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There is a letter book / account book of 347 p., 1790-1856, containing 466 draft copies of his commercial and social correspondence with shipping agents in Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Germany, China, Canada, as well as in the United States. The correspondence concerns Bell's business arrangements, the various cargos he shipped and their disposal, political affairs affecting the shipping trade, laws and treaties of various countries to be dealt with, taxes, embargoes, piracy, threats of war, and other pertinent events. A second account book of 84 p. (many are blank), 1787-1852, for the Ship Stephania and others contains ships' records for 1799 to 1828 and miscellaneous accounts up to 1857. There is a one volume carbon typescript (113 p.) of genealogical notes and reminiscences by Gordon Knox Bell (Regent of the University of the State of New York and grandson of Isaac Bell) and others, ca.1940. There is also an essay and lists of the residents of Greenwich Street (including the Bell and Rogers families) by Elizur Yale Smith with related correspondence, 1940.

Papers of the Jay family and of those families related to the Jay family, including Bruen, Butterworth, Chapman, Clarkson, Dawson, Du Bois, Field, Iselin, McVickar, Mortimer, O'Kill, Pellew, Pierrepont, Prime, Robinson, Schieffelin, Von Schweinitz, Sedgwick, and Wurts. In addition to family and personal matters, the correspondence deals with anti-slavery, New York State civil service, repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Civil War, the Blair Bill, international affairs, and New York City and State politics and government. There are letters from numerous prominent persons including George Bancroft, F.A.P. Barnard, Bismarck, William Cullen Bryant, Aaron Burr, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hamilton Fish, Albert Gallatin, Horace Greeley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Irving, Frances Anne Kemble, Jenny Lind, Henry W. Longfellow, Seth Low, James Russell Lowell, John Stuart Mill, Alice Duer Miller, Clement Clarke Moore, J.P. Morgan, Thomas Nast, Commodore Matthew Perry, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Carl Schurz, William H. Seward, William T. Sherman, Charles Sumner, and John Greenleaf Whittier.