Wayne County, NC - Robinson/Ragsdale Collection

File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by
Lori Price Cobb <jhcobb@iquest.net>

William & Emmet Robinson Collection
Johnston County Heritage Center
Reference Box, P.C.1.1.
George Ragsdale Collection

                                           West Point Oct 22 1854

My dear and affectionate Pa,

                            The time has come when I am compelled to 
write you not of my success in over-powering difficulties encountered
at West Point but being bowed down by new ones at home.  I have
just received the startling and confounding intelligence that you were
drinking again.  My God support myself and all the family in our
affliction.  I am now completely broken hearted.  I am thinking of
sending in my resignation, and will do so unless I hear that there is
a change for the better, for there is no use in my endeavoring to stay
at West Point, in the state I am now in.  Just before I received the
melancholy letter, I had sat down to write you, that I was now within
a few files of head of my class.  But now all my prospects and the 
hopes of my younger brothers are dashed to the ground.  A drunken
father and a life of punery and disgrace in persepctive in probably
the only inheritance that be left us.  O! my Dear Pa, I conj___ you
to stop and think before too late.

        Think of the children you are about to leave on the world to
receive it buffets and kicks.  Think of the disgrage you are incurring
both for yourself and all connected.  O! My Pa  sincerely hope you are
not so totally lost to all principle, as to heed neither the advice of
freinds nor the supplications of your children.  You who have so often
lectured in public on temperance and now being publicly drunk is enough
to fasten indelible disgrace upon yourself and the whole family.  I 
never entertained an idea when I left home that you would ever again
taste a drop of whiskey.  The thought is terrible.  I am in such trouble,
dear Pa, that I can write no more.  I can only say for God's sake hesitate
in your career of a drunkard.

                                              Your devoted Son
                                                 W. George

I did not learn this news from home, and I think it is wrong that it
should have been kept concealed.
 
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