The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 34, July 1930 - April, 1931 Page: 187
359 p. : ill., maps ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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A Brief Study of Thomas J. Ruslc, 1885-1856
and on several subsequent visits, he was able to talk to me and
tell me much that he remembered about his Uncle Tom and
about his own father, David Rusk, and other members of the
family, as well as a few family anecdotes and traditions. Some
weeks before his death he consented to my reading and later copy-
ing some forty-five or fifty letters from Thomas J. Rusk to his
brother, David.
But though I was allowed to copy those letters and was given
permission to use them in a biography of Rusk, I was still not
to make them public. Mr. Rusk and his children felt that the
letters were too personal and of too private a nature to be made
public, while the references they contained to public matters were
not, they thought, of sufficient historical importance to justify
their publication. However, I have obtained from Miss Helen Rusk,
grand-niece of Thomas J. Rusk, permission to use them in part
in the preparation of this paper.
These letters from Thomas J. Rusk to his brother, David,
cover a period of twenty-one years and refer to many matters of
general interest in spite of their purely personal nature. In this
paper I shall make no attempt to write a biography of Rusk, nor
to give those facts of his public life to be found in the sources
of Texas history. On the contrary, I shall seek to show Rusk,
the man, in his personal relation to his own family and to the two
men important in the life of the state and nation with whom he
came in close contact and friendship, John C. Calhoun and Sam
Houston.
II
Thomas J. Rusk and His Family
Thomas Jefferson Rusk was the son of John Rusk and Mary
Sterritt Rusk. His descendants and his relatives now living in
Nacogdoches seem to have no knowledge of the family history
beyond the parents of Thomas Jefferson Rusk. John Rusk
emigrated from Ireland in 1791, and settled in the Pendleton
District in South Carolina on land belonging to John C. Cal-
houn.1 Indeed, the house in which he lived belonged to Calhoun.
1Texas Almanac, 1858, p. 105. Houston, Speech in Senate of United
States, January 19, 1858, Congressional Globe, 1st. Session 85th Congress,
p. 331; C. B. Sterrett, Life of T. J. Rusk, p. 1 (M. A. Thesis in Univer-187
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 34, July 1930 - April, 1931, periodical, 1931; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101091/m1/203/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.