850 had only 19 English-born residents out of a total recorded population of 2,438), but he also lived in Ohio and later fought for the Union in the Civil War. The language is quite amazingly political, with references to ‘a poor degraded lick spital under some lordling aristocrat’, and his admonitions to Clara not to marry an English aristocrat, who is ‘hardly a man’. Like others, Mattison generally liked Americans: ‘The American white people are the most polite unassuming people I have ever seen, although they have customs I do not admire’. He seems to have fitted in quite well. Having established a nursery business, Mattison remarks that ‘A negro slave is for no use to me in the nursery; I cannot trust them out of my sight for they are so very careless’. Like many Americans, he was against slavery not necessarily for moral reasons, but more for practical ones. He seems bitter towards his old country, and insists that the United States was ‘the greatest country in the world’ and ‘truly the home of the working man’.
