214 
To [Jeremiah Barker?]
Biddeford 13 January 1814
My dear Sir
Yesterday I recieved yours of the 8th inst., together with Mr. English’s book,1 which seems to have created considerable indignation in your mind against the author of a work you consider very wicked & even blasphemous—I read your letter through yesterday; and have read again to day half of the first page, and noting at the conclusion, (for like Girls in reading novels, I, in reading letters, often turn to see how the concluding sentence ends) that you would not be displeased at my sending you my sentiments after reading yours I shall now comply with your request—
I shall deal pretty much in generals, because I have not leisure to look into books to enable me to be more particular—And first I will submit a general observation that has often rose in my mind when reading, or thinking on the controversy between Christians and Deists. You have often heard me observe to two Gentleman, at the bar, each contending, for the cause of his client, against his Antagonist, that it would greatly facilitate the discovery of the real justice in the cause, if they would take a retrospect of all the evidence in the cause & make reasonable deductions on both sides, such as the jury will make, & see whether there is, in fact, any ground for a difference of opinion, & what that diversity is? Now I am inclined to think if you will coolly set down & see wherein Deists & Christians differ you will remit back much of the warm animated feelings you have expressed against Mr. E. & such writers in general—I have not yet read the whole of his book; but in reading the first forty or fifty pages, I had nothing like the feelings & sentiments you seem to have on the occasion—I look upon him as an honest man contending for the truth, as much as the honest young men lately gone to India to preach down Jugonautism, & plant the religion of Jesus in its room2—I may think him in an error; and probably thousands of the worshippers of the great Idol may at first laugh at, dispise & pronounce our honest missionaries, also in an error, if not something worse—but we must bear in mind, that our opinions do not make their moral characters—I know nothing of Mr. E. but what I see of him as an author in his books; for I have lately read his reply to Mr. Cary, & Mr. Channing3—He certainly appears to have made sacrifices of interest, if the abandoning a profession, may be so denominated, for what he calls the truth. He may nevertheless be wrong, but I have no authority as a follower of Jesus to say more of him, than that I believe him to be in an error—& pray for his conversion—So far I think you will agree with me—
But I blame him, & Mr. Cary for the censorious & bitter language they make use of in their writings;4 & permit me to say, you my friend, have suffered feelings to rise in your mind, while reading the controversy, that have a tendency to shut it against a ready perception of the truth.
“As to the internal evidence of the divinity of Christianity, it seems to you impossible that it should be doubted, unless a better System can be offered to mankind in its stead. No Deist, you believe, from Celsus5 down to Mr. E. has ever pretended that this can be done.” You appear by this not to have an absolute conviction of the divinity of christianity, but it is only a conviction sub modo or qualified, untill some better system shall be presented to mankind; and then I suppose you will abandon the christian System & place your confidence in that better System. This is exactly the case with Mr. E. if we believe what he has written as to the progress of his own mind relative to this subject.
I believe the principle Deists have complained of the christian morality, & attempted to point out improvements from Jewish & heathen writers or philosophers—I say I believe they have thus complained & attempted—I shall not say that I think their complaints are at all founded, or that they have succeeded in their amendments. This is a different question altogether—I believe that Tom Paine one of the least respectable of any of the Deistical writers in the English class of them made this pretention.
Tho great reliance has been made on the internal evidence for the last forty years, since it was so elegantly stated by the Author of the Letters on the Origin of Evil,6 yet many Divines, among whom is ----- McClain, the translator of Moshime Ecclesiastical history,7 consider that but of a secondary nature & that too much stress may be laid upon it.
“You say you are at a loss to know what mankind can gain by being undecieved, in case Christianity be really a delusion?” And so is every body but the deists themselves. I have often endeavoured to examine this question to discover, if by any data in my knowledge, how, & by what means, or process the Christian part of the world, could be ameliorated by a total disbelief & actual rejection of the Christian religion; It is an historic fact that I believe is susceptible of the fullest proof; that wherever the christian religion has been adopted the people have been better men in all senses of the word, good & better, than where it has not been recieved. Now if this be a fact—it seems to follow that there is something or other, included in the system, that tends to improve the human race; because where this system has not been adopted, that portion of the human race are not so much improved as the christian. I am sensible a further enquiry may be made, is that something or other which has operated exclusively within the christian world, & produced the assumed amelioration of man, a part of the christian system? This starts a variety of important questions which at some convenient time we, with others of our acquaintance, will talk over & endeavour mutually to assist each other in making up our minds; And for the present I will only suggest that it appears to me necessary to analize the christian religion into its various parts & note how much of what is commonly included under the common title of christianity is, has been, or might have been discovered by the natural powers of man in examining his frame of body & mind together with the other parts of the universe; also that facts that are included as parts of the system—also the morality or human duties distinguishing those clearly revealed or for the first time declared & made known by Jesus from those that were before that time known & taught more or less by nations—Also the Institutions of the Christian world, again distinguishing those that are directly from Christ or his apostles from those derived from the Jews or other nations, & from such as the christian religion as it was taught during the four or five first centuries, gave occasion to rise up in the world—For I shall be in favour of giving credit to Jesus or his religion for all the institutions that have actually sprung out of his societies, & which have been among the mass of operating causes in the amelioration of man; and this is the more just as the Deists are always for debating him or his religion or the professors of his religion with all the institutions, sentiments & persecutions that have sprung up in Christendom & have tended to darken the mind, debase the heart & barbarize the habits of his professors.
It will be nothing to their purpose for Deists to say, that if the Christian religion had not have been embraced & taught in Christendom something else might have been taught it its room that would have advanced the countries, where christianity has been taught, to a higher state of moral & political & religious perfection than they now are. This must be the merest assumption without a single fact to support it. Nor do I think you are correct in saying “that the establishment of Deism would degrade man below the brute. Could Society remain long in mere Deism?”
What is Deism? Here we must do justice to our opponents; And it will be as incorrect reasoning to charge the irregular lives of a few persons whom we may call deists, or who may call themselves deists, upon deism as her natural & legitimate fruits, as it would be to set the temper, agency & principles of Calvin, when he burnt Servetus,8 to the score of Christ or his religion. We must endeavour as much as possible not to charge upon a religion the conduct of men who are not influenced by its spirit & principles. Man may be educated under the profession of a religion & yet have never acquired the habits & temper which are the natural fruits of the religion they profess; As speculative men may draw inferences from facts and propositions contained & admitted as truths in their system, & endeavour to palm them on the system as parts of it, which in fact are no more than suppositions & chimeras of the brains of an enthusiast.
But what is Deism—it is generally defined [as] that knowledge of God & our relation & duty to him which are discoverable by reason without the aid of Revelation, As morality or ethics is that system of duties we as rational creatures owe to ourselves and our fellow-creatures in the various relations of society & Government, discoverable by the mental powers & reason. To what degree of perfection Deism may be carried will be seen by reading Dr. Saml Clarks demonstration of the Atributes & being of a God9—Fosters dissertations of Natural Religion10 & many others of a like kind—I believe the Deistical writers in England of any note have laid down their systems with some clearness; & if they were made the rule of life I am far from thinking the world would become brutalized, tho it might fall short of what is now the state of society in christiandom.
Deism may be said to consist of two parts—a negative & a possitive—The first consists in denying revelation, and while their christian opponents rail at and abuse them for this they are apt to overlook what the deists intend would be the general result to mankind if the possitive part of their system, that is, their natural religion & morality were made the subjects of general instruction, in the same manner as Christianity is now, & has been taught for eighteen hundred years—The deists content that, if this had been the case, all the good which has in fact resulted from Christianity, without any of the evils of enthusiasm & fanaticism which have been in some degree associated with it, might have been derived to that portion of the world, called christian. Now without examining how far this might or might not be the case, which tho difficult if possible to be done to any degree of satisfaction, each have gone on, like two lawyers, diverging further & further apart, the Christian abusing the deist for being an unbeliever & atheist; and the deist charging the christian with all the horrors of the Inquisition, & the yet more cruel torments of burning heritics & infidels!
Untill we ascertain clearly what is Christianity; and what is intended by infidelity we shall not be able to say how many, & what are the blessings of life we are indebted exclusively to the one, or how many & what are the evils we may justly set down to the score of the other. Hence you will see the propriety of my general observation, and before we attempt one or the other, see & note the particulars wherein the christian & the deist agree as to the practical duties of man. And I believe I may say generally they agree in all the moral duties arising from the social relations of life—Do they not assert the same rights & assert obedience to the same duties? I know of no diversity of opinion in this part of the controversy. As to propositions which are matters of belief I am sensible there will be a wide space between them—but not a great deal wider than that between some christians—For there appears to me to be as much a scale of faith, by the degrees whereof, christians may be noted to differ from one another, as there are of latitude & Longitude by which distances are measured from a given meridian, or from the Equator. But which class of christians, or which individual of any given class shall be taken as the point & standard of truth to re[a]son from has never, since the reformation, been agreed upon. It is true the catholics have their, or rather had their pope:11 The Church of England have their thirty nine articles, the dissenters their Assemblys catechism, the Friends have their moving spirit;12 & the same may be said of every denomination, or party; for after all I have some suspicion that mere party spirit enters more into, & causes this variety in the christian world than a real love to Christianity whatever it may be—No one of any class will be willing to be judged by the christianity of another class or party—and not very often, or for any considerable length of time, by the ostensable standard of his own—Hence divisions & subdivisions, new churches, new meeting houses without number or reason, and all uncharitableness without measure: But nevertheless do they not all as to classes parties & individuals come near to each other in their ascent to the moral and social duties—those rights and obligations that have been pretty clearly delineated as well as enforced by human sanctions, even without the aid of revelation? Now if we run over the separate needs of all the religious classes, there is no one proposition or article common to all of them of more real importance than the belief of future rewards & punishments; and this appears to me to be held in nearly equal degree of respect by all classes, & all deem it a revealed truth. This article of Revelation includes or implies many others, and modifications of the general principle, that need not to be detailed; because I have never been able to discover that these varieties weakened the force of the principle, in its effects, on society. This principle then we will consider as common to all christians; and no one will deny its usefullness to Society. The simple fear of punishment, & hope & expectation of rewards as natural consequences of our good & bad conduct in this life will be left fully to operate on the minds of all believers, whatever may be their opinions as to a thousand questions that have been started about the person of Jesus; whether, as the high orthodox contend, he be God or in all the atributes of God his equal; or as the high Arians contend that he was not exactly equal to God, but created all things, or as the low Arians think him a great super-angelic being, the Angel of the Covenant spoken of in the O. Testament & who personally appeared to the patriarchs & conducted the march of the Children of Israel out of Egypt; or whether he was a simple spirit that existed before he was born of Mary; or as some begin to think, that he was a mere man born of his mother as other children are, but highly favourd by God in his public & private conduct while in this world; I say the simple belief of rewards and punishments beyond the grave for the good or bad conduct in this life, seems to me to secure to society all the beneficial consequences of revelation, whatever individuals may think as to these other articles in the creeds of some christians—Then the question returns upon us to enquire whether this single principle does not make a most important distinction in favour of Revelation & those who are believers, against Deists tho they should be allowed to agree with christians in all the moral and social duties of man? Now as all people are influenced more or less by their hopes and fears, nothing will have a more effectual tendency to deter from the commission of actions detrimental to society than a real belief that an inconvenience, or misery, such as eye hath not seen, or ear ever heard to expressed in words, will certainly befall to a man in case he does certain forbidden actions, in the deists, as well as in the christians code, denominated crimes.
So far then as men are influenced in their conduct by a fear of punishment, & an expectation of pleasures beyond the grave, there is a probability that believers will make better members of society than unbelievers in revelation; unless it can be shewn that unbelievers are more punctual in their duties from an abstract conviction of the fitness of moral justice than believers are, or do in fact satisfy themselves of the infliction of rewards & punishments in another life by reasoning on the common course of nature, which is a position hardly to be supported. For there is nothing in the nature of things to give this advantage to infidels over the true believers—And the great book of Nature by the examination of which it is pretended the unbeliever gains his conviction, is equally open to the believer who to this source joins that of the supernatural Book. How far it is a fact as some deists pretend, that rewards & punishments are demonstrable from the nature of man, & the truths of natural religion, I leave for those to judge, who are better acquainted with the works of those deists who have exhibeted the utmost that has, or probably can be executed in that branch of moral science.
This course of reasoning will not apply to the Jews, or Mahamitans—because they recieve the old testament, & it seems to be admitted that these doctrines are fully declared in some of those books—which I am not disposed to controvert tho it was most earnestly supported by the learned Warburton13—a real Giant in theology.
* * *
FC (incomplete?), TFP
1. Francois-Alexandre-Frederic, duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels through the United States of North America . . . in the years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (London, 1799), pp. 462-63. The only other individual mentioned by name in the Maine chapter headings of this famous travelogue was Henry Knox, whom Liancourt had visited in Thomaston just days before passing through Biddeford. The contrast with the retired secretary of war enthroned in his baronial manor could not have been greater, and serves to highlight the simplicity of GT’s private life.
2. For an explanation of these alternative spellings of the Thatcher name, see pages civ-cv below.
3. Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, p. 5. Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (London, 1702; p. 77) records the divine providence visited upon Antony Thacher (ca. 1589-ca. 1668) when a pinnace carrying him, his family, and seventeen other settlers shipwrecked during a tremendous storm off Cape Anne, Massachusetts in August 1635. Only Antony and his wife Elizabeth Jones Thacher survived, by clinging to the rocky shores of what was known thereafter as Thacher’s Island, or “Thacher’s Woe.” “What a strange thing is the pride of ancestry?” TBW once remarked to GT. “You have as small a portion of it as almost any man—but you have some—and it seems all to center in the aforesaid Elizabeth Jones” (TBW to GT, 22 Dec. 1813, Wait Letters).
4. Allen, Thacher Genealogy, pp. 29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 41; Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, pp. 166-67; “Obituary”; John Adams to Peter Thatcher Vose, 25 Dec. 1821, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 6 Dec. 2016, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-7585 (accessed Dec. 2016). Adams was most certainly thinking of one of his heroes of the Boston bar, Oxenbridge Thacher, who, like the letter’s recipient, was a member of the Boston branch of the Thacher family. But the qualities that Adams most admired in Oxenbridge—discovered in evenings spent together discussing “all Subjects of Religion, Morals, Law, Politicks, History, Phylosophy, Belle letters Theology, Mythology, Cosmogeny, Metaphysicks, Lock, Clark, Leibnits, Bolinbroke, Berckley, the Preestablished Harmony of the Universe, the Nature of Matter and Spirit, and the eternal Establishment of Coincidences between their Operations”—were equally qualities he might have discovered in an evening’s conversation with GT (John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, 13 February 1818, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 6 Dec. 2016, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6854 [accessed Dec. 2016]).
5. Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, pp. 166-67; Daniel Davis to GT, 9 Oct. 1788, TFP; GT to TBW, 5 Aug. 1790, DHFFC 20:2348.
6. AN, GTP-Salem. Strangely, given the pains GT took to compile his family history, the closest he came to an autobiographical sketch exists only as a three-page fragment addressed to an unidentified recipient, of which this is an excerpt. Far from ever finished, it was hardly begun—its value evidently more confessional than informational. Among the other gems yielded up: “I can recollect about three nights in my life that my conscience was not quiet—& to be honest during those dark intervals I thought it the greatest curse in the world.”
7. Daniel Davis to GT, 9 Oct. 1788, TFP; “Obituary”; GT to SST, 26 July 1789 (No. 39, below); GT to SST, 2 Aug. 1789, TFP; Wright, Revolutionary Generation, p. 228.
8. Joseph Priestley to GT, 14 Feb. 1799, “Priestley Letters,” p. 29; Wright, Revolutionary Generation, pp. 34, 43; Cohen, “Harvard College,” pp. 175, 185.
9. Percy W. Brown, “The Sojourn of Harvard College in Concord,” Harvard Graduates Magazine, 27(June 1919):508; Wright, Revolutionary Generation, pp. 101-02; Ezra Ripley to GT, 1 Nov. 1788, Duane N. Diedrich Collection, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
10. Dudley Atkins Tyng to GT, 10 Dec. 1806, Tyng Correspondence.
11. GT to SST, [10 May 1823], TFP. The “Great Rebellion” erupted over a Senior class member’s expulsion on the word of an unpopular informer, and the resulting boycott by the Senior class (Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, pp. 230-31).
12. More than a decade after being exposed to the writings of the Swiss political theorist Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui (1694-1748), GT would include them in the course of studies he recommended for JH: “[I] am still pursuing your direction respecting my studies, am exceeding pleased with Burlamaqui” (JH to GT, 1-2 Jan. 1788, DHROC 5:573).
13. Cohen, “Harvard College,” p. 187; Wright, Revolutionary Generation, pp. 81, 91; GT to SST, 14 Oct. 1788, TFP, MHi; Varnum Letter; NB to GT, 20 Feb. 1788, Barrell Correspondence. A receipt to the Massachusetts Board of War dated 13 October 1778, for expenses related to the prize brig Juno, includes a line item for GT’s expenses “bringing a Letter from Falmouth,” which may point to his deeper involvement in the Juno’s capture off Cape Cod by the Massachusetts state navy’s 14-gun brigantine Tyrannicide on 25 September 1778. The Tyrannicide was captained by John Allen Hallett of Yarmouth, a cousin through GT’s aunt Thankful Thacher (“USMA Tyrannicide,” http://3decks.pbworks.com/w/page/916127/USMA-Tyrannicide-%281776%29#B071 [accessed Jan. 2017]; “Prize Brig. Juno to Board of War,” Misc. Bd. 1778 Oct. 13, MHi; Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, p. 280).
14. GT to TBW, 5 Aug. 1790, DHFFC 20:2348; Obituary; Harvard Graduates 16:59-63; Belsham, Theophilus Lindsey, pp. 250-51. Timothy Hilliard (1746-1790; Harvard, 1764), a native of New Hampshire, tutored at Harvard (1768-71) until his ordination as pastor of Barnstable’s Second (or East) Church in April 1771. Despite his Whig sympathies, he refused to politicize his pulpit and won the admiration of all parties for his evenhandedness. Ill health forced his transfer to the more salubrious air of Cambridge, where his installation as pastor of the First Church in October 1783 made him de facto pastor of his alma mater. GT also briefly (ca. 1769-70) attended the school kept by Timothy Alden (1736-1828; Harvard, 1762), who in 1770 was installed as pastor of Yarmouth’s First Church, where “his liberal theological ideas appealed to a large majority of his congregation” (GT to SST, 31 March 1823, TFP; Harvard Graduates 15:152-53).
15. GT to Thomas Thacher, 22 May 1790 (No. 45, below); Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago, 2012), p. 12.
16. Willis, Lawyers of Maine, p. 107; Wright, Revolutionary Generation, p. 61; Daniel Davis to GT, 9 Oct. 1788, TFP. As a congressman in April 1790, GT had the opportunity to repay his former teacher by locating Bourne’s runaway son on a New York merchant ship and arranging for his return to Cape Cod (DHFFC 19:1094-95, 1181, 1186, 1220, 1221, 1310).
17. GT was susceptible to nostalgia with others too. When a Baltimore merchant reminisced about their “early connections,” GT replied that it “warmed those dorment, tho not extinguished, feelings of seventy five & seventy six, when we traversed the streets arm in arm, of Barnstable & Yarmouth—Many times since I have been setled in Life have I thought of those times & connections” (GT to William Taylor, 29 March 1789, DHFFC 15:151).
