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Correspondence, copies of letters, documents, manuscripts, invitations, menus, clippings, school papers, leases, agreements, deeds, financial accounts, photographs, and printed miscellany. The papers deal with many aspects of the Belmont family interests from 1799 until 1930, including: finance, banking and the Rothschilds; the United States Navy, Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794-1858) and the Perry expeditions to Mexico and Japan; Belmont's embassy to The Netherlands from 1853 to 1857; the Democratic Party, New York City politics, presidential and Civil War politics; social life in New York and Newport and European travel; horses, horse breeding, The Jockey Club, polo, the Remount Association (for cavalry horses in World War I), fox hunting, dog breeding, and yachting; New York subway construction, railroads, the Cape Cod Canal and aviation; the Democratic Convention of 1912; and genealogical notes on the Belmont, Perry, and other families. In addition to the correspondence, there are 117 letter books, tissue-paper copies of outgoing letters.

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.