Moses P. Handy Papers

Biographical Note

Moses Purnell Handy, son of Isaac William Ker (1815-1878) and Mary Jane Rozelle Purnell (1821-1848) Handy, was born April 14, 1847, in Warsaw, Missouri. His father had been sent out as a missionary to Missouri by the Presbyterian Church, but pastored an interdenominational congregation in Warsaw. He was an infant when his mother died and his father moved back east; most of his youth was spent in Portsmouth, Virginia. His secondary education was at Virginia Collegiate Institute in Portsmouth, under the direction of N.B. Webster. Handy was fourteen when the Civil War broke out, and on the evacuation of Norfolk and Portsmouth he was sent to his uncle William H. Purnell, Baltimore postmaster and a Union army colonel. At Baltimore, he was enrolled in the Rugby Institute.

Moses Handy's father Isaac was a Union supporter politically, but was slowly won over to the Confederate cause and became an ardent secessionist after the election of Abraham Lincoln, believing peaceful union to be an impossibility. When the Union army occupied Portsmouth, Isaac Handy went north with a pass from General Dix to New Castle, Delaware. Here he was arrested for voicing his southern sympathies too loudly, and was incarcerated at Fort Delaware Prison for several months. Moses removed from Baltimore and settled at Delaware City to be near his father, where he supported himself via clerking for an apothecary of whose store he found himself manager when the Confederate-sympathizing proprietor was arrested.

Upon his father's release from prison, Moses declined his uncle's offer of a northern education and ran the blockade, arriving in Richmond where he joined the Confederate Army on the staff of General Walter Hustad Stevens (1827-1867). He was in Richmond the last six months before its fall in April, 1865; the account he wrote of that event, at the age of seventeen, was his first journalistic sale. The Watchman of New York bought his story and published it serially between February and April, 1866. Coming to Richmond after the war, he worked as a mailing clerk for the Christian Observer. He also became a book agent as the Virginia merchandiser of The Life of Stonewall Jackson. In spring, 1866, he was sent to Orange Court House by the Richmond Dispatch to cover a speech of Congressman Henry Wilson; a second such article reporting a Horace Greeley address netted him a permanent position with the Dispatch.

While connected with the Dispatch, he served as a correspondent for several other newspapers, including the New York World, and was general manager for the southern states of the American Press Association. In 1873, the New York Tribune sent him as a special correspondent to Key West, Florida, where he sprang into national note as the only reporter to witness the transfer of the steamer "Virginius" from Spanish authorities to the United States government which narrowly averted a war between the two countries. The articles stemming from this event prompted an offer to Handy from the Tribune, and he joined its editorial staff in 1874. As a correspondent he traveled extensively, covering the woman's temperance crusade in Ohio, and political affairs in the South. Articles in September 1874, exposing shady monetary arrangements among Louisiana carpetbagger politicians caused several of the principals to retire temporarily from public life.

In October, 1875, Handy resigned the Tribune to become editor-in-chief of the Richmond Enquirer, of which he was newly one-third owner. Internal strife at that paper began almost immediately, culminating during Handy's absence in summer, 1876, at Philadelphia where he was a United States Centennial Commissioner for Virginia (similar to an office he held in 1873 by Presidential appointment to the International Exhibition at Vienna, Austria). He accepted an offer of associate editorship from the Philadelphia Times and remained with that newspaper until late 1880 when he became managing editor of the Philadelphia Press. In his years with the Press, its circulation rose from 10,000 to 60,000. He worked for James G. Blaine's presidential campaign in 1884; shortly afterwards he purchased and became editor of the Philadelphia News. His health broke in 1887, and after several months' recuperation, he was for a short time managing editor of the New York World before resigning to join Benjamin Harrison's campaign staff for the 1888 election.

Again, his health failed and he went to Europe to regain his strength. He declined the consulship to Egypt in 1891 in favor of the appointment of Chief of the Department of Publicity and Promotion for the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago, the first department of that project to be organized. He was one of five commissioners sent to Europe in 1891 on behalf of the Fair to foster interest in it. During the Exposition, 1892-1893, Handy weathered severe attacks on the financial integrity of his department, and was able to resign, at the Fair's conclusion, with honor. From 1894 to 1895 he was a special correspondent for the New York Mail and Express and the Chicago Inter-Ocean, while living in New York. In 1895 he returned to Chicago as political writer and editor-in-chief of the Times-Herald, where his column "Major Handy's Point of View" established his reputation as something of a political prophet.

While on the staff of the Times-Herald, he was an organizer of both the American Honest Money League (1896) and the National Business League (1897). He campaigned for William McKinley in 1896 but was unsuccessful in his bid for a foreign consulate as part of the spoils. He accepted appointment in 1897 as Special Commissioner of the United States to the Paris International Exposition (1900) and he and Mrs. Handy spent the fall of that year in France. Moses became ill, and upon their return to America in November they went to Augusta, Georgia, for the winter. Here Moses Handy died January 8, 1898, at the age of fifty.

Handy married in Cumberland County, Virginia, April 15, 1869, Sarah Ann Matthews (1845-1933), the daughter of George Hancock and Martha Miller Matthews. They were the parents of seven children: William Matthews (1870-1925), Rozelle Purnell (1871-1920), Agnes Gordon (1873-19__), Sarah Virginia Chaille (1876-1963), Moses Purnell Jr. (1878-1897), Cora Macon (1882-1958), and Henry Jamison (1886-1983). Sarah Handy survived her husband by a third of a century. For many years she wrote a newspaper advice and household-hints column under the pen name of Helen Oldfield. Shortly after Moses's death, she purchased land near Berlin, Maryland, from her mother-in-law's family. Here she built "Anchuka" in 1899 and 1900, where she lived out her years. She died August 2, 1933, and was buried beside her husband in the Buckingham Presbyterian Church Cemetery, Berlin.

Scope and Content

This collection contains microfilm of original documents in the Handy Family Papers held by the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Moses Handy's involvement with the World's Columbian Exposition, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America in 1492, netted the Handy Family Papers two and a half boxes of correspondence, reports, financial records, brochures, and memorabilia. Handy's advertising campaign, begun in 1890 as chair of "Department O” (Publicity and Promotion), has been cited as the prototype of modern public strategies. Material concerning the Exposition is filed in box 25 folder 12 through box 27 folder 7. Information about the San Francisco Mid-Winter Exposition (1893), a sort of subsidiary event to the main Chicago attraction, is in box 27, folders 8-72.

The collection has been filmed without targets. However, the items in each folder have been filmed with the folder itself as a backdrop. The folder title and number are visible along the margin of each document indicating location. Each file filmed is listed in the Box-folder List, pages 4 to 6 in this guide.

Related Materials

Various World's Fair collections.

Container List

The following material regarding the World's Columbian Exposition in the Handy Papers was not included on this microfilm. Material was not included which was more or less duplicated by original items held by the Chicago Public Library. Items such as advertising cards and brochures were unindexable in this collection and have their main value in the exhibit potential of the originals. Oversize material was not filmed. Excluded material is as follows.