18. GT to Thomas Thacher, 22 May 1790 (No. 45, below); Thomas Thacher to GT, 15 April 1790, DHFFC 19:1236; Daniel Davis to GT, 9 Oct. 1788, TFP. Davis may not have been aware that GT’s own uncle (by marriage) Edmund Hawes (d. 1777) had hung himself in the Cape Cod woods, or that his cousin Edmund Hawes, Jr. also committed suicide (Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, p. 187).
19. Harvard Graduates 15:300; Thomas Dawes to GT (regarding the estate of a Mr. Lucas), 27 Aug. 1781, Foster Family; GT to Thomas Thacher, 27 July 1784, TFP, MHi; Willis, Lawyers of Maine, pp. 112, 128. In 1788—not long enough likely for his memory to be mistaken—GT dated his acquaintance with York’s merchant Nathaniel Barrell to 1780 (NB to GT, 20 Feb. 1788, Barrell Correspondence). GT’s letter to brother Thomas suggests that he resided in Saco after leaving York and prior to moving across the river to Biddeford, although Willis and others assert, without attribution, that he settled in Biddeford immediately upon leaving York in 1782.
Regarding demographics: by 1790, for example, southern New England provided a disproportionately high percentage of the settlers in the Penobscot Valley, and Cape Cod made up four-fifths of those (Stephen J. Hornsby and Richard W. Judd, eds., Historical Atlas of Maine [Orono, Me., 2015], Plate 24). Barnstable and GT’s adopted hometown of Biddeford were not only near neighbors demographically; their English namesakes are coincidentally the principal port towns of the two rivers that come together to form Barnstaple or Bideford Bay off the Devonshire coast.
20. Harvard Graduates 16:424-26; Henry Thacher to GT, 30 July 1812, TFP. Samuel Savage’s wife Hope was the younger sister of Bourne’s wife Hannah (m. 1767). Alternatively, but less likely, George and Sarah may have been introduced by her first cousin, Royall Tyler, who was GT’s classmate (Mary R. Cabot, ed., Annals of Brattleboro, 1681-1895, [2 vols., Brattleboro, Vt., 1921] 1:251-52). Tyler, a future Chief Justice of Vermont, was also America’s first native-born playwright, which suggests a genetic influence behind SST’s own affinity for literature.
21. Mary Scollay had discerned something in a letter from SST that she was “apt to think look’d a little stif, which you know <lined out> is not the greatest recommendation in the world—You remember what Mr Thatcher Yousd to say about the Barnstable Girls” (Mary Scollay to SST, 28 March 1786, GTP-Salem). Mary Scollay (1752-1841) married Rev. Thomas Prentiss of Medfield, Mass. in 1789. Her letters to SST, with those of Mary Russell Atkins Searle, constitute the most valuable collection of known letters to Sarah, in GTP-Salem.
22. Joseph G. Waters, et al., eds. Diary of William Bentley (4 vols., Salem, Mass., 1905-14) 1:66; Rev. Ezra Ripley to GT, 30 Mar. 1789, Chamberlain; Sarah Sayward Barrell to GT, 25 March 1790, Chamberlain (with notation in NB’s hand: “my saucy Wife insisted on my inclosg this [in his own letter to GT], and being under petticoat Government, I’m obligd to comply”); GT to SST, 7, 28 Feb. 1791, DHFFC 21:723, 969.
“Sally” Barrell was one of GT’s few known female correspondents. True to his fondness for vivacious young women, she was described as “a great belle in her time and was the general favorite of the village” (Sayward, Sayward Family, p. 81).
23. Mary Scollay to ST, 1 Dec. 1787, GTP-Salem; GT to SST, 1 Feb. 1789, 11 Dec. 1793, TFP; GT to SST, 14 May 1789, DHFFC 15:555; Matthew Cobb to GT, 15 Feb. 1789, GTP-Portland.
24. GT to SST, 22 Jan. 1800 (No. 188, below); Thomas A. Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America (Boston, 2006), pp. 78-89. For more on the companionate ideal as a change in the pattern of women’s lives, see Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston, 1980), pp. 228-55, and Nancy F. Cott, “Divorce and the Changing Status of Women in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” WMQ, v. 33, 4 (Oct. 1976):586-614. For a case study in how historians apply that model of analysis, see Anya Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal (Baltimore, 1998).
25. GT to Thomas Thacher, 27 July 1784, TFP; GT to SST, 7 Feb. 1794, TFP. On the economic necessity behind family exchanges, see Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale, pp. 81-82.
The Thatcher home, seen in a photograph from 1955 occupying the now-empty lot at 208 South Street, was taken by eminent domain and destroyed to widen South Street for a new railroad bridge begun in 1978 (“Thacher House,” Maine Memory Network, https://www.mainememory.net/artifact/33971 [accessed Dec. 2016]; [Biddeford] Journal Tribune, 27 May 1977).
26. James Scammon (1742-1804) married Hanna Page (1742-1821) in 1761. In 1775 he commanded one of the first Massachusetts militia regiments raised in the Siege of Boston, adopted into the Continental Army in June 1775 and designated the 18th Continental Regiment. After the war, he was a merchant with his brother Nathaniel in Saco (Benjamin Goodale, Material for a Genealogy of the Scammon Family in Maine [Salem, (Me.?), 1892], p. 12).
27. Col. Joseph Morrill (1748-1840) and Mary Jordan (ca. 1750-1837) married in 1772 and resided in Biddeford (http://morrillonline.com/morrilljoseph-1748-1840/ [accessed May 2018]).
28. Probably Mary Jordan Morrill’s younger brother Rishworth Jordan, Jr. (1754-1843), and his first wife Sarah Forsyth (1751-86), of Biddeford (William Richard Cutter, ed., Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Boston and Eastern Massachusetts [New York, 1908] 3:668).
29. Daniel Hooper (1754-1800), a Biddeford shopkeeper, served as state representative, 1797-99, and as postmaster after his father Benjamin Hooper’s resignation in 1798. In 1783 he married Mary Gray of Saco (Charles Henry Pope and Thomas Hooper, eds., Hooper Genealogy [Boston, 1908], pp. 240-41). During Hooper’s mortal illness in the spring of 1800, GT would recall that “The coming fall compleats twenty years since I was first acquainted with him—And he has seemed unto me like a brother” (GT to SST, 8 April 1800, TFP).
30. Probably David King, an uncle of Rufus, Cyrus, and Betsey King, and a relation of Mary Gray Hooper through his deceased wife Elizabeth. King was a prominent merchant of Saco (Folsom, Saco and Biddeford, p. 250; Maine Historical and Genealogical Recorder 1[Portland, 1884]:152).
31. Journal entry, 24 Dec. 1784, TFP.
32. GT to SST, 2 Feb. 1793, TFP; JH to GT, 13 Feb. 1790, DHFFC 18:510; Samuel Deane to GT, 21 May 1789, GTP-Biddeford (see additional letters of recommendation for John Rudberg from William Vaughn and Daniel George to GT, 4, 5 June 1789, DHFFC 16:703, 705).
33. “Obituary.” “An anecdote to which Mr. Thacher, when at the bar, was a party, is told by an old lawyer. He was managing a cause against the Attorney General, in which the counsel were considerably excited: the Attorney General said to Mr. Thacher, ‘You are no gentleman.’ Thacher rose and said, ‘Well, now, I admit, Mr. Attorney, that I am no gentleman,—I am no gentleman.’ The venerable Judge Strong, who was holding the court, interrupted, and with his peculiar arch manner, said, ‘Well, gentlemen, I think you need not go to the jury about that” (Willis, Lawyers of Maine, p. 109).
34. SL to GT, 13 Feb. 1788, Chamberlain; Benjamin Brown to GT, 5 June 1789, Charles Pelham Greenough Papers, 1669-1963, Ms. N-1251, MHi; Josiah Stebbins to GT, 5 June 1797, Coll. 268, George Thacher Papers, 1796-98, MeHi; GT to ST, 14 June 1789, TFP. GT’s advice may have influenced Stebbins (1766-1826; Yale, 1791) to open his practice in New Milford (now Alna), Maine. He went on to become judge of the court of common pleas, member of the Massachusetts Executive Council, and Maine state senator (Willis, Lawyers of Maine, pp. 236-42). James Rodon Savage (1792-1816; Harvard, 1812) studied only briefly with his uncle before returning to his native Jamaica, where he died in a horse riding accident (Park, Savage Descendants, p. 39).
35. Grindall Reynolds, The Story of a Concord Farm and its Owners (Concord, Mass., 1883), pp. 15, 17-19; “Memorandum of Agreement” (in SL’s hand), 14 Oct. 1787, TFP; SL to GT, 8 Feb., 28 April, 30 June 1789, GTP-Biddeford. The latter collection includes SL’s accounting of the household finances for 27 Nov. 1787 to 23 Oct. 1789, evidently compiled in compliance with the “Memorandum of Agreement.”
36. Additional background and selections from “A Rational Christian” and “Scribble-Scrabble” appear in Selected Miscellaneous Writings, below.
37. Banks, Maine Becomes a State, pp. 14-24; James Leamon, “In Shays’s Shadow: Separation and Ratification of the Constitution in Maine,” in Robert A. Gross, ed., In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), pp. 285-91; DHFFE 1:435-36; David Sewall to GT, 16 Oct. 1786, “Thatcher Papers,” p. 259. Sewall fervently disagreed with GT’s opinion on free assembly, complaining (in the same letter to GT), that “These Conventions of Counties are Seeds of Sedition.”
38. Nathan Dane to Rufus King, 16 July 1787, LDC 24:359. Dane (1752-1835; Harvard, 1778); lawyer of Beverly, Mass. from 1782; member, state house of representatives (1782-85), Confederation Congress (1785-88), state senate (1790-91, 1794-97).
39. Evidently a college nickname: “I rejoice to find, that my friend, who is pleased to stile himself, the Hebrew, does not, upon being called to take a Seat in the first Council of America, overlook his old friend Ezra” (Ezra Ripley to GT, 1 Nov. 1788, Duane N. Diedrich Collection, William M. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). Ripley, Gore, and GT were all members of Harvard’s Class of 1776; King graduated the following year. Gore uses the nickname here to correct the more logical presumption that he was referring to Josiah Thacher (1733-99) of Gorham, a distant relative through the Boston branch, who had served as a state senator and county court judge. Into late life, GT addressed “my old chum, Gore” by his college nickname, “Kitty Gore” (GT to SST, 28 April 1800, TFP; Willis, Lawyers of Maine, p. 110).
40. Samuel Phillips, Jr. (1752-1808; Harvard, 1771); manufacturer of Andover, Mass.; represented Essex County in state senate almost continuously from 1780 to 1801 (as its president from 1785) (DHFFC 22:1947).
41. Jonathan Grout (1737-1807); lawyer of Petersham, Mass.; member of Provincial Congress (1775); rose from captain to colonel in state militia during Revolutionary War; state representative (1781, 1784); senator (1788); voted against ratifying Constitution at state convention; Antifederalist Representative to First Federal Congress (DHFFC 14:628-30).
42. Christopher Gore to Rufus King, 28 June 1787, King 1:226-27.
43. JCC 34:vii; Burnett, Continental Congress, pp. 724-26; Nathan Dane to Theodore Sedgwick, 20 July 1788, LDC 25:235; attendance record, LDC 24:xxi, 25:xix-xx; Samuel Phillips Savage to GT, 17 Feb. 1788, DHROC 7:1704.
44. GT to SST, 24 Oct. 1787, 22 Aug. 1788, TFP. The earlier of SST’s two extant letters to GT is marked “N. 2” and dated 23 December 1787, with a postscript written four days later. Its location in the Foster Family Autograph Collection (MHi) strongly suggests that her letters stood a much better chance of surviving if alienated from the larger collection that would form the Thacher Family Papers (also at MHi). Her only other letter to GT is actually a postscript added to the back of a letter from son Henry to his father, 21 March [1808] (TFP). SST’s other extant letters are three letters to the same son, Henry—and it is most likely to Henry’s credit that even these few were saved.
45. For a fuller treatment of this subject, see William C. diGiacomantonio, “A Congressional Wife at Home: The Case of Sarah Thatcher, 1787-1792,” in Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon, eds., Neither Separate nor Equal: Congress in the 1790s (Athens, Ohio, 2000), pp. 155-80.
46. GT to SST, 11 Dec. 1793, 24 Feb. 1788 (No. 11, below), 1 April 1800, 7 Sept. 1788, 24 Jan. 1795, 7 Feb. 1797, TFP.
47. Mary Scollay to ST, 22 Sept. [1788?], GTP-Salem. Scollay’s apparent mimicking of Rachel’s accent suggests the Thatchers’ beloved housemaid was a Scottish immigrant.
48. GT to SST, 14 Sept. 1788, 1 Dec. 1791, 20 Oct. 1788, TFP.
49. GT to SST, 24 May 1789, TFP; GT to SST, 3 May 1789 (No. 35, below); GT to TBW, 6 April 1790, DHFFC 19:1157.
50. GT to SST, 18, 22 Feb. 1789 (Nos. 30 and 31, below); Mary Searle to SST, 26 Nov. 1790, GTP-Salem. For Kames’s influence, see Wilson Smith, ed., Theories of Education in Early America, 1655-1819 (Indianapolis, Ind., 1973), pp. 127-29.
51. GT to SST, 1 Dec. 1791, 16 March 1788, TFP. Notation on GT’s copy of Thoughts on Female Education reads (at the top of the title page) “Sarah Thatcher’s Book,” and (at the bottom) “Sally Thatcher her Book”—suggesting mother passed it on to daughter.
52. Clayton, York County, p. 78; GT to SST, 28 Oct.-11 Nov. 1787, TFP; GT to Samuel Phillips Savage Thatcher, 19 Feb. 1801, TFP.
53. GT to SST, 22 March, 17 May 1789, DHFFC 15:96, 584. For GT’s earliest known reading of Emilius, see GT to TBW, 11 July 1790 (No. 48, below). For Hartley’s doctrine of association, see GT to Joseph Priestley, 25 April 1792 (No. 79, below).
54. Daniel Cony to GT, 16 May 1789, DHFFC 15:566; Abigail Adams as quoted in Rosemary S. Keller, Patriotism and the Female Sex: Abigail Adams and the American Revolution (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1994), p. 105.
55. Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale, p. 82; GT to SST, 17 Jan. 1795, 23 Jan. 1792, TFP; GT to SST, 14 May 1789, DHFFC 15:555.
56. GT to SST, 31 March 1790, DHFFC 19:1060; GT to Samuel Phillips Savage Thatcher, 3 May 1798, TFP; GT to ST, 24 March 1800, TFP. Not surprisingly, Thacher’s Tracts reflect relatively little reading on husbandry; among those titles are Sketches on Rotations of Crops (v. 55), Practical Hints to Farmers (v. 137-39), and various published addresses before county societies and agricultural exhibitions. The list of books GT compiled, evidently as a partial catalog of his personal library, includes A. Millar’s English edition (London, 1745) of writings on husbandry and trees by Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella (4-ca. 70 a.d.) (Booklist, n.d., TFP).
57. GT to SST, 28 Oct. 1787, 23 Jan. 1792, 7 Feb. 1797, 2 Jan. 1792, TFP. Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, addressed to a young Lady (2 vols., London, 1773) was written by Hester Mulso Chapone (1727-1801), a member of the Blue Stockings Society of England, a women’s cooperative and mutual-improvement society. GT later donated a copy to Fryeburg Academy (Amos Cook to GT, 22 Feb. 1817, TFP).
58. GT to SST, 17 Aug. 1788, LDC 25:300.
59. JH to GT, [26 Sept.] (P.S. to 25 Sept.) 1788, TFP. See also GT to SST, 27 Dec. 1787 (No. 5, below). JH’s postscript concludes:
Sammy [Samuel Phillips Savage Thatcher] paid great Attention, not only to the roast Beef, but to the soldier-like Appearance of the company in exercising their Knives & forks. Sammy wished his papa was there, Sally shewed her full Approbation of the several Manoeuvres as well as of the agreeable Conversation which displayed itself in her little risible muscles, & her Mama called her a little dear honey—
These details probably contributed to GT’s belief in the pedagogical value of exposing children to adult company and conversation, particularly at table.
60. SST to GT, 27 Dec. (P.S. to 23 Dec.) 1787, Foster Family.
61. TBW to GT, 26 Feb. 1788, Chamberlain.
62. Daniel Cony to GT, 12 March 1789, DHFFE 1:579; GT to SST, 1 Dec. 1796, 25 Feb. 1800, TFP; Matthew Cobb to GT, 30 Sept. 1788, GTP-Portland. Other references in Cobb’s letter indicate that SST was sharing GT’s letters of 16 Sept. 1788 (Nos. 18 and 19, below).
63. DHROC 5:491-92n; Finding Guide, Coll. 2129, Barrell Family Collection: 1740-1936, MeHi; GT to NB, 27 Jan. 1788 (No. 7, below); GT to Sarah Sayward Barrell, 8 April 1790, DHFFC 19:1178. In 1758 NB married Sarah, the only child of Jonathan Sayward, the virtual “squire” of York, Maine. In 1765 they settled on the farm “Barrell Grove,” next to Sayward’s own estate, which NB also worked but would never inherit. In his will, the “benevolent, charitable and pious” old squire made the Barrells’ second youngest son his principal heir, leaving his estranged son in law a single suit of clothing and a walking stick that NB had given him years before (Sayward, Sayward Family, pp. 64-65).
64. Harvard Graduates 17:396; JH to GT, 10, 18 Jan. (continuation of 13 Jan.) 1793, Chamberlain. [Jeremiah Hill], The trial of Jeremiah Hill, esq. for heresy: before the Church of Christ in Biddeford, May 2, 1793 (Portland, 1793) is among Thacher’s Tracts (v. 54).
65. Harvard Graduates 17:391-96; JH to GT, 29 April 1789, DHFFC 15:387-88.
66. TBW started the Falmouth Gazette with Benjamin Titcomb, Jr. in Falmouth on 1 January 1785. The paper’s name changed to the Cumberland Gazette when part of Falmouth itself changed its name to Portland the next year, and TBW took over sole proprietorship beginning 7 April 1786. Titcomb started Portland’s rival Gazette of Maine in October 1790. TBW’s paper became The Eastern Herald on 2 January 1792 and continued until 29 August 1796, when it was taken over by his cousin and former apprentice John K. Baker, who also took over Titcomb’s newspaper and published under the combined title The Eastern Herald and Gazette of Maine (Philip M. Marsh, “Maine’s First Newspaper Editor: Thomas Wait,” New England Quarterly, v. 28, 4[Dec. 1955]:519-34; C.G. Furbish, “Baker Family,” Maine Historical and Genealogical Recorder, 8[1895]:160).
67. TBW to GT, 3 Feb. 1791, DHFFC 21:676; TBW to GT, 17 Jan. 1788, Chamberlain. Besides his letters published in the newspaper, GT sent TBW the journal of proceedings of Congress (for the week of 12-19 April 1789) to use in his Cumberland Gazette (GT to SST, 19 April 1789, DHFFC 15:293).
68. GT to TBW, 5 Aug. 1790, DHFFC 20:2347; GT to SST, 4 April [1820], 13 March 1822, TFP.
69. “There is something wrong among the Federalists in this town,” TBW wrote from Boston, following Republican gains in recent legislative (1806) and gubernatorial (1807) state elections.
There exists a vile spirit of Jealousy; the object of which is the Essex Junto. This spirit is more generally diffused than you are aware of, or I should not mention it. It has slept a year or two, because, for a year or two the Federalists have had no power. Who is this Junto? I asked—and what their object? . . . [the answer] proves that the Essex Junto are indeed an Aristocracy; but that sort of Aristocracy which derives it[s] privileges immediately from Almighty God, and it is best to submit quietly. The peculiar privileges of their Order, are Virtue, Talents, and Patriotism. Instead of destroying, I am for joining the Order (TBW to GT, [7] June [P.S. to 3 June] 1808, Wait Letters).
