Heading: (Stock market, banking – Roosevelt 1847)
Author:
Title: Franklin Roosevelt’s great grand-father as bank stock investor, 1847 letter
Place Published:
Publisher:
Date Published: 1847
Description:

D.[avid] V.N.Radcliff. Autograph Letter Signed. Albany, NY, Aug. 25, 1847. 2pp.+address leaf.

To John M. Knox, Counsellor at Law, New York: About stock held by James Roosevelt, who had just died. "...I would prefer the stock to any other property, knowing the bank to be the safest in the state...I cannot but think Mrs. Roosevelt and some of the legatees would prefer such an investment for its safety, convenience and profit to any other particularly in preference to U.S. stock which pays less and with the threatening trouble of Mexican annexation and Wilmot proviso and other causes may prove worthless..."

Before practicing law in Albany, Radcliff had been a judge in Duchess County where wealthy New York City banker James Roosevelt - great grand-father of future President Franklin D. Roosevelt - had a large country estate. Radcliff was writing during the Mexican-American War, when anti-slavery Congressmen (including a young Abraham Lincoln) favored the "Proviso" that slavery should be prohibited in any future territory acquired by conquest from Mexico - military and political events which took their toll on banking stocks linked to the federal government.

Very good condition.