During this time, however, many letters of literary and historic importance were written by him. There is found on those pages a letter written by Mr. John C. Hamilton, of New York, son of Alexander Hamilton, propounding eleven inquiries relating to the history of North Carolina; more particularly with regard to the system of her colonial and early State taxation; and the reasons of the action of her convention in regard to the adoption of the Federal Constitution, and kindred topics. Governor Swain's replies to these queries show a wonderful amount of information and research into the minuter sources of our early history, clearly indicating that he was possessed in a high degree of those peculiar talents which constitute the true historian. Most of his literary labor throughout his life was in this department, and his collections were especially rich in the early history of North Carolina. Who is there left now in our State able to use the material for its history which he had been accumulating through so many years? To this great work he had intended to devote the closing years of his life. What stores of information perished with him! He was the special vindicator of that much-abused and much-misunderstood class of men, the Regulators of our colonial times. No man in the State has done so much to clear their fame--few have been so competent. The papers contributed by him to the _University Magazine_ on the subject would form a volume, if collected, and their great value is indicated by the numerous inquiries instituted for them by men in various States of the Union. His lecture before the Historical Society in 1852 may be said to have settled the question of the merits of the Regulators and their service to liberty. As Governor of the State, in 1833, he laid the cornerstone of the present capitol amid imposing ceremonies; a building designed with perhaps as pure and simple taste as any in America, and as solid and enduring as any in the world. On the 12th of January, 1826, he was married to Miss Eleanor H. White, daughter of William White, Secretary of State, and granddaughter of Governor Caswell, a union productive of great domestic happiness to a man so fitted as he, by nature and by a life of unsullied purity, to appreciate the ties of home and the love of wife and children. By this lady there were born to him several children, of whom but three, two daughters and a son, ever reached maturity. His oldest son, David, who died in childhood, was a boy of great promise. His eldest child and daughter, Anne, died unmarried in 1867. The second daughter, and now only surviving child, Eleanor Hope, married General S. D. Atkins, of Freeport, Illinois, where she now resides. The son, Richard Caswell, was killed a few years since, near his home in Illinois, being crushed to death by falling between two railroad cars while in motion. There is now no male representative of the name surviving.