TBW’s use of the term “Essex Junto” at this late date probably refers to the neo-Federalist leadership of younger politicians such as Josiah Quincy and Harrison Gray Otis, rather than to the clique of idealistic conservatives active (but hardly dominant, even in Essex County) from the 1770s until the 1790s. By the late 1790s, any such Junto existed more as a bogeyman of Jeffersonians and Adams Federalists. David H. Fischer does much to de-mythologize the “fabled junto” without de-valuing it as a historical trademark for arch-Federalism; see his “Myth of the Essex Junto,” WMQ, v. 21, 2(April 1964):191-235. Whether GT subscribed to TBW’s characterization is unknown.
70. TBW to GT, 20 May 1788, Chamberlain; 2 July 1809, 19 Jan. (continuation of 5 Jan.) 1810, 9 Dec. 1815, 6 Dec. 1819, 27 Aug. (continuation of 8 Aug.) 1814, 20 March 1821, Wait Letters. Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon (1609-74), Lord Chancellor of England during the earliest years of the Restoration, authored one of the most influential works of British history, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702-04).
John Leland (1691-1766) was an English Presbyterian minister and theologian. Among his works from GT’s library now at Bowdoin College, Maine, are: The divine authority of the Old and New Testament asserted (2 vols., London, 1739-40); A defence of Christianity (2 vols., London, 1753); A view of the principal deistical writers that have appears in England in the last and present centuries (2 vols., London, 1755-57); and A supplement to the first and second volumes of the View of the deistical writers (London, 1756).
Henry St. John, viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751) wrote extensively on political theory but mostly on the politics of early Hanoverian England. His Idea of a Patriot King (1738) had some influence over early American constitutional thought.
71. TBW to GT, 14 March 1789, DHFFC 15:65; 28 May 1809, Wait Letters. For more on GT and TBW’s relationship as a case study in male friendships, see Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore, 2009), pp. 55, 58-59, and Donald Yacovone, “‘Surpassing the Love of Women’: Victorian Manhood and the Language of Fraternal Love,” in Laura McCall and Donald Yacovone, eds., A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender (New York, 1998), pp. 195-221. Referring to the Thatcher-Wait correspondence, Yacovone has written, “I can’t think of another collection that better illustrated my interpretation of male relations before the age of Freud” (email to editor, 2 Aug. 2004).
72. Daniel Davis to GT, 9 Oct. 1788, TFP; Joseph Tucker to GT, 27 Aug. 1788, GTP-Portland; JH to GT, 2 Oct. 1788, TFP; William Lithgow, Jr. to GT, 12 Feb. 1789, DHFFC 15:216n; Stephen Hall to GT, 20 Feb. 1789, E.L. Diedrich Collection, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Daniel Cony to GT, 12 March 1789, DHFFE 1:579; Dudley Atkins Tyng to GT, 20 May 1789, DHFFC 22:1675-76.
73. Daniel Davis to GT, 9 Oct. 1788, TFP; Fisher Ames to Dwight Foster, 7 Dec. 1797, Ames 2:1255 (see also Ames to Jeremiah Smith, 18 Jan. 1796, Ames 2:1130: “abuse Mr. Thatcher, if you please, for his not writing to me”); Peleg Wadsworth to GT, 14 Feb. 1806, TFP
74. GT to SST, 14 Feb. 1799, TFP.
75. SL to GT, 23 Jan. 1788, DHROC 5:780; JH to GT, 24 March 1789, DHFFC 15:128.
76. JH to GT, 1-2 Jan. 1788, 12-13 Dec. 1787, DHROC 5:572, 907; Samuel Phillips Savage to GT, 11 Jan. 1788, DHROC 5:1073.
77. TBW to GT, 22 Nov. 1787, 8 Jan. 1788, DHROC 4:285, 5:645, 647; SL to GT, 23 Jan. 1788, DHROC 5:780-83; JH to GT, 14 Feb. 1788, DHROC 7:1697; TBW to GT, 14 Feb. 1788, DHROC 7:1701.
78. David Sewall to GT, 4 March 1788, Foster Family; Christopher Gore to GT, 9 Jan. 1788, DHROC 5:657; TBW to GT, 29 Feb. 1788, DHROC 7:1718. Sewall elsewhere noted that Antifederalists in central Massachusetts proffered their support for Maine’s separation in the expectation that, shed of its huge appendage “Down East,” the state government would move its capital to the more centrally located inland town of Worcester (David Sewall to GT, 11 Feb. 1788, DHROC 7:1691).
79. NB to GT, 15 Jan. 1788, DHROC 5:718; David Sewall to GT, 11 Feb. 1788, DHROC 7:1691, referring to GT to NB, 22 Dec. 1787 (No. 4, below); JH to GT, 7 Feb. 1788, DHROC 5:874; SL to GT, 14 Feb. 1788, DHROC 7:1700. Compare NB’s letter of 15 January 1788 (DHROC 5:717-19) to his speech of 5 February (DHROC 6:1448-50); both reveal only minor variations from NB’s draft letter (in Barrell Correspondence).
80. Samuel Nasson to GT, 8 Feb. 1788, DHROC 7:1649; William Widgery to GT, 8 Feb. 1788, “Thatcher Papers,” p. 273; TBW to GT, 29 Feb. 1788, DHROC 7:1718-19.
81. JH to GT, 28 Feb. 1788, DHROC 7:1717; Christopher Gore to Rufus King, 28 June 1787, King 1:227; GT to Robert Southgate, 1 July 1789 (No. 37, below); GT to [Edward Emerson], 2 April 1791, TFP; TBW to GT, 15 April 1789, DHFFC 15:271. GT’s entrenched views on demagoguery might also be inferred from the following passage, marked (presumably by his own pen) in the margins of a published July Fourth Oration delivered by John Holmes in 1809, found among Thacher’s Tracts (v. 128): “While you permit the boisterous shallow politician, to gain credit; while you listen to the charms which flattery impose, while virtue and talents are seldom thought of and never required, as qualifications for office; the intelligent and faithful friend to his country retires in disgust” (p. 3).
82. Ezra Ripley to GT, 30 March 1789, DHFFC 15:161; TBW to GT, 14 March 1789, DHFFC 15:64.
83. MC, 20 Dec. 1788, DHFFE 1:570; Dubin, Congressional Elections, p. 1; Thomas Tudor Tucker to St. George Tucker, 28 Dec. 1787, LDC 24:600.
84. GT to SST, 11 Jan. 1789, TFP.
85. NB to GT, 24 March 1790, DHFFC 19:986; Benjamin Lincoln to George Washington, 4 Jan. 1789, PGW:Presidential 1:233. For April Fools Day reference, see DHFFC 15:183.
86. Samuel Nasson to GT, 16 June 1789, DHFFC 16:790; votes of 21 Aug. 1789, DHFFC 3:160-61.
87. James Freeman to GT, 22 June 1789, DHFFC 22:1694; SL to GT, 7 March 1789, GTP-Biddeford; “Letter from New York,” CG, 4 Sept. 1789, DHFFC 16:1385. From similar motives, GT “ridiculed the idea of being at so much trouble” as to alter the national flag to accommodate the admission of two new states; it was “a consummate specimen of frivolity. At this rate,” he speculated, logically, “every State should alter its public seal when an additional county or township was formed.” In another version of the same speech, he wondered “indeed, whether Vermont or Kentucky had ever expressed a wish for the alteration” (COWH debate of 7 Jan. 1794, Annals of Congress, 3rd Cong., 1st sess., p. 164; GA, 9 Jan.). For more on the titles controversy in the First Federal Congress, see Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon, For Fear of an Elective King: George Washington and the Presidential Title Controversy of 1789 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2014).
88. David Sewall to GT, 24 Jan. 1793; John Avery, Jr. to GT, 9 Jan. 1793; and JH to GT, 13 Jan. 1793, all in Chamberlain.
89. Lloyd’s Notes, 13 April 1789, DHFFC 10:68.
90. Lloyd’s Notes, 24 April 1789, DHFFC 10:279-80.
91. In a debate over newspaper coverage of House proceedings in 1800, GT “said he believed the debates as taken down by Mr. Lloyd, were as accurately taken as any before or since” (9 Dec. 1800, Annals of Congress, 6th Cong., 2nd sess., p. 812).
92. “Scribble-Scrabble,” [Me.] Falmouth Gazette, 23 Mar. 1786.
93. GT to David Sewall, 4 July 1790 (No. 47, below); William Maclay’s Diary, entry for 3 May 1789, DHFFC 9:20.
94. NB to GT, [30] October 1788, Barrell Correspondence; GT to NB, 18 May 1789, DHFFC 22:1783; GT to James Sullivan, 27 July 1790, DHFFC 20:2268-69.
95. Congressional Register, 28 April 1789, DHFFC 10:368; TBW to GT, 9 Aug. 1789, DHFFC 16:1273; GT to John Waite, 31 May 1789, DHFFC 15:665, 667. In the speech referred to, delivered on 28 April 1789, GT joined the rest of the state delegation as they vigorously opposed a high molasses duty, which would cripple Massachusetts’s West Indies trade. (The fishing fleet exported salted cod to the West Indies to feed the enslaved blacks who made the molasses that Massachusetts needed to make its rum.) But GT went further, hinting darkly that taxing the North for its molasses would be comparable to taxing the South for its slaves—an inflammatory analogy upon which James Madison would not stoop to comment, “because I do not conceive it expresses either the deliberate temper of his [GT’s] own mind, or the good sense of his constituents” (Congressional Register, 28 April 1789, DHFFC 10:369, 372). It was a brief rehearsal for the anti-slavery agitation GT would wage more insistently in the years to come.
96. JH to GT, 25 Sept. 1788, TFP; Joseph McClellan to GT, 5 May, DHFFC 8:359.
97. TBW to GT, 30 Dec. 1789, DHFFC 8:414-16; Petition Committee of Portland to Fisher Ames, 11 Jan. 1790, DHFFC 8:416. GT may have had TBW’s complaints about the Portland petition in mind several years later, as he questioned an anti-Jay Treaty petition signed by the chairman and clerk of a Baltimore society of manufacturers and mechanics said to number “about four hundred respectable persons.” GT was among the handful who, in a “considerable debate . . . opposed its being received . . . as it purported to be the petition of a number of men, and was only signed by two” (25 April 1796, Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 1st sess., p. 1171)
98. GT to Joseph Tucker, 11 Nov. 1791, TFP. In May 1789, Virginia’s Theodorick Bland objected to the Portland merchants and traders’ petition against a molasses duty, on grounds that it inappropriately indicted the views of a specific member. Bland thought it “not right to mention the particulars of debates”—alluding to members’ traditional immunity for what was said in debate. (There was also a century-old tradition, in Britain’s House of Commons, that routinely banned petitions opposing new taxation.). GT, who had presented the Portland petition, countered that petitions should be framed in that “light in which it strikes the subjects of the United States” (Lloyd’s Notes, 13 May 1789, DHFFC 10:629. The petition was tabled.) For more on the origins of petitioning the early federal Congresses, see DHFFC 8:xi-xxviii.
99. SL to GT, 18 June 1789, GTP-Biddeford; John Adams to Secretary of War James McHenry, 12 Aug. 1799, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 1 Feb. 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3873 (accessed Feb. 2018); GT to George Washington, 14 Sept. 1789, PGW:Presidential 4:39-41; Jonathan Mason et al. to John Adams, 9 Feb. 1801, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 1 Feb. 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-4806 (accessed Feb. 2018); Stephen Hall to John Adams, 15 Aug. 1789, DHFFC 16:1319. Portland merchant Stephen Hall, who had failed to secure the port’s collectorship for himself, perhaps not coincidentally would later lead the opposition to GT in the second federal election of 1790-91 (TBW to GT, 9 Feb. 1791, DHFFC 22:1455).
100. John Warren to GT, 23 Jan. 1790 (patent for Nathan Read), Samuel Freeman to GT, 2 Dec. 1791 (library books), Daniel Sewall to GT, 26 March 1792 (thermometer), Daniel Kilham to GT, 14 Dec. 1792 (bank shares), Samuel Emerson to GT, 21 Dec. 1792 (medical books), and Philip Theobald to GT, 12 Feb. 1793 (tree specimen), all in Chamberlain; Samuel Phillips Savage to GT, 3 Oct. 1788, (finding children), GT to Joseph Savage, 30 Oct. 1791 (lottery tickets), and GT to James Dearing, 8 Dec. 1791 (medical consult), all in TFP; Daniel Lane to GT, 7 Jan. 1792, Charles Pelham Greenough Papers, 1669-1963, Ms. N-1251, MHi (military land bounty warrants); GT to Winthrop Sargent, 26 Feb. 1801, Winthrop Sargent Papers, 1771-1948, Ms. N-877, MHi (liaison).
101. Willis, Portland, p. 598; GT to SST, 28 Feb. 1791, DHFFC 21:969; [Boston] Herald of Freedom, 13 May 1791; Dubin, Congressional Elections, p. 5.
102. Jeremiah Barker to GT, 11 Oct. 1790, DHFFC 22:1395.
103. T.A. Milford, The Gardiners of Massachusetts: Provincial Ambition and the British-American Career (Lebanon, N.H., 2005), p. 112; [Jeremiah Hill] “Letter from Biddeford,” 8 Nov. 1790, DHFFC 22:1400. GT himself identified his ever-faithful friend JH as the Letter’s author (GT to TBW, 19 Nov. 1790, DHFFC 22:1404).
104. Christopher Gore to Rufus King, 25 April 1789, DHFFC 15:356.
105. An ancient Philistine deity whose main temple, the last great surviving center of pagan worship in the ancient Mediterranean world, was destroyed in 402.
106. [Samuel Nasson] to GT, 9 July 1789, GTP-Salem.
107. Belsham, Theophilus Lindsey, pp. 247-48.
108. See “Crazy Jonathan” Nos. 13-15, 18, and 21 in Selected Miscellaneous Writings (below). For a complete history of GT’s reelection campaign, the most thoroughly documented of any congressional district in the second federal election, see DHFFC 22:1381-1478.
109. GT to SST, 24 Dec. 1794, TFP; John to Abigail Adams, 9 Oct. 1774, Adams Family 1:166-67.
110. “Crazy Jonathan” No. 7, CG, 1 Nov. 1787.
111. GT to SST, 27 Dec. 1789, DHFFC 18:114; GT to Henry Thacher, 30 March 1806, TFP.
112. Stephen A. Marini, “Religious Revolution in the District of Maine, 1780-1820,” in Charles E. Clark, James S. Leamon, and Karen Bowden, eds., Maine in the Early Republic (Hanover, N.H., 1988), pp. 128-32; James Freeman to Theophilus Lindsey, 21 May 1792, in Belsham, Theophilus Lindsey, pp. 248-49.
113. Belsham, Theophilus Lindsey, pp. 246-47. This account evidently mistakes Saco as the birthplace of the Second Religious Society, which was established in Biddeford in 1797. The Society would indeed relocate to Saco, but not until fifteen years after Lindsey’s Memoirs were first published, and it survives today as the Unitarian Universalist Church of Saco and Biddeford.
114. GT to SST, 12 Nov. 1794, TFP; Emerson, “The Second Church,” pp. 244-45. Rev. Nathaniel Webster (1749-1830; Harvard, 1769), although left with a smaller congregation, remained sufficiently popular with Biddeford’s townspeople generally as to be elected their state representative in 1804. But increasingly his preaching and published sermons, claiming “the sufficiency of the scriptures, independent of creeds, as the standard of religious faith,” placed him beyond the pale, and he was eventually dismissed from the pulpit in 1828 (Folsom, Saco and Biddeford, p. 294; Harvard Graduates 17:303-05). One of Webster’s published sermons (Kennebeck, 1815) can be found among Thatcher’s Tracts (v. 154).
Rev. John Turner (1769-1839; Brown, 1788) came to Biddeford from a pulpit in nearby Alfred. After being forced out of the Second Religious Society in 1817, he stoked the same sectarian controversy from his next pulpit in Kingston, New Hampshire, from where he was dismissed yet again after just five years (Bob Pothier, Jr. and Ellen Lavoie, eds., History of Kingston, New Hampshire, 1694-1994 [1969; reprint, Kingston, N.H., 1994], pp. VI.22-VI.24, VI.26).
115. “A New Nation Votes,” http://elections.lib.tufts.edu/catalog/tufts:ma.uscongress.4.york.1792 (accessed July 2015); Dubin, Congressional Elections, pp. 10, 12, 14, 18, 22.
116. John Fenno to Joseph Ward, 9 July 1796, “Fenno Letters,” p. 216; Pierre Auguste Adet to Minister of Foreign Relations, 15 Dec. 1796, in Frederick Jackson Turner, “Correspondence of the French Ministers to the United States, 1791-1797,” American Historical Association Annual Report for the year 1903 2(Washington, D.C., 1904):979; GT to SST, 15 Dec. 1796, TFP. “Adet’s decision to revert to the high-handed methods of his famous predecessor, Edmund Genêt, turned the election of 1796 into a unique comedy of errors: never before or since has a foreign power acted so openly in an American election” (Kurtz, Adams Presidency, p. 114).
117. Fisher Ames to Harrison Gray Otis, 23 April 1798, Ames 2:1275.
118. Proceedings of 15 May 1798, Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 1707, 1719. On 9 July, GT sided with a vastly outvoted minority (67 to 15) against amending the Sedition Bill to allow juries “to determine the law and the fact” of any evidence given in defense of a charge of libel. Later the same day he voted with the minority again (43 to 39) to keep a provision criminalizing “any writing, printing, or speaking” that threatened to damage the character of a public official (except the president, who was already protected by a separate provision).
119. Rosenfeld, American Aurora, pp. 150-54; 18 June 1798, Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 1972-73. The envoys’ dispatch No. 8, dated 3 April and transmitted to Congress on 18 June, is printed in Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 3425-59.
120. Speech of 21 June 1798, Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., p. 2021; Rosenfeld, American Aurora, p. 162; Thomas Boylston Adams to Joseph Pitcairn, 10 Aug. 1798, Adams Family 13:222.
121. Joseph B. Varnum, “Notes on Mr. Thatcher’s Speech” (fragment), [1798], Gilder Lehrman Collection, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York, http://-www.gilderlehrman.org/collections/4bf74b87-53ba-42de-85cb-710317478431 (accessed Sept. 2016); Varnum Letter. Otis was referring to Alexander Hamilton’s “Proposition . . . for establishing a Constitution,” published in the [Philadelphia] Aurora, 13 Jan. 1798, from notes (leaked to Benjamin Franklin Bache, probably by James Madison) of Hamilton’s speech at the Federal Convention on 18 June 1787 (Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the Formation of the Federal Government, 5 January 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 29 June 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-30-02-0007 [accessed Oct. 2017].)
122. NB to GT, 25 March, 28 April 1798, Barrell Correspondence; Banning, To the Hartford Convention, pp. 89-99; 1 July 1797, Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 426-27. Citing an alternate version of this speech of 1 July, in which GT hoped that the proposed stamp tax “could be made so that nobody should be a citizen but original Americans” ([NYC] Daily Advertiser, 6 July 1797), the editor of Philadelphia’s Southwark Gazette (1 Aug. 1797) joked, “Who will say Mr. Thatcher is not an original?”
