Here at Letterjoy, we specialize in finding amazing letters, restoring them for print, and mailing them to your door.
In our search for great letters, we usually look for hidden gems, but some of American history's best letters are also its most famous.
Below are the 23 most famous and influential letters in American history. Some you'll recognize from your high school social studies textbook. Some, you may have never heard of. All of them are well worth reading.
23. John Steinbeck to His Son Thom (Nov. 10, 1958)
In 1958, John Steinbeck's 14-year-old son Thom wrote home from boarding school to say that he had fallen in love with a girl named Susan. He asked his father what to do.
Steinbeck's reply is one of the kindest pieces of advice in the American letter canon. He told Thom there were two kinds of love, the selfish kind that made you smaller, and the generous kind that made you better.
He told him not to worry about anything. Then he told him to tell Susan how he felt.
22. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's "If Nominated" Telegram (June 5, 1884)
The Republican Party wanted Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman as their presidential nominee. He wanted nothing to do with it. He cabled the convention with what is now considered the most decisive refusal in American political history.
"I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected."
That phrase entered the political lexicon as a "Sherman statement," an unbreakable refusal to run. Politicians have been chasing that level of clarity ever since.
21. Jackie Robinson to President Dwight D. Eisenhower (May 13, 1958)
In 1958, speaking to a Black audience about civil rights, President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked his audience to be "patient."
Jackie Robinson, retired from baseball and increasingly active in politics, wrote the president back the next day, rejecting his call for patience.
In his letter, Robinson retorted "I respectfully remind you sir, that we have been the most
patient of all people."
Black Americans, Robinson wrote, could not wait any longer. It was one of the earliest and bluntest civil rights challenges directed at a sitting president, written by one of the most famous athletes in American history.
20. Cesar Chavez's Letter From Delano (April 1969)
Written from the fields of central California during a farmworkers' strike, Cesar Chavez's open letter was modeled on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter From Birmingham Jail (which appears later on this list). It was addressed to E.L. Barr Jr., president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League, who had accused the strikers of violence.
Chavez, invoking Gandhi and King, explained why the United Farm Workers were committed to nonviolent struggle. Chavez's letter ran in the Christian Century and the National Catholic Reporter. It became one of the founding documents of the modern American labor movement.
19. Gen. Robert E. Lee Declines Union Command (April 20, 1861)
After Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln's emissary offered Gen. Robert E. Lee field command of the entire Union Army. Lee, a Virginian, declined the offer. His resignation letter to Secretary of War Simon Cameron was brief and courteous.
His longer letter to his sister explained the choice that broke his career into two halves. He could not draw his sword against his home state. Lee went home to the family seat in Arlington, then took command of Virginia's forces.
18. The Cuban Missile Crisis Letters (October 1962)
For two weeks in October 1962, the world balanced on a knife's edge while President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev exchanged urgent secret letters. Khrushchev sent two in particular, one conciliatory, one harder. Kennedy chose to respond only to the softer one. He ignored the other.
Kennedy's strategy worked. Khrushchev pulled his missiles out of Cuba. Kennedy quietly pulled American missiles out of Turkey.
Some historians credit the exchange with averting nuclear war.
17. John Brown's Final Note (Dec. 2, 1859)
On the morning of his execution for the raid on Harpers Ferry, abolitionist John Brown handed his jailer a folded slip of paper. It contained one single prediction: the crimes of the guilty nation would not be purged except with blood.
He was hanged that afternoon. 16 months later, the country exploded into the Civil War. The song "John Brown's Body" became a rallying cry for Union soldiers.
Letters from the John Brown raid are featured in our American History series.
16. "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus" (Sept. 21, 1897)
As the Christmas of 1897 approached, 8-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon wrote the New York Sun asking whether Santa Claus was real. Veteran editor Francis Pharcellus Church got the assignment of writing back.
His unsigned editorial ran on the editorial page. It told Virginia that her skeptical little friends were wrong. The most real things in the world were the ones nobody could see.
