War Letters, 1812-1818

This collection documents five generations of the Jones family, a Virginia military family, through commissions, correspondence, printed military orders, and personal artifacts. Most of the materials consists of military commissions, appointments, and presidential correspondence directed to Roger Jones (1789–1852), the longest-serving Adjutant General of the United States Army, with the bound commission volume documenting his career from his initial 1809 Marine Corps appointment through his death in office in 1852. A one page autograph letter from Edmund P. Gaines (1777-1849) to Roger Jones, dated March 2, 1828 and postmarked in Washington City is included. The letter commends Jones for “his untiring vigilant gallantry and meritorious service in the Battle for which it was granted to his General and constant friend.” On the verso of the page is a written indication of Jones’s receipt of the letter the same day. Gaines was a senior commander in the United States Army and served in the War of 1812, the Seminole Wars, the Black Hawk Wars, and the later Mexican-American War. Jones served under Gaines during the British attempt to retake Fort Erie during the War of 1812. Other named recipients of commissions include the Revolutionary-era patriarch Catesby Jones (c. 1730–1800) (Virginia militia commissions, 1785–1794); his sons Roger Jones and Thomas ap Catesby Jones (1790–1858), U.S. Navy commodore; Roger Jones's sons William Page Jones (1820–1841), Catesby ap Roger Jones (1821–1877), Walter Jones, and Charles Lucian Jones (1835–1920); and the third-generation Catesby ap Lucian Jones, who received four officer's appointments in the U.S. Coast Artillery Corps, 1917–1918.

Signers of commissions and correspondence include Virginia governors Patrick Henry, Beverly Randolph, and Henry Lee III; Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Andrew Johnson; Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory; Secretaries of War John C. Calhoun, James Barbour, Lewis Cass, Joel R. Poinsett, William L. Marcy, Jefferson Davis, John B. Floyd, and Edwin M. Stanton; and Generals Winfield Scott, Jacob Brown, Alexander Macomb, William J. Worth, and Peter B. Porter. Ten autograph letters from Winfield Scott to Roger Jones, dated 1818 to 1855, form a notable correspondence series and document the close working relationship between Scott as senior field commander and Jones as Adjutant General across the War of 1812, the Second Seminole War, the Mexican-American War, and the early Civil War years.

Subject content ranges across the United States' principal military engagements from the Revolutionary War through World War II, with particular density on the War of 1812 (engagements at Chippewa, Niagara, and Fort Erie), the Mexican-American War, and the American Civil War as experienced from both Union (Roger Jones, Inspector General; Catesby ap Lucian Jones) and Confederate (Catesby ap Roger Jones, who commanded the ironclad CSS Virginia on the second day of action against the USS Monitor at Hampton Roads; Charles Lucian Jones, Confederate Navy paymaster aboard the ironclad CSS Tennessee) perspectives. Geographic coverage centers on Washington, D.C., Richmond, and the Virginia Tidewater, with secondary points of correspondence in Elizabethtown and Brownville, New York, Baltimore, Concord, New Hampshire, and the Mexican theater of war.

Notable individual items include a United States Military Academy diploma issued to William Page Jones in 1840; an 1841 War Department announcement of the death of President William Henry Harrison; an undated holograph note from Andrew Jackson; a manuscript volume of funeral orders kept and signed by Roger Jones as Adjutant General (1826, 1845–1849); a 1907 United Confederate Veterans membership certificate for Charles Lucian Jones; an 1830 invitation to a "May Ball" at L. Carusi's Washington Saloon; the Auguste Edouart cut-paper silhouette of Adjutant General Roger Jones, signed by both artist and subject and dated 16 June 1841; a quarter-plate daguerreotype of Roger Jones, ca. 1840s; and the embossed belt and engraved brass buckle presented to Roger Jones at Richmond in February 1841 in recognition of his War of 1812 service.