123. Manning J. Dauer, The Adams Federalists (1953; reprint, Baltimore, 1968), p. 227; Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 3rd sess., p. 2450. When John Nicholas (Va.) asked incredulously whether GT’s remark was in order, “the Speaker replied, that very many of his remarks were not.” A Pittsburg area newspaper editorialized its reprinting of GT’s “laconic speech” (from the Philadelphia Gazette, 17 Dec.) by adding, “The reader will see with what respect this light from the east looks on the moral character of our western brethren—with pretty much the same as our light in the west does on their political” ([Washington, Penn.] Herald of Liberty, 31 Dec. 1798).
124. Doina Pasca Harsanyi, Lessons from America: Liberal French Nobles in Exile, 1793-1798 (University Park, Penn., 2010), pp. 59, 163n. Both the writer/adventurer Chateaubriand (1768-1848) and the disgraced priest/politician Talleyrand (1754-1838) came to America as aristocratic émigrés during the French Revolution. To combat his own ennui during his thirty month-long stay (1793-95), Talleyrand undertook a fact-finding mission to investigate opportunities for Dutch investors’ land speculation on the Maine frontier in the autumn of 1794. Two representative types of GT’s constituents inspired some of Talleyrand’s most colorful writing about his American sojourn. Maine’s lumberman, he wrote, “has no memories to place anywhere. . . . He has not planted; he does not know the pleasure of it. The tree which he would plant would be good for nothing for him, for he would never see it large enough for him to cut it. . . . he has no interest in improvements which are so satisfying to the owner. If in leaving he does not forget his ax, he leaves no regrets for the place where he has lived for years.” Fishing also made for poor citizens: “In the east it is a lazy trade.” Maine fishermen’s skill “is only a little cunning and their action, which consists only in having an arm hang over the side of a boat, closely resembles idleness.” The result is that “a few codfish more or less determine their homeland. . . . That the people of Nantucket should be fishermen is explained by their location, but that a man near millions of acres of excellent lands should be a fisherman with a line is a natural vice of spirit and character.” For the disgraced former Bishop of Autun no less than the increasingly weary congressman who resented the tortuous flux of exile and longed for nothing more than the baroque Acadia of home, America’s vastness was its misfortune by continually opening up new temptations to move on after just a minimum of effort. Maine folk hasten to leave their homes, “in a word, because they have done too little work around them to have placed their affections there. This indifference to one’s domicile is certainly an antisocial disposition.” Talleyrand is known to have been in the vicinity of Portland, but sadly there is no proof that he stopped in Biddeford to commiserate with GT (Hans Huth and Wilma J. Pugh, eds., Talleyrand in America as a Financial Promoter, 1794-96 [3 vols., Washington, D.C., 1942] 2:79, 80-81, 83-84).
125. GT to Benjamin Chadbourn, 30 Jan. 1791, DHFFC 21:616-17; TBW to GT, 27 Jan. 1815, Wait Letters. Unbeknownst to TBW and every other New Englander at the time, the British had been repulsed from New Orleans almost three weeks earlier.
126. Elijah Backus to GT, 4 June 1797, MS 128 Backus-Woodbridge Family Papers, Ohio Connection. Backus (b. 1759), a lawyer and receiver of public monies in the Northwest Territory, purchased Belle Isle in 1792. As Blennerhassett Island, it would play a major role as the nursery for Aaron Burr’s treason of 1805-06 (William W. Backus, Genealogical Memoir of the Backus Family [Norwich, Conn., 1889], pp. 12-13).
127. “Numa” (I), [Portland] Gazette, 15 Oct. 1798; GUS, 21 Nov. 1798, reprinted from the [Portsmouth, N.H.] Oracle of the Day, 10 November; [Portland] Gazette, 19 Nov. 1798; Dubin, Congressional Elections, p. 18. Numa (II) went on to make the argument, widely resorted to by Federalists, that the Sedition Act was actually more lenient to alleged offenders than the common law prosecution of libel because it allowed defendants to introduce the truth as a defense ([Portland] Gazette, 19 Nov. 1798).
128. GT to SST, 3 Dec. 1798, TFP; John Fenno to Joseph Ward, 30 Aug. 1798, “Fenno Letters,” pp. 227-28.
129. GT to SST, 8 Dec. 1798, TFP, MHi; Stinchcombe, XYZ Affair, p. 113; “Notes on a Conversation with Perez Morton, 24 March 1800,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 12 April 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-31-02-0397 (accessed May 2018); Elkins and McKitrick, Federalism, pp. 589, 597, 879-80n; Kurtz, “French Mission of 1799-1800,” p. 544.
130. Elkins and McKitrick, Federalism, p. 597; Abigail to John Quincy Adams, 30 July 1799, Adams Family 13:529; Kurtz, “French Mission of 1799-1800,” p. 555. This analysis is drawn substantively from Kurtz’s 1965 monograph, which offers still the most cogent and compelling explanation of Adams’s motivation behind the renewed peace mission to France, including his dilatory strategy that postponed that peace mission for most of 1799. President Adams’s network of confidential correspondents in 1797-98 consisted of his two sons John Quincy, minister to Prussia, and Thomas Boylston, private secretary to his older brother; William Vans Murray, minister at The Hague; and Joseph Pitcairn, vice-consul in Paris; for more, see Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, “Private Letters and Public Diplomacy: The Adams Network and the Quasi-War, 1797-1798,” JER, v. 31, 2(Summer 2011):283-311. The direct communications between Vans Murray and Talleyrand’s “factotum,” Louis André Pichon, proved particularly persuasive (Hill, William Vans Murray, pp. 98, 126-31). Murray (1760-1803) was destined to play a still larger role in Adams’s maneuvering for peace with France: a Marylander trained for the law in London’s Temple, he sat briefly in the Maryland legislature before serving in Congress (1791-97) and as minister resident to The Netherlands (1797-1801), while serving simultaneously as one of the three peace commissioners to France (1799-1800) responsible for negotiating the Convention of 1800.
131. George Cabot to Oliver Wolcott, Jr., 5 Oct. 1800, Cabot, p. 295.
132. Hill, William Vans Murray, p. viii; Kurtz, Adams Presidency, p. 99; Samuel A. Otis to Theodore Sedgwick, 13 Oct. 1788, LDC 25:423; NB to GT, 28 April 1798, Barrell Correspondence.
133. Joseph Priestley to GT, 31 May 1798, 7 [24] Jan. 1799, “Priestley Letters,” pp. 21, 26. The MHSP dating of the latter letter is a mis-transcription; the ALS (in Joseph Priestley Letters, 1798-1800, Ms. S-703, MHi) bears the date 24 January.
134. GT to SST, 7 Feb. 1794, TFP; Joseph Priestley to GT, 21 Aug. 1793, “Priestley Letters,” p. 16; Graham, Revolutionary in Exile, pp. 32-33, 102, 165.
Henry Thacher, the self-appointed guardian of his father’s literary legacy, may have had a major role in preserving the most important cache of Priestley’s letters to GT. Charles Deane (1813-89), a businessman of Cambridge, had been a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 1849 and served variously as the Society’s recording secretary, corresponding secretary, and vice president between 1864 and 1889. As chairman of the publications committee in mid-century, he helped secure the first American manuscript copy of William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, and oversaw its landmark publication. Deane presented fourteen Priestley letters to a meeting of the Society hosted at his home on 18 June 1886, noting at the time that they had been entrusted to him several years earlier “by a connection of Judge Thacher’s family, with the understanding that I should ultimately place them in some suitable public depository.” Today they comprise the Society’s Joseph Priestley Letters, 1798-1800 Collection. Included with those he published in the subsequent MHSP were transcripts of others “furnished me by my friends,” including his brother in law Rev. Robert C. Waterston and Charles P. Greenough. Deane says that made 19 altogether, although the MHSP printed 22 letters from Priestley to GT, as well as GT’s letter to Rev. James Freeman, 14 Feb. 1796 (No. 127, below). Rev. Waterston’s father had hired Deane into the Boston merchant house of Waterston, Pray, & Co. in 1833; Deane married the boss’s daughter and eventually became a full partner in the firm. This was the same merchant house with which Henry Thacher had dealings when he set himself up in business around 1817. There is probably more than coincidence here. Although both Deane and Rev. Robert C. Waterston were noted historians and may have acquired Priestley’s letters to GT in some other way, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they came into the brothers’ hands through the family’s relations with Henry Thacher (Louis Leonard Tucker, The Massachusetts Historical Society: A Bicentennial History, 1791-1991 [Boston, 1996], pp. 206-07, 540-41; “Priestley Letters,” p. 12; Justin Winsor, Charles Deane . . . A Memoir [Cambridge, Mass., 1891], pp. 4-7; GT to Waterston and Pray, 24 Aug. 1817, U.S. Congress Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor).
Charles Deane, who was born and lived in Biddeford until the age of 15, remembered Judge Thatcher “as one advanced in years. . . . He was a great reader, was particularly versed in polemical and theological disquisition, and was celebrated for his wit” (“Priestley Letters,” p. 11).
135. Priestley never ceased trying to excite in GT a more active interest in science. “Tho’ you are not a chemist, you may perhaps find something to amuse, and I hope please, you in the Preface, &c.” of his Doctrine of phlogiston established (Northumberland, Pa., 1800). But it was Priestley who would be “much amused with the account of your being taken in by my treatise on phlogiston. For the future, mind the old adage Fronti nulla fides [do not trust appearances]. However, if you get anything for your half dollar it was not wholly thrown away, and you will be wiser another time” (Joseph Priestley to GT, 20 Feb., 23 April 1800, “Priestley Letters,” pp. 32, 36).
136. Joseph Priestley to GT, 10 March, 26 July 1798, 7 [24] Jan. 1799, “Priestley Letters,” pp. 18, 23-24, 26; 1 May 1800, Joseph Priestley Collection, Pennsylvania State University.
137. GT to SST, 2 Dec. 1799, TFP; John Ward Fenno to Joseph Ward, 10 Feb. 1800, “Fenno Letters,” p. 230.
138. Andrews, John Cotton Smith, p. 209; Dubin, Congressional Elections, pp. 20, 24.
139. Andrews, John Cotton Smith, pp. 216-17; GT to SST, 10 Dec. 1800 (No. 200, below); GT to SST, 17 Feb. 1801, TFP.
140. Dubin, Congressional Elections, pp. 22, 25; [Me.] Jenks’ Portland Gazette, 3 Aug. 1801; Fischer, American Conservatism, p. 4. The third-place candidate in the special election, a lawyer named Benjamin Greene, had been promoted as one who would “follow with undeviating step the path of his predecessor” even as far as sharing GT’s Unitarian beliefs, since Greene “believes not in twenty Gods, but in one” (Henry S. Burrage, “Richard Cutts,” MHSC, 2nd Ser., 8[1897]:6).
141. GT to SST, 30 Dec. 1795, 25 Feb. 1797, 9 April 1796, 24 April 1800, TFP. GT’s ambivalent attitude towards the seriousness of dreams may owe something to his cherished “doctrine of association.” Dr. Priestley himself made the connection in an essay on dreams, which GT may have later read: “ideas communicated by sensation,” argued Priestley, remained dormant in some remote part of the brain where they “may be reposited out of the reach of ordinary excitement, but in which they may be revived in particular circumstances, so that few or no impressions ever made upon the mind are wholly lost” (Joseph Priestly, “Some Thoughts concerning Dreams,” The Medical Repository 5[1802]:125-29).
142. GT to SST, 31 Jan. 1791, DHFFC 21:630; GT to SST, 23 Jan. 1792, 1 Jan. 1794 (No. 91, below), 13 Dec. 1796, 25 Oct. 1803, 22 Dec. 1796, 22 Dec. 1791, 31 Dec. 1796, all in TFP unless otherwise noted. As bad as it was, GT’s condition was not as severe as that of his Federalist colleague, Rep. Henry Glen (N.Y.): “This gentleman ever carried with him, on a journey, his death-clothes, as he called them, and a long rope to be tied to a bedstead, when he slept in a chamber, for escape in case of fire” (Andrews, John Cotton Smith, p. 201). Although GT and Glen never boarded together, neither their politics nor their pyrophobia would have made them strange bedfellows.
143. TBW to GT, 26 Feb. 1788, Chamberlain; Journal, entries for 20, 27 Dec. 1784, TFP.
144. GT to SST, 22 Aug. 1788, 1 Dec. 1791, TFP.
145. GT to William Taylor, 3 Sept. 1789, DHFFC 17:1463; GT to SST, 5 Dec. 1800, TFP.
146. GT proved his fidelity to the Compromise of 1790 and the viability of Washington, D.C. during a critical impasse in early 1796, when anti-Potomac forces were attempting to undermine preparations for the government’s scheduled arrival in 1800. GT was then serving on a select committee to consider a loan guarantee for completing the President’s House and Capitol. Testifying before the committee, Federal District Commissioner (and GT’s former colleague in the House) Alexander White noted appreciatively that “my friend Thatcher” was “much pleased with the plans of both buildings” and “was for granting an adequate sum to finish all the buildings in an elegant style.” The loan authorization bill passed both the House and Senate—without it being held as a bargaining chip for funding the Jay Treaty, as some had feared. Two years later, GT was the only speaker to rise in defense of a supplemental loan authorization bill just before it passed the House (Alexander White to the Federal District Commissioners, 13 Jan. 1796, 20 March 1798 in C.M. Harris, ed., Papers of William Thornton [1 vol. to date, Charlottesville, Va., 1995] 1:370-71, 452; Bob Arnebeck, Through a Fiery Trial: Building Washington, 1790-1800 [Lanham, Md., 1991], pp. 352-68 passim).
147. Taking into account the “larger social and cultural considerations” behind congressmen’s high voluntary retirement rate during the early federal Congresses, one recent study has shown that the variable with “the most pronounced effect . . . was the distance between the member’s home state and the national capital” (Rosemarie Zagarri, “The Family Factor: Congressmen, Turnover, and the Burden of Public Service in the Early American Republic,” JER, v. 33, 2[Summer 2013]:291).
148. GT to SST, [31 Oct.] (P.S. to 28 Oct.) [1787], TFP; NB to GT, 12 Feb. 1792, Chamberlain.
149. Abigail Adams to Mary Smith Cranch, 24 Jan. 1790, Adams Family 9:8. Lady Elizabeth Bowdoin Temple was the wife of Great Britain’s consul general in NYC; Lucy Flucker Knox, wife of Secretary at War Henry Knox; and Sarah Livingston Jay, wife of Chief Justice John Jay. For more on the importance of these quasi-political venues in the early Republic, especially for the influence brokered by women outside the formal, institutionalized channels of political maneuvering, see Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), and Frederika J. Teute and David S. Shields, “The Republican Court and the Historiography of a Woman’s Domain in the Public Shere,” “The Confederation Court,” and “The Court of Abigail Adams,” JER, v. 35, 2(Summer 2015): 169-83, 215-35.
151. GT to SST, 12 Nov. 1794, 13 May 1800, TFP; [John Adams] “List of Candidates for Offices, June 1797,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 29 June 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-2036 (accessed Sept. 2017); Elijah Backus to GT, 4 June 1797, MS 128 Backus-Woodbridge Family Papers, Ohio Connection.
152. Massachusetts Statutes, 1806, Ch. 5 and 1809, Ch. 13; GT to SST, 21 March 1801, TFP; Joseph Priestley to GT, 13 March 1803, Joseph Priestley Correspondence, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
153. GT to SST, 17 June 1801, TFP; Parsons, Theophilus Parsons, p. 200; William E. Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760-1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), pp. 167-68; GT to Jesse Appleton, 13 July 1818, Jesse Appleton Collection, MeB (“Mrs. Thacher will probably accompany me on the circuit this fall”). GT reported “the good effect” of the Court’s new jurisdictional changes in an undated, single page fragment (GTP-Salem). Among other efficiencies he noted, of the more than eighty cases sent to jury in the circuit of Maine’s four lower counties, only two were later referred to law terms before the full Supreme Judicial Court.
154. Parsons, Theophilus Parsons, pp. 193-94; Richard E. Welch, “The Parsons-Sedgwick Feud and the Reform of the Massachusetts Judiciary,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 42[April 1956]:185; Dudley Atkins Tyng to GT, 2 Aug., 10 Dec. 1806, Tyng Correspondence; Willis, Lawyers of Maine, p. 299. Sedgwick’s biographer asserts that GT was not considered for the chief justiceship because “The goateed George Thacher, ever impoverished and always conciliatory, was generally regarded as the weakest member of the Court” (Welch, “The Parsons-Sedgwick Feud,” p. 172). GT was certainly conciliatory, and probably the least wealthy member of the high court at the time, but there is no evidence that he was regarded as the least competent, while any notion of him sporting facial hair is as anachronistic as it is unsubstantiated.
155. “Obituary”; Willis, Lawyers of Maine, pp. 108, 109, 278. Benjamin Orr (1772-1828; Dartmouth, 1798) was a prominent lawyer from Topsham and Federalist Representative in the Fifteenth Congress (1817-19).
156. “Obituary”; Holbrook, Old Yarmouth, p. 201.
157. Holbrook, Old Yarmouth, pp. 201-02. This excerpt is a more colorful rewording of the original account in Willis, Lawyers of Maine, p. 116, which Willis credits to Daniel Davis’s grandson, Boston lawyer William Minot, Jr. (1817-94).
158. Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990), pp. 129-30, 220-25, 227-28; GT to Gov. Elbridge Gerry, 1 Oct. 1810, Gratz: First Congress under the Constitution Collection, PHi.
159. TBW to GT, 25 Jan., 3 Feb. 1811, 27 Jan. 1812, Wait Letters.
160. For a brief description of this evolution within the Federalist party, and GT’s role in it, see Fischer, American Conservatism, pp. 227-28, 258. He identifies GT, like John Adams, as a “Federalist of the Old School,” while Fisher Ames is labeled a “Transitional Figure” and Harrison Gray Otis, a “Young Federalist.” Fischer heavily qualifies his own taxonomy by arranging each category as “impressionistic intersections of individual lives” along a spectrum of support for the new democratization of the political process.
161. “Crazy Jonathan” (VII), CG, 1 Nov. 1787. GT thought that coverage of congressional debates and other proceedings constituted only part of newspapers’ armor against tyranny; by 1800 he was “persuaded that all the information derived from the debates of this House was of little comparative importance when viewed in relation to the general mass of information possessed by the people.” For that reason, and because he refused to believe that errors crept into the published debates simply because of reporters’ inability to hear, GT voted with the majority against allowing stenographers privileged access within the bar of the House (9 Dec. 1800, Annals of Congress, 6th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 812, 816).
162. JH to GT, 14 Dec. 1792, Chamberlain; Varnum Letter; Fisher Ames to [Dwight?] Foster, 17 Dec. 1797, Ames 2:1258; GT to SST, 7 Feb. 1802, TFP; TBW to GT, 28 July 1819, Wait Letters. For more on Peter Porcupine’s abuse of Joseph Priestley, see Graham, Revolutionary in Exile, pp. 97-131 passim.
163. Peleg Wadsworth to GT, 25 Feb. 1806, TFP; Ezekiel Whitman to GT, 15 Jan. 1810, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville.
164. GT to Richard Cutts, 17 March 1802, Emmet Collection: The First Federal Administration, NN. GT began soliciting from Cutts reports about Congress at least two months earlier (GT to Richard Cutts, 20 Jan. 1802, Papers of Richard Cutts, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville).
165. Varnum Letter. The clarity and candor of this remarkable 32-page manuscript helps explain its busy afterlife: in 1959 it was sold at auction “from the Collection of a Western Gentleman,” discovered two years later by Dr. Lawrence S. Kaplan while serving as Lilly Endowment Fellow at the University of Michigan, and published as an abridged transcription in his article, “A New Englander Defends the War of 1812: Senator Varnum to Judge Thacher,” Mid-America, 46(Oct. 1964):269-80. As a historian of U.S. foreign policy, Kaplan’s primary interest was in the letter’s author rather than its recipient—specifically, in Varnum’s anti-British views during the War of 1812.
