SOLON ROBINSON, 1851 479 



Letter to Mariah Robinson 



[Typewritten copy in Harry Robinson Strait Papers, Gary] 



Lexington Ga— Sund. eve. March 23, '51 

 Mrs. Mariah Robinson — 

 My Dear Wife. 



I am sitting all alone in a great house — that of ex- 

 Gov. Oilman^ — the family have all gone to church from 

 which I excused myself to get a few leisure minutes to 

 tell you where I am and that I am pretty well, tliough 

 never quite clear of a slight head ache; but I have used 

 to that. I have just finished a few stanzas to my Daughter 

 which I hope each of them will treasure up in their mem- 

 ory so they may retain them even after the evening 

 shades o'er take me. 



It is now upwards of two long months since I have 

 heard from you & it will be a week more before I can 

 reach Charleston where I hope to get a letter. I dont 

 know when I shall reach New York, as my master dont 

 seem to want me to leave the south till the sun drives me 

 away. I am getting veiy tired — This has been a labori- 

 ous winter to me. I dont wonder they wish me to re- 

 main, for I have been of great service to them. I am so 

 well known in this country that my name is valuable in 

 such exciting & bitter feeling times between North and 

 South. 



I am more and more satisfied with the institution of 

 slavery as one of the best for the negro race that could 

 be devised, but I am fully satisfied that the opposition to 

 it will dissolve the Union. No country was ever cursed 

 with worse enemies than the abolitionists. 



The weather is cool enough this evening to make fire 



^ George Rockingham Gilmer, born in the Broad River District of 

 upper Georgia, April 11, 1790; died at Lexington, Georgia, Novem- 

 ber 16, 1859. State legislator, 1818-1819, 1824. Representative to 

 Congress, 1821-1823, 1827-1829, 1833-1835. Governor of Georgia, 

 1829-1831, 1837-1839. Author of Sketches of Some of the First 

 Settlers of Upper Georgia. . . (New York, 1855; rev. ed., Ameri- 

 cus, Ga., 1926). See sketch in Dictionary of American Biography, 

 7:306-7. 



