Correspondence is primarily concerned with routine family and personal matters, such as illnesses, births, deaths, and marriages of relatives and neighbors.
One complete letter is devoted to a detailed description of a case of smallpox suffered by the writer's child (1856). Of interest are comments on current prices for various crops and goods during the period, including corn, pork, flour, cotton, tobacco, salt, sole leather, wagons, horses and mules. Particular note is made of the harsh winter of 1855-1856, the purchase of dresses (1850), the breaking up of slave families (1850), the difficulty of buying slaves (1852), religious revivals (1851), the position of the Know-Nothing (American) Party as the heir to Whig Party support (1856), scarcity of money (1857-1858), and inflationary prices during the early months of the Civil War (1861). Several letters (1857-1860, 1883) were written from South Carolina and Georgia and describe efforts to sell tobacco on a glutted market. Typical of this was his report from Macon, Georgia (1858), that there were already sixteen wagons of tobacco in the yard when he arrived.