166. Donald R. Kennon, ed., The Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives: A Bibliography, 1789-1984 (Baltimore, 1986), p. 8.
167. Dudley Atkins Tyng to GT, 29 April 1812, Tyng Correspondence; Henry Thacher to Joseph Emerson, 6 Dec. 1812, TFP; TBW to GT, 24 April, 27 Jan. 1812, Wait Letters.
168. Henry Thacher to (cousin) George Thacher, 31 July 1813, TFP; TBW to GT, 16, 27 Jan. 1815, Wait Letters. A few years later, TBW instructed GT “you ought possitively to read” the series of seven letters written in defense of the Hartford Convention by “One of the Convention” [Harrison Gray Otis], reprinted in CC (15-29 Jan. 1820) from the National Intelligencer (TBW to GT, 22 Jan. 1820, Wait Letters). It was later published in book form as Letters Developing the Character and Views of the Hartford Convention (Washington, D.C., 1820).
169. GT to SST, 25 Feb. 1821, TFP; fragment, n.d., GTP-Salem (quoting William Godwin [1756-1836], The Enquirer. Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature. In a Series of Essays [London, 1797]); Folsom, Saco and Biddeford, p. 301; GT to ST, 23 Jan. 1793 (No. 85, below); GT to TBW, 29 April 1821 (No. 222, below); TBW to GT, 6 May, 24 April 1817, 28 July 1819, Wait Letters. Joseph Bumstead was a bookseller on State Street in Boston. The “English player” was of course none other than the great Edmund Kean (1787-1833), then in Boston nearing the end of a sixteen-night run playing in the title role of Shakespeare’s Richard III (Willis Steell, “Edmund Keen and His American Enemies,” The Theater Magazine, vol. 11, 109[March 1910]:87).
170. Folsom, Saco and Biddeford, p. 300; Thomas Oxnard to [James Freeman], November 1788, in Belsham, Theophilus Lindsey, pp. 245, 247; GT to Sarah Sayward Barrell, 8 April 1790, DHFFC 19:1178. Appleton wrote that GT’s first donation “was made before my acquaintance with the institution” ([Jesse Appleton] to GT, 12 Feb. 1812, TFP. Appleton became president of Bowdoin College in 1807). Most of Bowdoin College’s 95-volume Joseph Priestley Collection was donated by GT under the provisions of his last will and testament dated 30 October 1814. A codicil dated 9 November 1822 bequeathed another nineteen volumes on religion and moral philosophy, although ultimately GT’s donations to Bowdoin represent a much larger number and wider variety of titles—half of which also appear on an undated list of approximately 100 titles that GT compiled as a partial catalog of his personal library (Kat Stefko, email to editor, Nov. 2017; Anderson, York County Wills, p. 407; Booklist, n.d., TFP). GT donated “Paine’s System of Universal Geography” and “Mrs. Chapone’s Letters on Female Education” to Fryeburg Academy (Copy of Minutes of Board of Trustees, 13 March 1807, and Amos Cook to GT, 22 Feb. 1817, TFP).
171. “Obituary.” GT’s collection of church histories included: Samuel Parker (1681-1730), The ecclesiastical histories of Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodorit; Thomas Lodge, tran. (ca. 1558-1625), Famous and Memorable Works of Josephus; Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), History of the Reformation of the Church of England; Daniel Neal (1678-1743), History of the Puritans . . . from the reformation under King Henry IV; Archibald Bower (1686-1766), History of the Popes, from the foundation of the See of Rome to the present time; Pierre Jurieu (1637-1713), History of the Council of Trent; Sir Samuel Morland (1625-95), History of the Evangelical Churches of the Valleys of the Piedmont (titles from Booklist, n.d., TFP, or catalog, MeB, or both).
172. A sampling of this large category includes: Sir Walter Raleigh (ca. 1554-1618) History of the World; James Usher (1581-1656), Annals; Temple Stanyan (1675-1752), Grecian History: from the origin of Greece, to the death of Philip of Macedon; William Beloe, trans. (1756-1817), Herodotus (Receipt from Berry & Rogers, 10 May 1792, TFP); Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Annals and History of the Low Countries; Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), History of the Reign of King Henry VII; Enrico Caterino Davila (1576-1631), History of the Civil Wars of France; David Jones (active 1676-1720), Life of Leopold, Late Emperor of Germany; Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819), Topographical and political description of the Spanish part of Saint-Domingo; S. Hollingsworth (active ca. 1786), Present state of Nova Scotia: with a brief account of Canada; Sir Paul Rycaut (1629-1700), Present State of the Ottoman Empire; Simon Ockley (1678-1720), History of the Saracens; and Abū Zayd Hasan Ibn Yazīd Sīrāfī (active 10th C.), Ancient Accounts of India and China (unless otherwise noted, all titles listed are from Booklist, n.d., TFP, or catalog, MeB, or both). While meeting in New York City, members of the First Federal Congress had access to the New York Society Library, a 3000-volume subscription library operating in a third floor chamber of Federal Hall. Remarkably, the Society’s charging ledger for the period is still extant. It indicates that, over the course of four weeks in August-September 1789, GT borrowed volumes 1 and 13 of the 44-volume encyclopedic Modern Part of An Universal History, covering the rise of Islam, the Ottoman Empire, and the Jewish Diaspora (DHFFC 22:1840, 1850, 1858n).
173. These include such canonical works as: Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Leviathan; Algernon Sidney (1632-83), Discourses Concerning Government; James Harrington (1611-77), Oceana; and Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), Florentine disputationum de republica and Florentini princeps (titles from Booklist, n.d., TFP, or catalog, MeB, or both).
174. In addition to the many other theology titles cited in this edition, GT’s library included Richard Hooker (1554-1600), The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; George Stanhope, trans. (1660-1728), Meditations of St. Augustine; and the works of Martin Luther. Published sermons and pamphlets on religion comprise the largest single genre represented in Thacher’s Tracts. Also in this category might be included, to the scandal of many of his contemporaries, GT’s copies of Ethan Allen’s Reason the Only Oracle of Man and Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (all titles from Booklist, n.d., TFP, or catalog, MeB, or both; Paine’s Age of Reason is among Thacher’s Tracts [v. 38]). Both Allen (1738-89) and Paine (1737-1809) were heroes of the American Revolution whose subsequent philosophical writings showed the dangerous extremes to which Deism could lead. Paine in particular was cruelly ostracized following his return from a lengthy and eventful sojourn back to Europe, where he was convicted of libel in England and actually served in France’s revolutionary National Convention.
175. Among the very few examples were: Pliny the Elder (23-79), Natural History of the World; Henry Pemberton (1694-1771), View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy; and William Whiston (1667-1752), Astronomical Lectures (Booklist, n.d., TFP).
176. Thomas Erpenius (1584-1624), Grammatica arabica: ab autore emendata & aucta (listed on both Booklist, n.d., TFP, and catalog, MeB).
177. GT to Samuel Greele, 10 July 1819 (No. 217, below); Receipt, 26 May 1792, TFP; TBW to GT, 1 Jan. 1816, Wait Letters; GT to SST, 25 Feb. 1821, TFP. Maria; or the Hollanders (1st U.S. edition, Boston, 1815) was an epistolary novel indeed written by Louis Buonaparte (1778-1846), whom his older brother Napoleon had appointed king of the satellite Kingdom of Holland (1806-10). At the same auction, GT bought SST and his daughters’ “favorite novel Thaddy—Tho you have all read it, yet it was so cheep I could not help biding for it about thirty cents.” This was probably Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803; 1st U.S. edition, 2 vols., Boston, 1809), a wildly popular historical fiction set in Poland in 1790s, by Jane Porter (1776-1850).
In addition to novels and poetry, other fiction that GT collected included two plays—both farces—found among Thacher’s Tracts: The Better Sort; or, A Girl of Spirit (v. 17) and Occurrences of the Times. Or, the Transactions of Four Days (v. 23), both written by William Hill Brown (1765-93) and published in theater-less Boston in 1789. The latter play in particular was significant more as political propaganda than stagecraft; GT’s annotation identifying the pseudonymous dramatis personæ clearly relates it to Boston politics of the day. GT also owned a copy of Brown’s novel The Power of Sympathy (1789), which he mailed home to SST but may have never himself read (GT to SST, 10 May 1789, DHFFC 15:504).
178. The reply of the majority of the representatives from the state of Massachusetts, in Congress, to the resolutions and instructions of the legislature of that state on the subject of the embargo laws (Washington, D.C., 1808; p. 6), in Thacher’s Tracts (v. 57-58).
179. “Obituary.” For letters to Barker and Greele, see Nos. 213, 214, and 217, below. GT’s lengthy letters to Nathaniel Cross (1765-1839), a tinsmith of Portland and deacon of its Third Congregational Church, are in GTP-Salem (MHSC 2nd Ser., 10[1899]:124). Letter to a Friend, preserved among Thacher’s Tracts (v. 158-59), is dated internally “Biddeford, February 1820” but identifies GT as “Late Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court.”
180. Emerson, “The Second Church,” p. 245, where the author also records Betsey Witham’s account of GT’s reaction: “he begged her ‘not to be alarmed; that she was a very good girl and had never done a bad thing; that for himself he had no fears; all would come out well at last’.” Elizabeth Witham (1782-post 1865), originally of York, eventually left the Thatchers’ service and in 1823 married Rev. Amos Bingham, a Presbyterian “city missionary” in Albany, Boston, and Philadelphia, where they ultimately settled (Theodore A. Bingham, Genealogy of the Bingham Family [Harrisburg, Penn., 1898], p. 89; Walter E. Howard and Charles E. Prentiss, eds., Catalogue of Officers and Students of Middlebury College [Middlebury, Vt., 1901], p. 29).
181. William Wells to Thomas Belsham, 21 March 1812, in Belsham, Theophilus Lindsey, p. 520.
182. “Obituary”; Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, pp. 303-04; Park, Savage Descendants, p. 3; GT to Isaac Winslow, 5 Jan. 1810, TFP. Winslow (1739-1819) was a prominent physician of Marshfield, Massachusetts whose loyalism during the Revolutionary War was overlooked by his neighbors in gratitude for his successfully inoculating hundreds of them against smallpox in 1778 (Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution [2 vols., Boston, 1864] 2:446). Thatcher may have hoped that they shared a common ancestry through his great-grandmother Rebecca (Winslow) Thacher (1643-83)—who was in fact a niece of Edward Winslow, Jr. (1596-1655), the third governor of Plymouth Colony and said Isaac Winslow’s great-great-grandfather. When teenaged son Henry made his first visit to meet his cousins on Cape Cod in the summer of 1812, Thatcher deputed him to verify the exact ages and death dates of his parents, Lt. Peter and Anner Lewis Thacher, from their headstones at Yarmouth’s Ancient Cemetery (Henry Thacher to GT, 30 July-2 Aug. 1812, TFP). Thatcher may also have been assisted in his genealogical research by the collections of the American Antiquarian Society, to which he was elected a member in 1814—the same year as his friends Christopher Gore and brother in law Dr. Samuel Savage (certificate of membership, Oliver Fiske to GT, 3 Nov. 1814, TFP).
Thatcher’s original genealogical manuscript is lost, but his son Henry made a transcription in 1844, a 1861 copy of which is now at the New York Public Library. John R. Totten, compiler of the Thacher-Thatcher Genealogy, had access to a more recent copy kept and added to by a descendent, George Winslow Thacher, now in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Library (Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, p. 303).
183. Boston’s Judge Peter Oxenbridge Thacher (1776-1843; Harvard, 1796) was often called upon for genealogical information about his distant relation through the Cape Cod line. Personally examining extant documentation, he found that not only correspondence but quarterly receipts in the state archives, for cousin George’s salary as judge from 1809 to 1824, all bear the restored spelling (Peter O. Thacher to William Chamberlain, Jr., 19 Aug. 1840, TFP; “Priestly Letters,” p. 13).
184. Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, pp. 13-18. Members of the Thacher-Thatcher Family Association struggle in vain to maintain the purity of the original spelling. One Association member has noted that when the name is spelled “Thacher,” it is sometimes mispronounced “Thacker”; “Thus George obviously gave up and used the extra T” (Dr. John Thacher, email to editor, 2 Jan. 2018).
185. David Sewall to GT, 2 Nov. 1785, MHSP, 3rd Ser., 58[Dec. 1924]:194; Banks, Maine Becomes a State, pp. 58-66, 135-49; TBW to GT, 28 July 1819, Wait Letters.
186. Joseph Adams to GT, 17 May 1805, GTP-Salem. Joseph Adams, who married daughter Sally in 1810, was described as a “sound, judicious lawyer.” He moved his practice to Portland a year after statehood (McLellan and Lewis, Gorham, p. 286; John A. Waterman et al., Celebration of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of Gorham, Maine [Portland, 1886], p. 87).
187. TBW to GT, [ca. 27] May 1808, Wait Letters.
188. Coverage of 14, 15 Oct. 1819, in Perley, Convention Debates, pp. 50-51, 54-56.
189. Coverage of 19, 25 Oct. 1819, in Perley, Convention Debates, pp. 71, 189-98. Exempting for religious scruples was ultimately negatived.
190. Coverage of 19, 27, 28 Oct. 1819, in Perley, Convention Debates, pp. 72, 73-74, 246, 262.
191. Varnum Letter.
192. TBW to GT and SST, 15 March 1807, Wait Letters. GT’s 1817 inventory lists “a farm of conventional size, with a small house & convenient buildings, such as barn, stable, wood house &c. for farming business.” Although GT intended soon to turn an old barn into a cider house by the addition of a cider mill and press, in its current state the farm was “by no means equal to the support of itself & a family.” He estimated its value at three thousand dollars—against which he did not think he could raise six hundred. Nine shares in the Saco Bank, worth nine hundred dollars, could not be sold to raise even two thirds of its value. And his current salary “barely affords a support” (GT to Boston merchants Waterston and Pray, 24 Aug. 1817, U.S. Congress Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). At the time of his death, GT also held stock in the South Berwick bank (cashier Edward Hayman to GT, 5 Jan. 1824, GTP-Salem). A codicil added to GT’s last will and testament just a year and a half before his death indicates that his real estate holdings had been augmented by a “farm and house” purchased of the widow Carlisle. This property was probably located in nearby York, where Revolutionary War veteran John Carlisle had just died two years earlier, leaving a wife Hannah. GT left the property to youngest son Josiah—the sole farmer among his five sons and, apart from SST, the only legatee specifically named for any bequest other than books (Anderson, York County Wills, p. 407; George W. Chamberlain, ed., “Revolutionary Soldiers of York County, Maine,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 65[Boston, 1911]:80).
193. TBW to GT, 24 Jan. 1810, 16 Jan. 1815, 20 March 1821, Wait Letters; John J. Currier, History of Newburyport, Mass. 1764-1905 (Newburyport, Mass., 1906), pp. 318-19.
194. Emerson, “The Second Church,” pp. 245-46; George Thacher, Jr. to GT, 18 Dec. 1823, GTP-Biddeford; Alden Bradford to GT, 6 Dec. [1823], GTP-Salem. Thomas Tracy (1781-1872; Harvard, 1806) completed his studies at Harvard in 1823 and remained pastor of the Society until shortly after it relocated across the river to Saco in 1827 (General Catalogue of the Divinity School of Harvard University, 1915 [Cambridge, Mass., 1915], p. 30).
195. Marc M. Arkin, “The Force of Ancient Manners: Federalist Politics and the Unitarian Controversy Revisited,” JER, v. 22, 4(Winter 2002):575-610. An excellent summary of the Dedham Case, its immediate precedents, and aftermath, can be found in Leonard W. Levy, The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 29-42. Like GT, Lemuel Shaw (1781-1861) was a native of Cape Cod, graduated from Harvard (1800), shied from the clergyman’s life desired for him by his father, and opted instead to study law while teaching school. He went on to a lucrative law practice in Boston, served multiple terms as both representative and senator in the General Court, and for the last thirty years of his life sat on the bench of the Supreme Judicial Court as its chief justice. Three years after GT’s death, Shaw married SST’s niece, Dr. Samuel Savage’s daughter Hope. As the chief justice who ruled in the so-called Brookfield Case (Stebbbins v. Jennings), reaffirming the Dedham decision of ten years earlier, Shaw inserted himself in GT’s ecclesiological and legal legacy just as surely as he had in GT’s family legacy. For a reading of the Dedham decision that is both more nuanced and detailed, by positing that its significance hinged not on the distinction between parish and church but the definition of “church,” see Conrad Wright, The Unitarian Controversy: Essays on American Unitarian History (Boston, 1994), pp. 111-35.
196. Samuel Peirson to GT, 8 Jan. 1824, GTP-Biddeford; [Jared Sparks, ed.] “Ordination at Biddeford,” Unitarian Miscellany and Christian Monitor, n. 38, 5(Feb. 1824):240.
197. [Mass.] Newburyport Herald, 16 Jan. 1824; Samuel Merrill Diary, 1799-1844 (typescript, p. 96), McArthur Public Library Archives and Special Collections, Biddeford; “Obituary.”
198. Samuel S. Wilde to GT, 1 March 1814, GTP-Biddeford. SL died a few minutes after noon that day. It would have been “soothing & consolatory,” continued Wilde, if GT or any of the family had been able to attend the funeral, “but from the nature of the disorder it was thought by friends that it could not be postponed later than thursday [two days later].” Historians have since determined that SL was the first fatal victim of a local, three month outbreak of cerebrospinal meningitis, or “spotted fever” as it was then known (Sadik, Portraits at Bowdoin College, p. 120). Wilde’s account of SL’s rapid decline merits quoting at length for its detailed description of the course of that violent disease as witnessed by helpless early nineteenth century bystanders:
On thursday evening last [24 February] our dear friend left me about 11 oclock apparently well, having been engaged in business as usual thro’ the day & evening—before 12 I was called to him & found him in a most raging fever, & great pain—all that could be done to save his valuable life, has I doubt not been done, but the attack was too heavy, the disease too malignant, to yield to any remedies—On Sunday the Symptoms assumed a favourable appearance, but yesterday [28 February] was a terrible day, & last night fixed the fate of our dear departed friend.
200. GT to SST, 14 May 1800, TFP; 19 April, 10 May, DHFFC 15:293, 504; GT to JH, 17 May 1789, DHFFC 15:584; GT to NB, 30 May, DHFFC 22:1784; Thomas Thacher to GT, 15 April 1790, DHFFC 19:1235; GT to SST, 30 April 1794, 21 Feb. 1795, 2 Feb. 1796, TFP.
201. GT to SST, 19 Feb. 1800, TFP; TBW to GT, 28 May 1809, 9 Dec. (P.S. to 7 Dec.) 1814, Wait Letters; TBW to GT, 14 July 1817, Coll. S-5164, Thomas Wait ALS 1817, MeHi; TBW to GT, 4 Nov. 1818, Wait Letters; GT to SST, 13 March 1822, TFP. GT’s name was the first on a list of subscribers in a 1815 published testimonial to Dr. Dean’s Pills, which stated they “have been freely used by ourselves or families for some years. . . . From what we have experienced, seen and heard, we consider them more effectual than any thing else we have known” ([Conn.] Hartford Courant, 16 Aug. 1815). “Rheumatism,” also regarded as a form of gout, was not categorically described as arthritis until 1800, and not labeled rheumatoid arthritis until 1858 (Lawrence C. Parish, “An Historical Approach to the Nomenclature of Rheumatoid Arthritis,” Arthritis and Rheumatism, v. 6, 2[April 1963]:138-39).
