PETERSBURG Va. // AUG / 6 [1861] blue cds and matching PAID 10 (type D, CV $300) on folded business LETTER to P.C. Cameron Esq. Company Shops P.O. No Carolina from Jno. Kevan & Bro. regarding cotton and flour order. Ex Kathleen Staples. $250.

Paul Carrington Cameron (1808-1891) was a planter, agricultural reformer, railway and road builder. Cameron's treatment of his slaves was firm but benign. "I had nineteen hundred of them once," he is quoted as saying many years after the Emancipation, "and I never was ashamed to look one of them in the face after they were freed." John H. Wheeler says that Cameron would tell with some zest how he had been prevailed upon by a friend to free a family of slaves and to settle them in Liberia under the care of the American Colonization Society, with a gift of a thousand dollars and house and food for twelve months provided, and how at the end of the year they appeared at the door of his mansion and begged him to take them back. Years after the war, many of his former slaves would greet him with respect and affection, and many of them attended his funeral in 1891, at which eight of his old black servants, some of whom had been slaves, bore his coffin to the hearse. The wealthiest man in the state at the beginning of the war, he was still the wealthiest, despite the loss of his slaves, at the end of it. By enterprise and sagacity, he was soon able to reestablish the economy of his plantations and to extend and diversify his business activities on a secure and stable basis. Source: NC Encyclopedia. Cameron Papers are housed at the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.