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Collection: JOHN STEELE PAPERS
Salisbury, North Carolina
' 1777-1831 .
Physical Description: c. 400 items (3 mounted \olumes, 1 box); correspondence,
receipts, subpeonas, wr it' of debt, settlement of estate, power of attorney,
transcript of court record, promissory notes, circulars, land grants,
merchandise orders, inventories, and miscellaneous reports and material.
Acquisition: There is no definite information as to when the bulk of the
collection was received or from whom. According to H. G. Jones, For
History's Sake, page 269, and The Papers of John Steele ^ Edited by H. M.
Wagstaff, pages v-vii, the Steele Papers now in the State Archives were
originally a part of the David L. Swain Collection. Perhaps the papers
were part of the approximately 1,000 manuscripts of the Swain Collection
that were received on January 24, 1910> from Chief Justice Walter Clark,
executor of Mrs. Swain's estate. The Biennial Report. 1914-1916 , shows
that the collection was arranged and bound during this period. Eleven
letters were presented on December 2, 1914, by Misses Martha and Margaret
steele, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, through Dr. Archibald Hender¬
son; one letter, John Steele to Andrew Bell, October. 11, 1800, was pre¬
sented on March 19, 1914, by Noah Famham Morrison, Elizabeth, New Jersey;
two. letters, John Steele to Stephan Moylan, June 7 and September 3, 1799,
were purchased on December 10. 1918. from Stan V., Henkels, a dealer. Four¬
teen items were transferred from Rowan County Records on November 13. 1962.
Description: John Steele was bora in Salisbury, North Carolina, on Novem¬
ber 16, 1764. Son of William and Elizabeth Maxwell Steele, he attended
school at Clio's Nursery near Statesville and at the English School in
Salisbury but did not attend college. In 1787, at age 23, he represented
Salisbury in the House of Commons, and he was a delegate to the Convention
in Hillsborough in 1788 and to the Convention in Fayetteville in 1789. Elec¬
ted to the first and second Congresses, he was defeated for the third Con¬
gress and also failed to be elected to the Senate in 1792. His Federalist
views perhaps hindered him in the elections, but George Washington appointed
him as Comptroller, of the U. S. Treasury in 1796, a position he held until
1802. After returning to Salisbury, Steele engaged in agriculture and was
the agent of the Bank of Cape Fear in Salisbury. He served in the N. C.
House of Commons again in 1806, 1811-1813, and was re-elected on August 14,
1815, the day of his death.
Many of the John Steele .Papers can be divided into several main topics —
correspondence while he was Comptroller, correspondence while he was an
agent of the Bank of Cape Fear, and political material, either letters,
opinions, or reports by Steele. Topics which include a lesser amount of
material include farming, horses, and racing, the boundary problems between
N. C. and S. C. and Georgia, Indian affairs, the Richard Dobbs Spaight suit
against Thomas Wade (in which Steele represented Spaight), and letters