203. [Mass.] Newburyport Herald, 16 Jan. 1824; Rufus King to Prentiss Mellen, 10 April 1824, King 6:562; [Mass.] Salem Gazette, 9 April 1824; “Obituary”; Samuel Merrill Diary, 1799-1844 (typescript, p. 96), McArthur Public Library Archives and Special Collections, Biddeford; Anderson, York County Wills, p. 407. A few days after posting notice of GT’s death, Boston’s Repertory and Daily Advertiser published the “Obituary,’’ which was republished in its entirety by the Boston Commercial Gazette on 15 April (the source text for this document), and in part by Portland’s Eastern Argus on 20 April.
GT’s will, dated 30 October 1814 (with a codicil of 9 November 1822) and probated 9 November 1824, had been witnessed by his son in law Abner Sawyer, Jr. and his oldest local friend, JH. Sons Samuel Phillips Savage and George Jr. were named as executors. “Believing she [SST] has the same good wishes for the happiness and welfare of our children that I have myself,” GT left his entire estate to her, “to dispose of in full as she may choose.” Not surprisingly, the will’s few specific bequests related primarily to the future care of his books: those on religion and philosophy, he left to Bowdoin College “as a small additional token of my regard for that institution,” while the law books were to be divided among his lawyer sons (Samuel Phillips Savage, George Jr., and Sally’s husband Joseph Adams), “as they may agree” (Anderson, York County Wills, pp. 406-07).
204. TBW to GT, 3 June 1814, Wait Letters; Christopher Gore to Rufus King, 28 June 1787, King 1:226-27; GT to Edward Emerson, 2 April 1791, DHFFC 22:1475-76; Samuel Nasson to GT (quoting GT), 23 June 1789, DHFFC 16:841.
205. TBW to GT, 29 Jan. 1813, Wait Letters; “Obituary.”
206. TBW to GT, 27 Aug. (continuation of 8 Aug.) 1814, Wait Letters.
2. On 30 Oct. 1791, for example, GT wrote his brother in law Joseph Savage: “Yours of the 15th & 19th inst. are before me—the latter I am unable to read, most of the words being wrote in such a manner that I cannot find out what they were made for—Pray, for the future, take a little more time, & write your words in full length, & let your Letters be distinguishable one from another” (TFP). On 25 February 1797, he wrote SST, “Tell our friend G[eorge]. Peirson that by last mail I recieved a Letter which I suspect is from him, but it being nine tenths wrote in characters I do not understand, he must not expect any answer” (TFP). SST’s few extant writings warrant GT’s complaint that her handwriting too was nearly illegible; his insistence on teaching their daughter Sally how to read and write may hide an implied criticism of SST’s lacking in that regard (GT to SST, 26 Jan. 1793 [No. 86, below]; 25 Feb. 1795, TFP).
3. For an excellent account of the earliest reporting and printing of House debates, especially contrasted with the later Annals of Congress, see DHFFC 10:xxiii-xxviii.
1. GT seems to have written his younger brother only very infrequently—and he must have dreaded every reply. Thoreau once described Yankee husbandmen as living lives of “quiet desperation,” but Thomas’s desperation was not so quiet: his letters to GT are full of complaints about health, work, money, and his brother’s neglect of his relations on Cape Cod (Thomas Thacher to GT, 14 Oct. 1787, 15 April 1790, Chamberlain).
2. GT and Thomas’s older sister Sarah (1749-1808?) and her husband Isaac Gorham (1752-1814) of Yarmouth, Massachusetts.
1. Christopher Gore was among those who counseled precautionary measures: “I hope that long ere this reaches you, you have been innoculated, and are recovering from the small pox” (Christopher Gore to GT, 25 Nov. 1787, Foster Family).
2. A week later, GT’s eyes were still “exceedingly sore” and the sight in his right eye, in particular, remained “very furry” (GT to SST, 23 Dec. 1787, TFP).
3. “I am more anxious about his Temper & Disposition, than his body. Before [I] came from home, I percieved he began to be pevish & fretfull, inclining to rule every thing about him; and upon the least opposition, to fal[l to] crying, till he obtained his point” (GT to SST, 29 Dec. 1787, TFP). In the same letter, GT suspects the influence of their servant woman Rachel’s over-indulgence.
4. Charles appears to have been a youth whom the Thatchers employed as a farmhand. “Tell Charles, that Mr. [Silas] Lee sais he is a good b[o]y—and this gives me pleasure—He must not forfeit this” (GT to SST, 9 March 1788, TFP).
5. “Friend [Jeremiah] Hill sais holy Ratchel’s face shines—I suppose with piety—this too affords me pleasure” (GT to SST, 9 March 1788, TFP). Despite this tone of innocent mockery, one can imagine it was precisely Rachel’s religiosity that made her an attractive choice as the Thatchers’ domestic servant.
1. On 3 December 1787, NB’s “great Zeal for the Liberties of the Country procured him an Election from the lower class of Citizens” of York (David Sewall to GT, 5 Jan. 1788, DHROC 5:1072).
2. Ecclesiastes 1:9.
3. NB’s reply thanked GT for enclosing the unnamed pamphlet, which David Sewall later identified as The Weaknesses of Brutus Exposed by “A Citizen of Philadelphia” [Peletiah Webster] (NB to GT, 15 Jan. 1788 and David Sewall to GT, 5 Jan. 1788, DHROC 5:718, 1073). “Brutus” was a major anti-ratification writer whose sixteen essays were first printed in NYC between October 1787 and April 1788; random numbers began appearing in Boston newspapers on 22 November (DHROC 4:301-03).
1. Wrote JH: “Mr. Lee spent the evening with us[.] we took the whole matter under our most serious Consideration, corrected the Errors of Congress, the Faults of the [ratification] Convention, the Ambition of the several States[,] took a short cursory view of the rise & progress of the civil Liberty and the general Principals of Republicanism, the motives that influenced the different parties[,] just touched upon the Cincinnati &c &c—Miss Thatcher & Miss [Mary Emery] Hill were ingaged in recapitulating the various Modes & fashions of the times, the present Construction of making baby linnen, the Œconomy of house keeping, the management of Infants the education of Children, the advantage of having good Maids, and Just mentioned old Rachel &c. &c. Jenny listened with great Attention” (JH to GT, 13 Dec. [P.S. to 12 Dec.] 1787, Chamberlain).
The Society of the Cincinnati, a fraternal organization of veteran Continental Army officers founded shortly before the army was disbanded in 1783, was organized on the basis of state societies under a national umbrella with George Washington as president general (1783-99). Notwithstanding Washington’s insistence on the abolition of hereditary membership in 1784, the Society was widely condemned as a reactionary conspiracy throughout the 1780s.
3. As GT had planned, SST did not learn of his inoculation before she learned of his recovery from it. Mary Scollay had divulged the secret as early as 18 December, having learned of GT’s condition via a letter from Delegate Samuel Allyne Otis to his wife Elizabeth Gray Otis (Mary Scollay to SST, 18 Dec. 1787, GTP-Salem). “All my friends knew of your intention as soon as you arived at New York but prudiently cept it from me until they heard you wrote to Capt. [Elisha] Thatcher that you was Cleverly.” SST did not learn of it from GT’s own pen until 26 December; “Where you ben present and see me read those dear lines you would have supposed me as fool of Greaf as it was posable for aney person to have ben in” (SST to GT, 23 Dec., with P.S. of 27 Dec. 1787, Foster Family). SST was not the only victim of this conspiracy of silence: Thatcher regretted incurring Silas Lee’s “suspicion of my want of friendship” while incommunicado, and Thomas B. Wait felt similarly slighted that he had to learn, by hearsay, about his friend’s inoculation (GT to SST, 18 Jan. 1788, TFP; TBW to GT, 17 Jan. 1788, Chamberlain).
4. Don Diego de Gardoqui (1735-98) served as Spain’s encargado de negocios, or chief diplomatic representative in NYC, 1785-89.
5. Dorothy and Vandine Elsworth’s boardinghouse at 19 Maiden Lane, which was a particular favorite of Virginians. Rep. Alexander White (Va.), upon taking lodgings there in early 1789, assured his family that it was “reckened the best House for Company and Entertainment in the City” (White to Mary Wood, 8 March 1789, DHFFC 15:45).
6. GT moved into Samuel Allyne Otis’s lodgings two days later (GT to SST, 29 Dec. 1787, TFP).
1. GT was reacting here to a letter in which Thomas B. Wait relayed SST’s fears during a recent visit: “O, said Mrs. T. I hope his long absence from home will not make him contented to continue so.” Wait advised Thatcher: “You are now a stranger to N. York, and all who inhabit it—continue to be such—consider yourself as a stranger—form no friendships—aim not to make yourself happy for a moment while from home” (TBW to GT, 17 Jan. 1788, Chamberlain).
2. “He visited me every day while I was confined, and as soon as I was able to go out he came with his Chariot & gave me a Ride as often as the weather was fair” (GT to SST, 29 Dec. 1787, TFP).
3. “Mr. Lee informs he [me] that he diped [bathed] the little creature, the morning he wrote—and that she is an Angel” (GT to SST, 31 Jan. 1788, TFP).
1. NB had complained that the manner in which GT’s letter of 22 December (No. 4, above) treated NB’s serious concerns about the Constitution was “rather laughfable than serious” (NB to GT, 15 Jan. 1788, DHROC 5:718).
1. As were state representatives under the constitution of 1780, until amended to biennial elections in 1918.
2. The frequency of federal elections was the principal subject of debate in the Massachusetts Convention on 14-15 January. Theodore Sedgwick, Thomas Dawes, Jr., Caleb Strong, Rufus King, Christopher Gore, and Fisher Ames defended biennial elections in speeches printed or summarized in Boston’s Massachusetts Centinel of 16 and 19 January, and Independent Chronicle of 17 January. GT may have read any of these accounts or, closer to home, he may have read the New York Journal’s coverage of Ames’s speech, reprinted in its entirety from the Independent Chronicle on 26 and 28 January (DHROC 6:1184-87, 1188-98, 1200-05).
3. “Were we sure they would continue the faithful guardians of our libertys, & prevent any infringments on the priviledges of the people—what assurance can we have that such men will always hold the rein of Government?—that their successors will be such—history tells us Rome was happy under Augustus, tho wretched under Nero, who could have no greater power than Augustus” (NB to GT, 15 Jan. 1788, DHROC 5:719).
4. Federalist Nos. 45 and 46, which addressed the federal government’s threat to state authority and its domestic use of military force, respectively, were reprinted together in the New York Packet of 29 January, while Federalist No. 47, on the separation of powers within the federal government, was first printed in the [New York] Independent Journal of 30 January. Christopher Gore had requested that GT send him all the Federalist essays, which never circulated widely in Massachusetts; none of the three Federalist essays cited in this letter, for example, were published in Massachusetts in their serial form (Christopher Gore to Thatcher, 23 Dec. 1788, DHROC 5:506). GT’s submitting them to the consideration of delegates while the convention was still in session was therefore both exceptional and significant.
5. Sometime after 13 January 1788, President Cyrus Griffin received news that Richard Henry Lee and John Page, “men of Influence in Virginia, are relinquishing their opposition” to the Constitution (Cyrus Griffin to Thomas Fitzsimons, 18 Feb. 1788, LDC 24:651).
1. Indeed, Lee wrote, “Sambo [Sammy] . . . is as rugged as you can wish” (SL to GT, 17 Jan. 1788, Chamberlain).
2. This promise, of a kind made by fathers since Adam and Abel, prompted a serious sermon on childrearing in a letter GT wrote to SST several weeks later:
I believe my saying any thing of Boots to him was very inadvertent in me—since promises ought, most punctually, to be performed to children—And their expectations realised. . . . My imprudence has taught me a good Lesson—by which I will endeavour to profit—To promise children things and then disappoint them has a very natural tendency to make them suspicious of your instructions, admonitions &c as well as sets them an example to decieve you, in their turn, which no precept will ever be able to counter act (GT to SST, 9 March 1788, TFP).
1. The ascetic lifestyle GT describes here refers only to his “temporary Banishment” in New York City. As indicated elsewhere, he was a devotee of dancing assemblies back home. “After having danced two or three nights at Penobscot you will not think it strange to hear of my going to the Theatre,” he wrote SST, while passing through NYC en route to the Second Congress in Philadelphia in October 1791. At the insistence of some acquaintances, on 19 October he attended the Old American Company’s performance of the comedy The West-Indian and the accompanying comic opera Inkle & Yarico. “I was not disappointed, the amusement fully answered my expectation”—and yet it remains the only occasion GT is known to have attended the theater (GT to SST, 21 Oct. 1791, TFP; [New York] Daily Advertiser, 19 Oct. 1791).
2. Rufus King had already served the maximum three continuous annual terms in the Confederation Congress as a delegate from Massachusetts (1784-87), but became a de facto permanent resident of New York when he married Mary Alsop (1770-94), the daughter of a prosperous NYC merchant, in early 1786. “Tell Betsy King her Sister is a beauty,” GT wrote SST in December 1787. “She is vastly the best looking woman I have seen since I have been in th[is] City—She resembles, in countenance, Mrs. [Joshua B.?] Osgood—she is hardly so tall; but at this time a little larger.” She gave birth to son John Alsop King (d. 1867) on 3 January 1788. After returning to Congress in the summer of 1788, GT would “call on them almost every day—to see them & kiss their little child. . . . I make a sort of substitute of it for the absence of our dear little Sally” (GT to SST, 29 Dec. 1787, GTP; 17 Aug. 1788, LDC 25:300).
3. In the event, GT left NYC by boat on Friday morning, 28 March, and disembarked in New Haven late that night. “So you see I have once more ventured myself upon the water again!” Notwithstanding the “pleasant and agreeable sale, . . . I have, since I got on shore, again determined never to go on the water, when I can pass by Land”—and true to his word, he rarely did. On the journey from Boston to NYC the previous November, he and Samuel Allyne Otis “got off the notion of going by the way of Providence [R.I.] & through the [Long Island] Sound—My avertion from passing by water is very great at all times, but more especially this time of the year” (GT to SST, [4 April 1788] and [11 Nov.] continuation of 28 Oct. [1787], TFP).
1. New Hampshire’s ratification convention first met on 13-22 February in Exeter. Realizing there were insufficient votes to ratify, Federalists narrowly secured what had proved impossible in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts: a postponement until more pro-ratification forces could be mobilized. By the time the second session convened in Concord on 18 June, previously unrepresented pro-ratification towns had finally sent delegates, while one delegate had been released from his town’s instructions to vote against ratification. Other delegates not similarly released were encouraged to be absent and two anti-ratification delegates’ credentials were successfully challenged. One final compromise, to recommend amendments if and when the Constitution ultimately became operable, pushed the margin of victory to 57 over 47 in the final vote of 21 June—making New Hampshire the ninth state to ratify, and putting the Constitution into effect under the provisions of Article VII (Maier, Ratification, pp. 218-19, 314-16).
2. Manasseh Cutler and Winthrop Sargent represented the Ohio Company of Associates, composed of Continental Army veterans from New England intent on purchasing and settling lands in the federal domain beyond the Ohio River. Sargent (1753-1820), a Harvard graduate and veteran Continental Army officer, served as the Company’s secretary as well as secretary of the Western Territory from the last years of the Confederation until his appointment as governor of the Mississippi Territory in 1798. Cutler (1742-1823; Yale, 1765), a former Continental Army chaplain and Congregational minister of Ipswich, Massachusetts, was the Company’s primary lobbyist in Congress. His efforts in the summer of 1787 met with failure until he was approached by the secretary of the Confederation’s board of treasury, William Duer (1743-99), a NYC merchant, former member of the Continental Congress, and Alexander Hamilton’s future first assistant secretary of the treasury. With Duer’s promise of support from “invisible partners” in the highest ranks of government, contracts signed with the board of treasury in late July 1787 secured for the Ohio Company 1.5 million acres in present day southeastern Ohio, and the option on an additional 3.5 million acres beyond for Duer’s Scioto Company—whose complete list of shareholders remains unknown (LDC 24:355; Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier [New York, 1960], p. 212-20; Robert F. Jones, “William Duer and the Business of Government in the Era of the American Revolution,” WMQ, v. 32, 3[July 1975]:404-407).
One month after the Ohio Company’s purchase, John Cleves Symmes (1742-1814), a New Jersey state legislator, jurist, and former member of the Confederation Congress, petitioned Congress for two million acres in present day southwestern Ohio. The contract authorized by Congress in October 1787 granted Symmes and his associates a one million acre tract at the same price as the Ohio Company’s contract. Later surveying more accurately fixed the size at only 330,000 acres, but Symmes continued to sell land beyond his purchase—including the site of the improbably-named Losantiville, or present-day Cincinnati (JCC 33:593-94; LDC 24:412-13; Billington, Westward Expansion, p. 218).
On 22 October 1787 Congress authorized the board of treasury to sell the NYC merchant Royal Flint (1754-97) and his associate Joseph Parker three million acres of land in present-day Indiana and Illinois upon the same terms as Symmes’s and the Ohio Company’s purchases (JCC 33:697-98; Yale Graduates 3:477-78).
3. Thomas Hutchins (1730-89) served as Geographer to the United States from 1781 until his death in May 1789, en route to complete the official survey of the first seven ranges of the territory northwest of the Ohio River. The New Jersey native and British Army veteran joined the Continental Army in 1780, where he was employed in military engineering and surveying (DHFFC 9:124n).
4. On 12 March 1788, Secretary for Foreign Affairs John Jay reported to Congress that Portugal’s Queen Maria I had declined to proceed with negotiations for a treaty of commerce begun by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in London in the spring of 1786, preferring direct negotiations conducted at Lisbon and by a U.S. minister plenipotentiary of a higher rank than chargé d’affaires (Mary A. Giunta et al., eds., The Emerging Nation: A Documentary History of the Foreign Relations of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, 1780-1789 [3 vols., Washington, D.C., 1996] 3:745).
5. The Federalist leadership at Annapolis’s ratifying convention decided to debate the Constitution as a whole rather than clause by clause and insisted on a straight up-or-down vote at the conclusion, without the option of considering amendments as a precondition for ratifying. The convention ratified on 26 April, by a vote of 63 to 11.
6. Early skepticism that South Carolina would ratify was widespread; Antifederalists at Pennsylvania’s convention had used that prediction as an argument against ratifying five months earlier. Yet South Carolina Federalists felt confident enough to stage a rehearsal debate in the state legislature in January 1788, for the benefit of upcountry constituencies not yet reconciled to the Constitution. The low country was vastly overrepresented at the convention, where the majority is believed to have represented only 39 percent of the actual non-slave population. Following an unsuccessful effort to postpone their decision until Virginia voted (presumably against ratifying), the South Carolina convention meeting in Columbia ratified on 23 May, by 149 votes to 73 (Maier, Ratification, pp. 115, 247-52).
7. Earlier in the month, Christopher Gore wrote Rufus King that “our friend Thacher is confident that Virginia will dissent” (9 April 1788, King 1:327). But the most credible calculations at this time, in Virginia as well as within Congress itself, gave pro-ratification forces a twenty-vote advantage. The convention that met in Richmond on 2 June ultimately voted to ratify by a smaller majority of 89 to 79 on 25 June (Maier, Ratification, p. 240, 526n).
1. “I forgot to tell you in a former Letter, that I did not take water passage, from New-Haven as I wrote you, from Hartford, I expected to. When I arrived at New-Haven, I met Mr. & Mrs. [Rufus] King, waiting for the Stage, thinking from the conversation we had at Boston, that I should take passage with them. They said many things to induce me to sail with them; but my timidity of going on the water overcame their civility—And I keept in the Stage, which got to New York the next evening” (GT to SST, 17 Aug. 1788, LDC 25:300).
