Autograph letter signed by Amos Tappan Akerman (1821–1880), as United States Attorney General, to United States Attorney Eugene Philip Jacobson (1841–1881) of Jackson, Mississippi. Washington, D.C., 18 August 1871. Three pages, 8vo, on Department of Justice letterhead.

Akerman, a former Confederate colonel and slaveholder, joined the Republican Party after the war and emerged as an outspoken advocate for the citizenship and suffrage of freedpeople. He served as U.S. Attorney General under President Ulysses S. Grant from 1870 to 1871.

In this letter, he writes about his beliefs regarding the South's political climate: "The Government can maintain itself in the south, if its officers will all be equal to the occasion. Yours is not the only district where the judiciary succumbs to the presence of a local sentiment. There is no remedy but the harsh and difficult one of impeachment, unless indeed Congress should take hold of the subject with a high hand, and destroy the office by destroying the judicial district, and attacking its territory to another." 

He  additionally offers his candid views on Jacobson’s difficulties in maintaining law and order in the South, writing: “It is my individual opinion that nothing is more idle than to attempt to conciliate by kindness that portion of the southern people who are still malcontent.”

Jacobson, a Jewish immigrant from Poland and a Medal of Honor recipient for distinguished service in the Union Army, worked for the State Department after the Civil War. In 1867 he was admitted to the bar and began practicing law, first in Washington, D.C., and later in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he was appointed United States Attorney for the Southern District. Deeply involved in Mississippi’s reintegration into the Union, Jacobson became a prominent figure in Reconstruction-era politics.

[Civil War, Union, Confederate]  [Manuscripts, Documents, Letters, Ephemera, Signatures, Autographs]

Pages hinged together in two areas with cloth tape. Occasional bleeding of ink due to paper stock.