Letters to Elizabeth
Charles Stillman at Home and at War
Before there was a First Cortina War.
Before Texas Rangers and artillery and the boom of cannon at dawn.
Before Brownsville became a battleground.
There were letters.
They begin not with politics or profit, but with longing.
In the summer of 1849, Charles Stillman — merchant, town founder, future millionaire — returned to Wethersfield, Connecticut, after twenty-two years away. He was thirty-nine. Grave. Reserved. Successful. A man who, according to one contemporary, “never talks, even to his brothers.”
And then he met Elizabeth Goodrich.
She was twenty. Bright, spirited, recently returned from teaching in Virginia. Fond of botany, fond of dancing, fond of letters. She had opinions about scenery, religion, and strawberries. She loved New England, but admired the wider world.
Within weeks of meeting her, Charles began writing like a different man.
“How agreeable it is to peruse the lines of those that are dear to you…
I felt fatigued and gloomy… until stepping into the office I found your kind letter waiting for me. All care vanished…”
This from the famously reserved Stillman.
He teases her about age differences. He jokes about grey hairs. He imagines ocean voyages with no one to disturb them. He longs “to claim you as my own.”
The wedding followed quickly — New York City, September 17, 1849. Only weeks after they met.
And then she sailed with him to what she would later call “the wastes of Texas.”
A House on Washington Street
Their new home stood at East Thirteenth and East Washington in Brownsville — thick brick walls, high ceilings, a verandah with white columns, open hearths, a garden. It was both New England and Mexican in spirit. Functional. Solid. Practical.
Elizabeth was twenty-one when she gave birth to their first child, James Jewett Stillman.
Her letters home reveal a young mother overwhelmed by love:
“Oh, it is a fearful thing to be a mother… All day he lay in my arms in a sort of stupor… Oh, the agony of that day I shall never forget!”
She writes of jealousy when the baby prefers his father. She describes dimples, eyes, shoulders, tiny expressions. She worries about illness. She marvels at life.
Meanwhile, Charles built ships, ranches, warehouses, and fortunes.
But when he left for New York on business, he wrote to Elizabeth — not about profits first, but about missing the children.
“I miss the children more than anything else…”
He tells her where he sleeps — on a cot in his warehouse, buffalo robe for a mattress. He jokes about her cook. He sends seashells home for the girls.
He signs simply:
“Yours Truly, Chas. Stillman.”
Christmas Eve in a Warehouse
By 1858 the tone shifts.
Stillman is back in Brownsville alone. His partner has died. Business is tangled. Yellow fever is stalking the town.
On Christmas Eve he writes from his warehouse:
“My bed is already made at one end of the salesroom — Bernardo at the other… I sleep like a mink.”
He complains about business confusion. He vents about former partners. He instructs her to send bills to New York.
But between the lines is something else: fatigue.
And still, he ends with affection:
“Kiss them all for their affectionate father…”
The Day Cortina Came
In September 1859, while Charles was in New York, Brownsville exploded into violence.
Juan Nepomuceno Cortina rode into town before dawn. Shots were fired. Men were killed. Panic spread. Families fled across the river to Matamoros.
Charles did not witness the first attack. He learned of it through breathless letters from his clerk, Henry Howlett:
“This has been a terrible day for Brownsville…”
The store became an arsenal. The town formed patrols. The Market Hall bell became an alarm signal.
When Charles finally returned to Texas, he stepped into a frontier at war.
His ranches were raided. Horses stolen. Ranch hands defected. Trade disrupted. Fear everywhere.
And yet, even in correspondence about artillery and Rangers and troop movements, there are glimpses of the private man:
He writes of missing his children.
He writes of worrying.
He writes of losses — not just financial, but personal.
In one quiet line after learning of his brother’s stroke, he writes:
“Were I in his situation, I should be inclined to destroy myself.”
It is a shocking sentence — raw, unguarded.
The letters to Elizabeth show us something the business records never do: vulnerability.
What the Letters Reveal
The public Stillman was formidable — strategic, relentless, often ruthless in business.
The private Stillman was:
• playful about age and grey hairs
• jealous of babies preferring their mothers
• sentimental about ocean voyages
• capable of loneliness
• weary at Christmas
• frightened for his town
• grieving for his brother
And deeply attached to Elizabeth.
For all the litigation, land claims, title disputes, and armed conflict that defined early Brownsville, at the center of it stood a marriage begun in haste and sustained through distance, disease, and war.
History remembers Stillman as founder, merchant, millionaire.
But in his letters, he is simply:
A husband writing home.
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