1. There were two Quaker Meetings gathered in NYC at this time. From GT’s description of his lodgings a quarter mile from City Hall (Federal Hall), it is clear he refers here to the newer meetinghouse, where Friends worshipped from 1775 until 1824, at the corner of Pearl and Oak streets (the present-day site of the Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers) (GT to SST, 22 Aug. 1788, LDC 25:315; Smith, New York, p. 143).
2. Notwithstanding their anomalous manner of public worship, GT would form a high opinion of Quakers’ public and private morality through personal contact with many of them while in Congress. At Maine’s Constitutional Convention in October 1819, he honored the Quakers even while objecting to their trademark stand against mandatory military service:
The Judge said, he was very well acquainted with the Societies of Friends, and for many years while he was at New York, and Philadelphia, he had opportunities of seeing much of their regulations as societies of christians, and to be intimately acquainted with many of them as individuals, and he did not hesitate to say he was ready to go farther than any member had gone in appreciating their principles in general as a sect of christians, and of their individual conduct that it approached, in several respects, nearer to evangelical purity than any other sect he was acquainted with; yet he thought they had some errors; though he looked upon them as less pernicious to society than the errors of some other sects (Perley, Convention Debates, p. 189).
3. Sir John Temple (1732-98) was a Boston-born colonial administrator and Loyalist who went into exile in London in 1778 but returned to serve as Britain’s consul general in NYC from 1785 until his death. In 1767 he married Elizabeth (1750-1809), only daughter of the wealthy Boston merchant and leader of the revolutionary movement, James Bowdoin (1727-90). GT’s first published newspaper piece defended Bowdoin’s recent election as governor, against suspicions raised about his patriotism because of this family relationship ([Portland, Me.] Falmouth Gazette, 21 May 1785. The anonymous piece is identified by a loose leaf draft in GT’s hand, dated 6 May 1785, among Thacher’s Tracts [v. 12]). GT’s prior relationship with either Bowdoin or Temple is unclear, but his friendship with the British diplomat must have been well served by his partisan defense of the diplomat’s father in law.
Rev. Manasseh Cutler of Massachusetts experienced Sir John’s hospitality the summer before GT’s arrival in NYC:
Sir John is the complete gentleman, but his deafness renders it painful to converse with him. Lady Temple is certainly the greatest beauty, notwithstanding her age, I ever saw. . . . Our dinner was in the English style, plain, but plentiful; the wines excellent, which is a greater object with Sir John than his roast beef or poultry. You can not please him more than by praising his Madeira and frequently begging the honor of a glass with him. The servants were all in livery. The Parlor, Drawing-room, and Dining-hall are in the second story—spacious and richly furnished. The paintings are principally historical, and executed by the greatest masters in Europe. The Parlor is ornamented chiefly with medals and small busts of the principal characters now living in Europe, made of Plaster of Paris or white wax. He dines at two on Sundays (Cutler 1:234-35).
Dinners such as this were a recurring feature of GT’s relatively narrow social life at the Confederation Congress. Several months before this letter, he wrote SST: “I have this moment returned from Sir John Temples where I dined. Sir John gives me an invitation to dine with him about once a fortnight. I enjoy myself, at his Table, as well as any one I dine at. The Company is not so large as they are at the Tables of the other Foreign Ministers. His dinners are more of the Domestic kind, where sociability takes the Lead of mere Formality” (GT to SST, 2 March 1788, LDC 25:5). Temple’s was probably the first formal dinner GT attended upon his arrival for the First Federal Congress (GT to SST, 1 Feb. 1789, TFP). Some thought Sir John served pleasure before the state: “he is not a fit Man for the purpose [of promoting British manufactures], incapable of any Business but riding on Horse back” (Peter Allaire, Occurrences, 21 March 1791, DHFFC 21:1045). If so, that may have been precisely the quality that made his company so appealing to Thatcher, for whom sheer amiability trumped many other virtues.
4. SST had accompanied GT as far as Weston, Massachusetts, where she stayed to visit her father Samuel Phillips Savage.
1. Letters on the Study and Use of History (1735) by Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), an English Tory politician and political philosopher.
2. Elizabeth Whitman (b. ca. 1751) died of puerperal fever on 25 July, two weeks after being delivered of a stillbirth child in the same Danvers tavern where the Thatchers stayed just days later. The first report of her story, in the [Mass.] Salem Mercury of 29 July, told of “a female stranger” who appeared in a mysterious chaise, “kept much retired” in her bedchamber while awaiting the arrival of a purported husband who never came, and died without a home (apart from her birthplace, which she divulged as Westfield, Connecticut, near Hartford), and nameless but for her linen’s monogramed “E.W.” This report was reprinted more than a dozen times, from Vermont to South Carolina. For the true story’s subsequent impact on the literature of the early republic, most notably as the basis for Hannah Webster Foster’s famous novel The Coquette (1797), see Waterman, “Whitman’s Disappearance.”
3. The prominent merchant John Scollay (1711-90), a member of the Sons of Liberty and chairman of Boston’s board of selectmen from 1774 until his death, may have been acquainted with GT through his wife, Mercy Greenleaf Scollay (1719-93), a native of Yarmouth, Massachusetts. SST would have known the family independently of GT, through her father Samuel Phillips Savage’s close association with Boston’s revolutionary leadership. She became an intimate friend of the Scollays’ daughter Mary, through whose letters to SST we know that GT sometimes visited the Scollays while passing through Boston en route to Congress (see, for example, Mary Scollay to SST, 1 Dec. 1787, GTP-Salem).
4. That is, Sunday 3 August, which GT spent in Hartford, Connecticut. The story had not been reported in Hartford, apparently deliberately and probably out of respect for Whitman’s friends and family in the neighborhood (Waterman, “Whitman’s Disappearance,” pp. 332, 336n). From the landlord’s reaction, it seems GT’s was the first notice made of the story in her own hometown area.
1. Since its relocation to New York City in 1785, the Confederation Congress had met in New York’s City Hall, built in 1700 on the north side of Wall Street at the head of Broad Street. The Congress’s single, elegant chamber was located in the southeast corner of the building; municipal courts occupied the opposite corner, and the mayor, aldermen, and guards occupied chambers below. In mid-September 1788 the city’s Common Council appropriated use of the entire building for the new Federal Congress, and repurposing the building according to plans by Peter Charles L’Enfant began later that month (Smith, New York, pp. 40-41; Cutler 1:237-38).
1. One day a month earlier, GT wrote an entire letter to SST “in the City Hall—while Congress is seting; but engaged on some small matters that do by no means take my attention from my Sally” (GT to SST, 15 Aug. 1788, TFP). It may shed some light on what GT considered “small matters” to know that the Congress’s attention on that day was taken up with the settlement of a petition by the commissioners of army accounts; the Secretary Charles Thomson’s report on the disposition of various other petitions and letters; and a report from the Secretary for Foreign Affairs about complaints of enslaved blacks escaping from Georgia to freedom in Spanish East Florida (JCC 34:429-31).
2. North Carolina’s first ratifying convention met at Hillsborough 21 July to 4 August. Reinforced by conciliatory amendments passed by the First Congress and facing the threat of economic sanctions for remaining outside the Union, Federalists succeeded in attracting a majority to a second convention that met on 16 November 1789 in Fayetteville, and ratified the Constitution a week later, 194 votes to 77.
1. [New York] Daily Advertiser of this date reprinted a series of letters attributed to “F— T— A—,” in which the female author forgives two apparent guardians (parents?) “D—r. and Mrs. P—s,” and proclaims her “guilty innocence” for allowing herself to be seduced by a “Mr. M—” and then choosing suicide after she bore his child and he betrayed her. The letters first appeared in Boston’s Herald of Freedom of 15 September, followed three days later by a poem called “Disappointment” and a prose postscript, which the Herald attributed to the same unfortunate woman. MC reprinted these latter two literary pieces on 20 September but appended a letter, signed “Curiosos,” which claims they were in fact written by the same Elizabeth Whitman whose story GT first learned nearly as an eye-witness (see No. 16. GT would not have known of this attribution to Whitman, since it was not reported in NYC papers until 30 September). For the political motives behind conflating the stories in order to whitewash the scandal that befell the actual “F— T— A—” (Fanny Theodora Apthorp), see Waterman, “Whitman’s Disappearance,” pp. 338-39.
1. Assuming GT did not apply the title sarcastically to signify any senior clergyman, he must have been referring to the only consecrated bishop in NYC at this time, Rev. Samuel Provoost (1742-1815), rector of the Episcopalian parish’s Trinity Church (still standing at the foot of Wall Street on Broadway). The preacher who earned GT’s harsh critique may have been the younger of Provoost’s two assistants, Rev. Dr. Benjamin Moore (1748-1816) and Rev. Dr. Abraham Beach (1740-1828). Moore is described as a slender man with modest speaking skills (Smith, New York, pp. 139-41). The church GT attended on this occasion was probably Trinity Church, although two chapels also belonged to the parish: St. Paul’s (still standing on Broadway between Fulton and Vesey streets), and St. George’s (under the present day site of the Southbridge Towers complex).
2. Nicholas Gilman (1755-1814), the middle son of a prominent political and mercantile family of Exeter, New Hampshire, was a veteran officer of the Continental Army who served in the Confederation Congress (1788-89), the Federal Convention, and with GT in the House (1789-97). His fellowship during dinner might have proved unpleasant; another delegate to the Federal Convention described Gilman as “modest” and “sensible” but hardly “brilliant,” while one political opponent back home thought him “proud, haughty, and overbearing” and the French chargé d’affaires observed he was “little liked among his colleagues” (DHFFC 14:661-65).
1. While walking to the Thatcher homestead to deliver a letter from GT to SST, JH was saddened by the lack of any to himself, and wondered: “Has his exalted Station, so lifted him up that he begins to look down on his old Friend? This I put into the balancies, and put a republican Government into the other Scale, & weighed it over & over, could not find it to preponderate for a sufficient Cause—I was going on in Search of further Causes, when I arrived at my walks end, and told Friend [Silas] Lee the melancholy tale. . . . but soon found the real Cause of all this misfortune, that is, my Friend was weary of the Corrispondence, and very politely excused the Matter to Mrs. Thatcher by telling her it would induce her Friends to visit her the oftener, which still increased the Mortification, to think that her agreeable Company would not induce her & your Friends to call & see her often enough.” JH “wandered home . . . like a young widower returning from the funeral of his wife, planning, by the by, where he should form another Connection—determined (as the parson told him) to make a wise improvment of this dispensation of providence” (JH to GT, 8 Oct. 1788, TFP).
2. “Should I continue to prosecute the plan I proposed in mine of yesterday—that is, to write you all the politics, & political news of this place, you will not complain any more of being dull & lonesom for the want of amusement” (GT to SST, 30 Sept. 1788, LDC 25:394).
3. This group of private citizens provided the initial investment of £3200 on 27 September, and supervision of the work was given to five commissioners appointed by the city’s Common Council on 30 September. The overall repurposing of New York’s City Hall was entrusted to Peter Charles L’Enfant (1754-1825), a French native who served as a draftsman and engineer in the Continental Army, where he rose to the rank of major. He settled permanently in the United States and, in addition to Federal Hall, undertook some private, residential architectural commissions. But his most enduring artistic legacy is his design for the original city of Washington, D.C. (1791); see Kenneth R. Bowling, Peter Charles L’Enfant: Vision, Honor and Male Friendship in the Early American Republic (Washington, D.C., 2002).
L’Enfant’s most substantive alteration to City Hall, renamed Federal Hall for the reception of the federal Congress, was a large addition for the new House of Representatives chamber; framing began on 16 October, the walls were in place by 11 November, and the roofing was complete by 7 December. In addition, the building boasted a three story atrium lit by a cupola, two large staircases (plus a smaller, third staircase to an upper level gallery overlooking the octagonal House chamber), and a new second-story balcony off the Senate chamber, overlooking Federal Hall’s commanding location at the intersection of Wall and Broad streets. Completing New York City’s then-largest public works project required two hundred laborers and a constant infusion of additional funds: on 7 January 1789, the municipality extended an additional £1000 credit, and on 22 January the state legislature authorized a special city tax to raise £13,000 to indemnify the original investors. The total costs of the conversion amounted to approximately $65,000 (not including interest on the loans). The building was torn down in 1812 and most of the site has been occupied since 1842 by the Greek Revival building that served for a time as a federal custom house and a Federal Reserve Bank branch before being repurposed once again for its current use as a museum to the First Federal Congress. For more on the construction and public reception, see “Preparing Federal Hall” headnote, DHFFC 15:26-36; for Federal Hall’s design and visual history, see Louis Torres, “Federal Hall Revisited,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 29(1970):327-38.
1. When he left Boston that summer, GT had planned to remain in New York City until the new federal government was launched, which he expected to be on 1 December. But following the Confederation Congress’s ordinance (13 September) that the First Federal Congress should convene on 4 March 1789, he resolved to leave when the “federal year” expired on 31 October (GT to SST, 27 Sept. 1788, LDC 25:391). Letters posted from Biddeford after 18 October would have failed to reach him before he left the city.
2. “The workman made such a continual noise that it was impossible to hear one another speek” (GT to Nathan Dane, 2 Oct. 1788, LDC 25:406). Consequently, Congress adjourned until Monday, 6 October, when they planned to reconvene in the rooms recently vacated by John Jay’s office of foreign affairs. The location is in dispute. GT’s own description of the space (see No. 25, below) seems to corroborate State Department historians’ claim that, from May until Congress took over the space five months later, Jay’s office was on the west side of the southern end of Broadway, near the Bowling Green, in a house owned by his cousin Walter Livingston (Lee H. Burke and Richard S. Patterson, Homes of the Department of State, 1774-1976 [Washington, D.C., 1977], p. 16).
3. “Sine die,” or without assigning a day for further meeting, indicated a final adjournment. “I should not wonder if by middle of next week Congress were to adjourn without day,” GT repeated the next day to an absent colleague, who had already left in mid-September. “Many are uneasy and are for going home” (GT to Nathan Dane, 2 Oct. 1788, LDC 25:xix, 406).
4. On 30 September, Pennsylvania’s unicameral Assembly balanced its Senate delegation in the First Congress by electing Philadelphia merchant and public securities and land speculator Robert Morris (1735-1806), and William Maclay (1737-1804), a major landholder from Sunbury along the Susquehanna, for the western part of the state. As superintendent of finance (1781-84), Morris held the most powerful administrative office in the Confederation government. His unsettled public accounts in that office, as well as the unadjusted accounts from his chairmanship of the Continental Congress’s secret committees entrusted with procurement transactions with France in the early years of the Revolutionary War, made him a frequent target especially within the Antifederalist press. In 1790 Morris petitioned the First Congress for exoneration from suspicions of mismanagement, which were not entirely allayed by the largely inconclusive findings of Congress (DHFFC 8: 663-75, 9:431-41, 14:761-73).
5. Maclay represented his resident Northumberland County and surrounding counties in Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council, which implemented the laws of the unicameral legislature.
1. Sorrows of Young Werther (1774; first English translation, 1779) was an epistolary novel by the German writer, scientist, and politician Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), one of the founders of the Romantic literary movement.
2. The Letters of Charlotte, during her Connexion with Werter (1786), attributed to Sir William-James James (1759-1829), was one of the many literary spin-offs of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther.
3. Probably his two landladies, the sisters Dorothy and Vandine Elsworth. GT had been tempted to move in with Samuel A. Otis—“a worthy, & amiable man”—for the last few weeks of the Confederation Congress, but Otis ended up taking rooms in Brooklyn, and the ferry crossing “is a disagreeable circumstance” (GT to SST, 17 Aug. 1788, LDC 25:300; 6 Oct. 1788, TFP).
4. Niece “Tempy” Hedge Lee eventually also caught the craze, and asked GT for a copy (SL to GT, 30 Jan. 1791, DHFFC 21:607).
5. James, Letters of Charlotte, Letter I, p. 5.
1. Just a week earlier, GT had complained of feeling “stuped, dull & heavy, & I suspect the summer & fall air of this City is not good for me.” Rather than posing its usual terror, sea travel now offered a solution: “My friends all tell me I must take an emetic before my head will endure much reading or thinking; and to re-gain this power I shall be willing to undergo almost any thing—Therefore I have it in contemplation to leave this City by water, & sail to New-Haven, or Providence [R.I.]—To be sea-sick an hour or two, would be more beneficial than a common puke.” He would stop at New Haven and travel the rest of the way overland “could I be sure of being sick enough to answer my end for going by water. . . . But as the [Long Island] Sound, between this City and that place, is no where more than a dozen miles wide, it will resemble the sailing in a creek or small River so much, that I almost doubt whether I should be sick—to this circumstance add that of my having been an old Seaman”—a facetious reference to his brief naval service in the war (GT to SST, 7, 14 Oct. 1788, TFP).
2. GT’s last recorded attendance at that session of Congress was 21 October (LDC 25:xx).
3. GT repeatedly was tempted to succumb to homesickness by jumping on the next stage out of town. “So much do my determanations depend upon the feelings of the moment—I am more and more of a materialist every day; and think very few people know how much every operation of the mind is influenced by the state of the body—that is, to its being sick, or in health—Indeed I am led to believe, that what we commonly call being in good spirits, and low spirits, is nothing more than different habitudes of the body as to health and vigour” (GT to SST, 9 Oct. 1788, TFP).
4. The residence at 39-41 Broadway, built in 1786 and owned by New York City businessman and land speculator Alexander McComb, was rented by the French minister Eleanor-François-Elie, comte de Moustier, prior to being occupied by the Washingtons as the presidential mansion from February to September 1790 (Smith, New York, p. 19; DHFFC 18:213n, 450).
5. Another contemporary agreed: “Few men were more deficient in all the essential elements which constitute good speaking. Without imagination, or power of illustration, without any pretension to elegance of diction, he only labored to make himself understood, and it seemed no small effort to accomplish that. A perpetual stammering and hesitation were the general characteristics of his addresses to the jury” (Allen, “Early Lawyers,” p. 53). A lawyer himself, Frederick Allen was equally “without the graces of oratory,” so that one might presume the force of empathy combined with Allen’s powers as “a careful and accurate lawyer” render this profile of SL a fair and faithful one (William Allen et al., eds., A Genealogy of the Allen Family from 1568 to 1882 [Farmington, 1882], p. 28).
1. It was not GT’s first recreational excursion to Long Island. On 3 September, “I took a ride, in company with Mr. [Rufus] King, upon Long Island—We set out in the morning & went about sixteen miles to a place called Flushing. This place is noted for nothing that I know of, but a very large orchard and Nursery of fruit Trees of all kinds; it is the property of one William Prince. . . . We returned about four miles to Jamaica & dined—We called & spent a few moments at Coll. Smith’s—where I was introduced to Mrs. Smith, formerly, Adams—daughter to our late Ambassador to the Court of London” (GT to SST, 8 Sept. 1788, TFP). Abigail Adams Smith (1765-1813), also known as “Nabby,” was the first-born of John and Abigail Adams’s children. In 1786 she married Col. William Stephens Smith (1755-1816), secretary of the U.S. legation in London during John Adams’s tenure there as minister plenipotentiary. When the entire Adams entourage returned to the United States in the summer of 1788, the Smiths settled on a small estate, “Beaver Hall,” in Jamaica, Long Island.
