Rewritten from dealer description: Caleb Smith had come to Hong Kong, China at the age of thirty in the later 1850s as partner in a small merchant firm. His younger brother Ethelbert joined him for a time, but at the start of the Civil War moved to on to the port of Amoy (Xieman), where at age twenty-three he began serving as unofficial United States Vice-Consul. President Lincoln's official Consul at Amoy was Thomas B. Bradford, an ardently anti-slavery Presbyterian Minister whose Pennsylvania home had been an active station of the Underground Railroad. Bradford, appointed in July 1861, did not actually reach China until the beginning of 1862 and then remained at Amoy for less than a year, departing because of ill-health. In his place, he left his twenty-six year old son Oliver as Vice-Consul, who in turn, soon moved on to Shanghai, where, thirteen years later, he was impeached as Vice-Consul-General and convicted of vast government fraud.

Throughout the War, the one stable consular official at Amoy was the younger Smith, who never had any official appointment at all. Smith was still acting as Vice-Consul when he received the first of these letters in May, but by December, when the second letter arrived, he had joined an unnamed private company. In the meantime, in October, Dr. William Irvin, a politically connected Pennsylvania physician, had arrived as Lincoln's substitute for the long absent Bradford. Irvin lasted less than a year, dying in a cholera epidemic in 1865.

It is clear from Caleb's first letter that the brothers were closely connected in business, notwithstanding Ethelbert's position as Vice-Consul. This was not unusual in the mid-eighteenth century, when United States consular officials were tasked to assist private American entrepreneurs in overseas business. Whether or not Caleb gave special treatment to his brother's affairs is unclear; however, it is clear from the second letter that Ethelbert had moral principles because whatever firm he had joined after giving up the Vice-Consulship was dealing in opium, which so disturbed Ethelbert that he thought immediately of resigning. Perhaps he was dissuaded by advice from his more experienced brother. It was not long before he settled in New York to become, like his brother, a China tea merchant who did not stoop to profit from more "unpleasant" business.