Church's piece has been reprinted every Christmas since. It is probably the most famous newspaper editorial in American history.
15. Alexander Hamilton's Last Letter to His Wife Eliza (July 4, 1804)
A week before his duel with Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton wrote a letter to his wife Eliza to be opened only in the event of his death.
Hamilton told her that the law of the land and his religion forbade the duel. He had resolved not to fire at Burr. If he died, he was confident she would meet him again in a better world.
Hamilton's letter was immortalized in the eponymous musical about his life.
14. Frederick Douglass to Thomas Auld (Sept. 3, 1848)
Ten years to the day after escaping slavery, Frederick Douglass wrote a letter to the man who had once owned him. Douglass published it in his newspaper, the North Star.
The letter was polite, but devastating. Douglass asked Auld how he would feel if his own daughter were sold away from him, then methodically described what slavery had done to Douglass's family.
It was one of the first (but far from the last) widely circulated examples of a formerly enslaved person addressing his former owner as an equal.
13. President George Washington's Farewell Address (Sept. 19, 1796)
President George Washington didn't deliver his Farewell Address as a speech. He published it as an open letter in a Philadelphia newspaper, telling the country he would not seek a third term.
Washington warned against political parties, foreign entanglements, and regional factions. He laid out what he hoped American democracy would become.
Senators still read it aloud on the floor of the Senate every year on Washington's birthday.
12. President Abraham Lincoln to Horace Greeley (Aug. 22, 1862)
In the lead-up to President Abraham Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley, Greeley, the well-connected editor of the New York Tribune, had been pushing him to free the slaves immediately. Lincoln's reply is one of the strangest letters ever written by a president, partly because it appears to contradict everything he was secretly already planning to do.
Lincoln told Greeley that his whole being was dedicated to saving the Union. If he could save it by freeing all the slaves, he would. By freeing none, he would. By freeing some and leaving others, he would.
Left unsaid was that Lincoln had already drafted the Emancipation Proclamation, the draft sitting in Lincoln's desk drawer at that very moment.
11. President George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport (August 1790)
President George Washington was on a goodwill tour through Rhode Island when the Jewish community of Newport sent him a welcome letter. He wrote back with one of the strongest defenses of religious liberty ever penned by an American president.
The new United States, Washington promised, would give "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." Tolerance was not a favor extended by the majority, but a right belonging to everyone.
The letter still hangs in Touro Synagogue, the oldest standing synagogue in the country.
10. President Richard M. Nixon's Resignation Letter (Aug. 9, 1974)
President Richard M. Nixon's formal resignation letter was just a single sentence: "I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States." It was addressed to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the constitutionally proper recipient.
The brevity was indicative of the devastation that Nixon felt at being the first President to earn the ignoble honor of resigning his office.
Kissinger signed and time-stamped the letter at 11:35 a.m. At that moment, Vice President Gerald Ford became president.
9. Sullivan Ballou to His Wife Sarah (July 14, 1861)
A week before the First Battle of Bull Run, a Union officer from Rhode Island named Sullivan Ballou wrote home to his wife Sarah. As he told her in the letter, Ballou had a feeling that he wasn't coming back.
The letter is crushing to read. Ballou told Sarah his love was deathless, that he could feel it pulling him back from the battlefield. If he died, she would feel him on the breeze.
He was killed at Bull Run a week later. Ken Burns's documentary "The Civil War" made the letter famous 125 years later.
8. President Abraham Lincoln to Lydia Bixby (Nov. 21, 1864)
President Abraham Lincoln wrote a short, devastating note to a Boston widow believed to have lost five sons in the war. "I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine," he began.
The facts got complicated later. Lydia Bixby had lost two sons, not five. She may have been a Confederate sympathizer. Some scholars believe Lincoln didn't actually write the letter. His secretary, John Hay, was probably the author.
None of that has dimmed its reputation. It is still taught as one of the finest pieces of presidential prose in American history.
7. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's "In Case of Failure" Note (June 5, 1944)
On the eve of D-Day, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower sat down and wrote a short note to be released if the Normandy landings collapsed. He scribbled it in pencil on a small piece of paper and slipped it into his wallet.
The landings had failed, he wrote, and he had withdrawn the troops. He took full personal responsibility for the disaster. He praised the courage of the men.
The landings succeeded. Eisenhower forgot the note was in his wallet for weeks. He had dated it July 5 instead of June 5, his mind already on what came next.
Letters from D-Day are featured in our American History and Military History series.
6. Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists (Jan. 1, 1802)
The Danbury Baptist Association wrote the new president complaining about Connecticut's established church. Thomas Jefferson's brief response coined a phrase that would echo through American constitutional law for the next 200 years.
The First Amendment, Jefferson wrote, built a "wall of separation between Church & State."
The Supreme Court has cited Jefferson's letter dozens of times. Jefferson didn't invent the idea of separation of church and state, but he gave it the metaphor that stuck.
5. Abigail Adams to John Adams (March 31, 1776)
Abigail and John Adams were the closest of correspondents. Throughout the American Revolution, while John was away at conventions, legislative sessions, and other meetings to shape the future of the nation, Abigail wrote the future 2nd president with news from New England and guidance.
In March of 1776, from their farmhouse in Braintree, Massachusetts, Abigail wrote John with a request that would live on in legend: when you write the new laws, she said, remember the ladies.
Adams wasn't being cute. She warned John that women would not feel bound by laws in which they had no voice. If pushed, they would foment a rebellion of their own.
Letters from John and Abigail Adams appear frequently in our American History and Military History series. Abigail will be featured in our upcoming Women in History series.
4. Lt. Col. William Barret Travis at the Alamo (Feb. 24, 1836)
Lt. Col. William Barret Travis was commanding fewer than 200 defenders inside the Alamo when Mexican Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna's army surrounded them. Travis wrote a letter addressed "To the People of Texas and All Americans in the World."
He refused to surrender. He called for reinforcements. He signed it "Victory or Death."
No reinforcements arrived in time. 13 days later, the Alamo fell and Travis was killed at the age of 26. The letter survived and became one of the most stirring documents in Texas history, a core reason why Texans still "remember the Alamo!"
Travis's letter is featured in our American History series.
3. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter From Birmingham Jail (April 16, 1963)
Arrested for marching without a permit, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his response to eight white Alabama clergymen in the margins of a newspaper, on scraps smuggled out by his lawyers.
The clergymen had called his demonstrations "unwise and untimely." King's reply systematically dismantled their argument. He explained why a just law must be obeyed and why an unjust law, in his view, must not.
He drew on famous figures in history, from Augustine, to Aquinas, to Jesus, Lincoln, and Jefferson, and sometimes several figures in the same paragraph.
King's letter ran nearly 7,000 words. It is read in classrooms in every state. It is, by many measures, the most famous letter ever written by an American.
2. Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Aug. 2, 1939)
Drafted by the physicist Leo Szilárd and signed by Albert Einstein, this two-page letter warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Nazi Germany might be working on a uranium bomb. It urged the U.S. government to start its own research.
Roosevelt read the letter that October. Soon after, he set up an advisory committee. That committee eventually became the Manhattan Project, the project that would eventually yield the world's first atomic bombs.
Einstein later said signing the letter was the one great mistake of his life. By the time he said it, Hiroshima was already a word in the dictionary.
Letters from the Manhattan Project are featured in our American History, Military History, & Science & Innovation series.
1. The Zimmermann Telegram (January 1917)
In January 1917, Germany's foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann cabled the German ambassador in Mexico with an audacious offer: if the U.S. entered the war, Mexico should attack America and get Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona back.
British intelligence intercepted and decoded the message using a captured codebook, then quietly handed it to their American colleagues. When it was published in U.S. newspapers in March 1917, support for entering World War I surged. President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war a month later.
The Zimmermann Telegram is featured in our Codebreaking series.