Civil War-era letters signed by Robert E. Lee auctioned

Eleven folders of old papers rescued from his parents' closet sat in Thomas Willcox's sport utility vehicle for months before he realized some were signed by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and might be valuable.

Yesterday, the three letters written by Lee during the Civil War sold at auction for $61,000.

That was far from the record $630,000 a Lee item sold for in 2002. But it was an improvement from last year, when two letters from the general who surrendered in 1865 sold for $5,000 and $1,900, said Patrick Scott, director of rare books and special collections at the University of South Carolina's Thomas Cooper Library.

The letters were among more than 400 documents Willcox put up for auction after a protracted fight with the state, which claimed ownership of the documents that had been in Willcox's family for years.

The collection details life in South Carolina from 1861 to 1863. Many of the letters are correspondence between generals and the Confederate government and Govs. Francis Wilkinson Pickens and Milledge Luke Bonham.

"The strength of the enemy, as far as I am able to judge, exceeds the whole force that we have in the state," Lee wrote to Pickens on Dec. 27, 1861. "It can be thrown with great celerity against any point, and far outnumbers any force we can bring against it in the field."

Other letters are from residents asking for help defending their communities or for the return of slaves taken from plantations to help build fortifications. Some document the grisly details of war.

"But shall I tell you now of the battlefield?" Sgt. Maj. William S. Mullins of the 8th Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers wrote in an Aug. 6, 1861, letter about the first Battle of Manassas. "Of the dead hideous in every form of ghastly death: heads off, arms off, abdomens protruding, every form of wound, low groans, sharp cries . . . convulsive agonies as the souls took flight. It is useless to write. I know something of the power of words to paint and I tell you that a man must see all this to conceive it."

By JIM DAVENPORT

The Associated Press