Restrictions to Access

No restrictions. Open for research.

Restrictions to Use

No usage restrictions.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Samuel H. Hempstead Letters, #3727-z, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Purchased from Robert K. Black, dealer, of Upper Montclair, N.J., February 1966.

Additional Descriptive Resources

A copy of the original finding aid for this collection is filed in folder 1.

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

Processed by: SHC Staff

Encoded by: Noah Huffman, December 2007

Updated by: Kate Stratton and Jodi Berkowitz, July 2010

This collection was rehoused and a summary created with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This finding aid was created with support from NC ECHO.

Diacritics and other special characters have been omitted from this finding aid to facilitate keyword searching in web browsers.

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• Arkansas--Politics and government--To 1950.
• Hempstead, Samuel H.
• Hempstead, William, fl. 1836-1837.
• Lawyers--Arkansas--History--19th century.
• Little Rock (Ark.)--History--19th century.

Samuel H. Hempstead (1814-1862) was a son of Joseph and Celinda Hutchinson Hempstead and was a nephew of William Hempstead, a St. Louis, Mo., merchant. Hempstead was born in New London, Conn., and moved to St. Louis, Mo. with his father in 1828. In 1830 Samuel and his brother Stephen Hempstead (1812-1883) went to Galena, Ill., where their uncle Charles S. Hempstead was a lawyer, and they clerked in a general store there. Both boys were for a time students at Illinois College at Jacksonville. Stephen fought in the Black Hawk War, settled at Dubuque, Iowa, in 1836, and was governor of Iowa, 1850-1854.

Samuel H. Hempstead studied law under Edward Bates; moved to Little Rock, Ark., in 1836; was clerk of the Arkansas House of Representatives, 1836-1838; adjutant general of militia under Governor Yell; prosecuting attorney, 1842; United States district attorney, 1856; solicitor general of Arkansas, 1858; and was sometime special judge of the state supreme court. He wrote the Reports of Cases argued in Arkansas Territorial and State Federal Courts 1820-1836 (1856), compiled swampland laws, and was prominent in real estate bank cases. He married Elizabeth A. Beall in 1841.

The collection includes six long letters from Samuel H. Hempstead in Little Rock, Ark., to his uncle, William Hempstead describing his situation and prospects as a beginning lawyer, and the atmosphere and politics of the new state of Arkansas.