Scope and Content Note
The papers of Willie Person Mangum (1792-1861) span the years 1771-1906, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1771-1868. The collection contains correspondence, memoranda, diaries, speeches, legal papers, genealogical material, financial papers, and printed matter concerning local, southern, and national politics, the Whig Party in the South, economic and social conditions in North Carolina, the Mangum plantation, and education of the Mangum children. The collection is organized into two series: Family Papers and Personal Papers.
Included are business papers of Arthur Mangum, Willie Person Mangum's grandfather; Priestly Hinton Mangum, (1795-1850), Willie Mangum's brother; Priestly Hinton Mangum, Jr. (born 1829), agriculturist of North Carolina; and Willie Person Mangum (1827-1881), Mangum's nephew and consul to China and Japan. Also in the collection is correspondence of Willie Mangum's wife, Charity Alston Cain Mangum, with her husband and other members of the Mangum and Cain families, and genealogical and biographical material compiled by Stephen Beauregard Weeks. The Miscellany subseries of the Financial Papers includes an 1849 letter of Abraham Lincoln to Willie Person Mangum.
Other correspondents include George Edmund Badger, James Brown, John Anson Burlingame, H. G. Burton, Wm. Cain, Paul Carrington Cameron, John Chavis, Weston R. Gales, William Gaston, Robert B. Gilliam, William A. Graham, William H. Haywood, Charles L. Hinton, James Iredell, Reverdy Johnson Frederick Nash, Romulus Mitchell Saunders, George F. Seward, William Henry Seward, Robert Wilson Shufeldt, Samuel L. Southard, Edward Stanly, David L. Swain, Hugh Waddell, J. Watson Webb, Daniel Wesbster, Thurlow Weed, Lewis Williams.