2. Following their occupation of New York City in the fall of 1776, British authorities relied on obsolete naval vessels to serve as prison ships; the most notorious of these, the Jersey, was moored in Wallabout Bay (present day site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard) beginning in 1778. These ships subjected as many as 22,000 prisoners of war to extreme deprivation and disease, from which as many as fifty percent found release as corpses buried in shallow trenches close to the shoreline. Like the wooden ribs of the abandoned ships that had once imprisoned them, the bones of these “Jersey dead” were, over the years, left exposed by the tides. In 1785 the Confederation Congress voted to collect them for re-interment but no action was taken, and the site continued to attract the curious and the pious well after GT’s pilgrimage. See Robert E. Cray, Jr., “Commemorating the Prison Ship Dead: Revolutionary Memory and the Politics of Sepulture in the Early Republic, 1776-1808,” WMQ, v. 56, 3(July 1999):565-90; Edwin G. Burrows, Forgotten Dead: The Untold Story of American Prisoners during the Revolutionary War (New York, 2008), pp. 200, 209-12.
3. Strabo (ca. 63 b.c.–a.d. 24), geographer, philosopher, and historian of ancient Greece; Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (fl. 1st century b.c.), author, architect, and civil engineer of ancient Rome.
4. Publius Aelius Aristides (a.d. 117-80), Athenian orator.
5. Footnote 200, Part II, Essay XI (“Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations”), Vol. I (Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary), of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1777 edition) by the Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume (1711-76).
1. Pierse Long to GT, 15 April 1788 (unlocated); see GT’s reply, 23 April 1788 (No. 12, above). Other correspondents were equally certain that the ready market in western land was contributing to sluggish and deflated land sales in Maine: “The Eastern Lands are selling but not very rapidly—the high-famed Ohio—the bewitching influence that novel places, matters, & things have on the human mind—and in consequence thereof, the numerous emigrations from the Eastern States to the western World will for a time, very much retard the sale of our Lands in this quarter” (Daniel Cony to GT, 10 Sept. 1788, TFP).
1. GT carried Kittery by 30 votes against 5 for Joshua B. Osgood of Fryeburg, and York by 33 votes against 19 for Nathaniel Wells (http://elections.lib.tufts.edu/catalog/tufts:ma.uscongress.6.1788 [accessed Sept. 2017]).
2. The priests of this Canaanite god were challenged by Elijah to test Baal’s strength against Jehovah, but when they did, “there was neither voice, nor any to answer” (I Kings 18:29).
3. Matthew 23:23.
1. The New York state legislature’s ordinance for the election of federal representatives passed in January 1789, but its Federalist-dominated Senate and Antifederalist Assembly did not agree on whether to elect senators by concurrent vote of each house or by the majority vote of a joint session, until an intervening state election gave the preference to the former in a second election act passed on 13 July, which the Council of Revision (the governor and state judicial officers) vetoed two days later. The legislature immediately thereupon decided the issue by a concurrent resolution rather than legislation, and elected Philip Schuyler and GT’s old friend Rufus King.
1. Loose Hints upon Education, Chiefly Concerning the Culture of the Heart (1781), by Henry Home, Lord Kames.
2. GT finally mailed home Kames’s Loose Hints on 10 May (GT to SST, 10 May 1789, DHFFC 15:504).
1. “Last Wednesday Evening we spent in great good humor by the Social Club at your House. . . . Be assured that you are with us in all our social meetings” (Matthew Cobb to GT, 15 Feb. 1789, GTP-Portland). Silas Lee also attended gatherings of the “Sweeten-Water Club” (SL to GT, 4 March 1789, GTP-Biddeford).
2. This and the following quotes are from the Introduction to Kames’s Loose Hints upon Education. GT substituted “Child” for “Man” in the first sentence of this brief excerpt.
1. One who gads, or roams about idly.
2. “By all means keep up your spirits & catch every pleasure you find in the road thro’ Life—Our friends at Portland will rejoice to see you—therefore I could wish you to make a visit there—And to York” (GT to SST, 18 Jan. 1789, TFP).
3. The New-York Directory and Register for the Year 1789 lists GT and fellow Representatives Benjamin Goodhue (Mass.), Jonathan Grout (Mass.), Jonathan Sturges (Conn.), and Senator Paine Wingate (N.H.) as lodging at 47 Broad Street, close to Federal Hall. Sturges (1740-1819; Yale, 1759); lawyer of Fairfield, Conn.; state legislator (1772-77, 1783-89); attended Confederation Congress (1786); voted to ratify Constitution at state convention; Federalist Representative to Congress (1789-93); justice of state superior court (1793-1805) (DHFFC 14:512-15).
“My Land Lady is a widow, whose husband was cast away on the Isle of Sable—she has two children—And is in deep mourning—Her name is Chadwell—there is a woman with her I take to be her maiden sister—rather advanced than handsome—Thus you have the history of my Lodgings” (GT to ST, 1 Feb. 1789, TFP). The landlady’s deceased husband, Capt. Benjamin Chadwell, had enjoyed some celebrity for surviving with his entire crew for almost seven months after their schooner George shipwrecked on Sable Island, 110 miles off Nova Scotia, in November 1787 (New-York Packet, 8 Aug. 1788).
4. Charles King (d. 1867), the second child of Rufus and Mary Alsop King, was born in New York City on 16 March 1789.
5. Rufus King’s father Richard had been a prosperous merchant, farmer, and local officeholder in Dunstan, that part of present-day Scarborough, Maine lying between the Scarboro and Nonesuch rivers, where Rufus King was born and spent his childhood.
6. “You must keep up your spirits, for good spirits and chearfullness are every thing with a woman” (GT to SST, 27 Feb. 1792, TFP).
7. Conversely, “I never imagined that women, from their situation in life, can commit many or very deadly sins” (GT to SST, 31 Dec. 1796, TFP).
1. GT was writing on Easter Sunday.
2. On 24 January 1790, GT wrote SST a pathetic account of the burial of the eldest of these girls the previous afternoon—little more than a year after Mrs. Chadwell’s youngest had also died, whom Thatcher notes was about their own daughter Sally’s age. The newly deceased was “a lively, sprightly, active girl—forward in reading, writing and womanly accomplishments—her temper & disposition were mild and amiable—the whole house were charmed with her, & greatly lament her untimely death.” GT follows with a detailed description of the funeral rites, some elements of which he knew SST would have found unusual (GT to SST, 24 Jan. 1790, DHFFC 18:304).
1. The first presidential residence was at 3 Cherry Street, on St. George’s Square (renamed Franklin Square and now covered by part of the Manhattan access to the Brooklyn Bridge). The mansion with surrounding gardens, built by the merchant Walter Franklin in 1770, had been rented out by its then-owner Samuel Osgood as the last official residence of the presidents of the Confederation Congress (DHFFC 9:4n).
2. Thomas Randall (1723-97) was one of NYC’s most prominent merchant sea-captains and partner of the firm Randall, Son & Stewart. He was celebrated locally as a leading figure within the radical wing of the city’s revolutionary movement in the 1770s, but GT’s mentioning of his name specifically, in this largely nameless account of the inauguration festivities, suggests Randall may have been known personally to the Thatchers—perhaps through his affiliation with Nathaniel Barrell’s brother Joseph in the China trade; in 1784 Randall sailed as commercial agent on board the Empress of China, the first U.S. ship to engage in the China trade. By 1790 he had returned to China to serve as American vice-consul in Macao (Ira K. Morris, Morris’s Memorial History of Staten Island [West New Brighton, N.Y., 1900] 2:413-14).
3. Fort George was an early seventeenth century fortress from the era of Dutch rule, located directly south of the Bowling Green. The flanks facing the Battery had been in serious disrepair since 1776, and a few months after Thatcher penned this description of its last public use, the state government ordered the structure demolished, its earthworks to be used as infill to extend the Battery, and its site for a new official residence for the president. The mansion’s cornerstone was laid in May 1790, but the federal government removed to Philadelphia before it was finished, after which it served as the governor’s home (Smith, New York, pp. 20-23).
4. George Clinton (1739-1812), governor, 1777-95, led the state’s populist political faction often opposed to the more patrician faction headed by Philip Schuyler and his son in law, Alexander Hamilton.
5. GT here enumerates the order of marchers, beginning with officers in various units of the state militia interspersed with “Bands of Music,” followed by the congressional reception committee, officers of the state and municipal governments, members of the clergy, the French and Spanish ambassadors, and “a numberless concourse of Citizens.” For the full text, see DHFFC 15:366-67.
6. Thomas Pearsall and Son were merchants at 203 Queen Street in 1789. The elder Pearsall (1735-1807) approached as close to participating in the war effort as his Quaker pacifism permitted, by remaining in British-occupied New York City during the Revolutionary War to smuggle out goods for the Continental Army (Drinker 3:2196).
1. Alexander Hodgdon (1741-97) of Boston served as Massachusetts’s state treasurer, 1787-92. After passage of the Salaries-Legislative Act in September 1789, members of Congress were paid out of the federal treasury, and GT would often draw upon the local revenue collector for part of his pay. But at this point, GT was evidently still attempting to collect money due for his past service as Confederation Congress delegate, which was charged to the respective states. On 20 January 1789, the General Court passed a resolution to pay GT £167.14 as the balance due in full for services as a delegate to the Confederation Congress up through 5 November 1788 (Ch. 38).
1. “It is said that you Correspond with Mr. [Samuel] Nason, Doctr. [Daniel] Coney, Mr. [William] Frost &c., and that your Letters have at Several times been Shewn in Such a manner as to Cause Some Pointed Remarks of Gentlemen of an oposite Political Character, such as George Thatcher is Courting Popularity Among the AntiFœderlist &c George Thatcher will Hurt himself” (Robert Southgate to GT, 15 June 1789, DHFFC 16:785). Other correspondents had earlier expressed this same concern. “You are said to have written letters to the W---dg---ies [William Widgerys]—the N---ns [Samuel Nassons]—the C---ys [Daniel Conys] &c &c.—for no other purpose than to secure a future election—while the gentlemen of character and ability were totally neglected by you—that persons of the former character were every day stepping about the floor of the [state] house with information fresh from Newyork, while gentlemen of the latter discription knew nothing but what N---n and W---y pleased to tell them, &c &c. I will not write another word—my heart bleeds a stream” (TBW to GT, 14 March 1789, DHFFC 15:65). “There are certain Honble. Gentlemen, who feel your omitting to write them, & construe this omission much to your disadvantage—they take notice of your frequently writing to the gentlemen, who live at Sandford [Samuel Nasson], New Glocester [William Widgery] & Hallowell [James Carr?]—you will pardon my mentioni[ng that] they [a]re watching for something, that they may make use of to your disadvantage—Have you wrote to Mr. [Dummer] Sewall of Bath, Judge [Nathaniel] Wells &c A word is sufficient—it [is] said, ‘that Mr. --- Mr. & Mrs. are shewing their letters from Congress & telling what their Friend Mr. --- has wrote them <illegible> when the first Gentlemen in the Commonwealth scarce ever hear from or of him’—these hints I trust will not be taken amiss” (SL to GT, 22 March 1789, GTP-Biddeford). Dummer Sewall (1737-1832), a farmer of Bath, served in the state Senate, 1788-89 and 1790-91.
2. “An Act for laying a duty on Goods, Wares, and Merchandises, imported into the United States” was signed by the Speaker and the president of the Senate on 2 July, and by President Washington on 4 July. For the complete legislative history, see DHFFC 4:940-83.
3. The first federal act imposing duties on tonnage, to take effect 15 August (not 1 August), had been slowed on its progress through Congress over the question of discriminating between nations in commercial treaty with the United States (such as France), and those not (most conspicuously, Great Britain). After a conference committee and various votes adhering to and disagreeing to a discrimination clause, the House finally agreed with the Senate amendment eliminating the provision, and the bill, signed by the Speaker of the House and president of the Senate on 8 July, was approved by President Washington on 20 July. For the complete legislative history, see DHFFC 6:1947-56.
1. The COWH did insert Pownalborough (present-day Dresden) as the alternate site on 24 August, perhaps at Thatcher’s request, and the amendment was retained in the final version of the Judiciary Act of 24 September 1789.
2. Something GT wrote in an unlocated letter to Thomas Rice of Wiscasset, dated 14 July, led the merchants there to believe mistakenly that this first Collection Act had failed to designate their town a port of entry for foreign shipping (Rice to GT, 11 Aug. 1789, DHFFC 16:1293-94). SL reported to GT that the news had set them all “a Jabbering,” since
there is ten times the Business done here, in proportion to the numbers, that there is even at Portland—The Harbour is equal to any in the world. . . . The people here are really federal, but should their Trade be incumbered in this manner, they begin to fear—they undoubtedly will improve the opportunities, that their Situation gives them for Smuggling—Which perhaps is the best in the world, there being such a number of creeks, Guts [channels], & by passages, it will be almost impossible to prevent it, if they are so disposed (SL to GT, 11 Aug. 1789, GTP-Biddeford).
The fact that Wiscasset’s reaction was based on erroneous information supplied by GT did little to alter the impression that he was out of his depth in matters of trade and commerce.
3. Richard Trevett (d. 1793), a privateersman during the Revolutionary War, had served as a state revenue officer at York for more than a decade before his appointment as federal collector there on 3 August 1789 (DHFFC 2:19, 513).
4. NB’s father in law—York’s most famous Tory, Jonathan Sayward—“was of the opinion that the Revolution would cause the decline of national virtue and prosperity in America” (James Henry Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the other side of the American Revolution [Boston, 1907], p. 444).
5. Like most other frugal Yankees in Congress, GT regarded (or rationalized) modest congressional pay as a venerable form of republican simplicity. In an unlocated letter written shortly after this, GT told TBW that congressional and executive compensations “are too high by at least one third.” TBW was probably not alone among GT’s correspondents in pointing out the anti-republican tendencies of too low a compensation, which “In a very few years . . . would have operated to the total exclusion of nine tenths of those citizens who are now well qualified either for Senators or Representatives” (TBW to GT, 9 Aug. 1789, DHFFC 16:1271). On 6 August, GT moved in the COWH to reduce members’ pay from six to five dollars per day. The motion was defeated by a large majority, and on 10 August the entire state delegation accounted for fully one half of the 16 vote minority against final passage of the House version of the Salaries-Legislative Bill (DHFFC 3:1411-42, 11:1184). GT’s only other recorded participation in the debate was to speak against concurring with a crucial Senate amendment discrimination between Representatives’ and Senators’ pay by granting the latter seven dollars per day beginning in 1795 (DHFFC 11:1473).
1. Possibly Lydia Smith Hooper (1727-1806). In 1744 she married Benjamin Hooper (1721-1802), Biddeford’s representative to General Court (1783-84) and first postmaster (1789-98). Only three of her nine children survived infancy—a circumstance that, along with her advanced age, may have made her a surrogate matriarch to younger families in the area (Charles Henry Pope and Thomas Hooper, eds., Hooper Genealogy [Boston, 1908], pp. 233-35).
1. Alexander Hamilton’s report on public credit, ordered by the House on 21 September 1789, was received there on 14 January 1790; 300 copies were ordered printed and it was agreed to postpone consideration in the COWH first until 28 January and then again until 8 February. For the report, see DHFFC 5:743-823.
2. It is impossible to say which of the many newspaper opinion pieces on public credit GT may have read, but holdings among the Thacher’s Tracts include at least four of the many pamphlets written in response to Hamilton’s report: Considerations on the nature of a funded debt; [Peletiah Webster] A Plea for the Poor Soldiers, on discriminating between original and secondary holders of public securities); and Fallacy Detected, by the Evidence of Facts . . . in a Letter to a Member of Congress (all in v. 9); and Remarks on the report of the Secretary of the Treasury to the House of Representatives . . . by a friend to the Public (v. 23).
3. GT here refers to the fight in the House over whether to discriminate between a primary holder of government securities given in payment for some forms of government debt during the war, and any primary holder’s subsequent assignee (or “secondary holders,” widely identified as rapacious speculators). Under discrimination, destitute primary holders who had been forced to sell off their certificates at deflated market value would still receive some of the value that the government was now prepared to pay the current holder. GT never spoke publicly on the issue, but privately he confided to Samuel Phillips Savage that he supported discrimination because it served the greater public good even if it was legalistically unjust—a position that his scandalized father in law equated with the public morality of Massachusetts’s notorious former Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson. If Thatcher was indeed among the minority who supported discrimination by a vote of only 13 against 36, he stood virtually alone among his fellow New Englanders (Samuel Phillips Savage to GT, 17 Feb. 1790, DHFFC 18:562; COWH vote, 22 Feb. 1790, DHFFC 12:479).
By the time a similar discrimination was later proposed under a different guise, constituents (and perhaps particularly his father in law) had some time to sway GT’s opinion about the justice due to secondary holders. When the Fifth Congress considered exempting primary holders from an act of limitation (an act preventing the settlement of public debt certificates after a certain time), extending the exemption for secondary holders was suddenly something GT could support—while characteristically flouting conventional pieties:
He did not think this description of men had done the millionth part of the injury ascribed to them. He believed they were in the situation of a certain other personage; for he was for giving the “Devil his due;” but he thought the old gentleman himself was often highly injured, by having more laid to his charge than he was guilty of (12 Dec. 1797, Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., p. 711).
4. John Gardiner (1737-93) was a Glasgow-trained lawyer and freshman state representative for Pownalboro (present-day Dresden). On 19 January 1790 he embarked on a populist campaign to reform the legal profession in Massachusetts by moving before the General Court a proposal for reducing clients’ expenses by simplifying and expediting legal procedures (especially relating to property, contract, and estate law). There is an irony in Gardiner’s pressing for such changes with the same fearless logic that GT urged in reviewing systems of religion and government. Gardiner’s opening words to the legislature (quoted below) might have been GT’s own in the First Congress debates over rules and procedure, or in the columns of “A Rational Christian”:
THE impressions and ideas which we receive and imbibe in our early years, generally grow up with, and attend us through life, too frequently interweave themselves, as it were, into our very constitution, and become prejudices. . . . to part with their long cherished opinions, deep-rooted by habit and almost sanctioned by custom and usage, requires efforts the most strenuous. . . . Even among the more liberal and enlightened of the human race, we find very few indeed who dare freely exercise this noblest gift of God, who dare freely think for themselves, dare open, and see, with their own eyes, hear with their own ears, compare, infer and judge from their own understandings. . . . There is, Sir, in most men, a strong, I had almost said a natural aversion, to alteration or reformation of long established, old, familiar systems, however erroneous, however defective, however absurd, however unintelligible ([Boston] Herald of Freedom, 22 Jan. 1790)
Yet GT was both skeptical of Gardiner’s motives and anxious about their impact: “I dont know any state or kingdom, where the laws have undergone so many changes, in so short a time, as the Massachusetts” ([GT] to [Daniel Cony], 31 Jan. 1790, DHFFC 18:367. The letter appeared in the [Boston] Herald of Freedom, 9 Feb. 1790, as an “Extract of a letter from a gentleman in the district of Maine, to his friend now in Boston”; for the identification of author and recipient, which was acknowledged by many of GT’s correspondents, see DHFFC 18:367-68). Ultimately, the Massachusetts House passed only one of Gardiner’s proposals, permitting anyone with a power of attorney the right to serve as a lawyer. For more on this episode, see DHFFC 18:235.
5. “Bar calls” or “Bar Meetings” were lawyers’ meetings targeted by Gardiner for their supposed purpose of setting legal procedures and fees. “I should not imagine that all ever held in this part of the Commonwealth [Maine], have done so much hurt as a mouse would do in a mill in ten minutes—and yet I should hardly think it demands a parliamentary interposition to exterminate mice from the face of the earth” ([GT] to [Daniel Cony], 31 Jan. 1790, DHFFC 18:367).
1. NB had reconsidered his offer to sell his copy of the General Dictionary, Historical and Critical (London, 1734-41), by Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), and urged Thatcher to purchase his own in New York City (NB to GT, 21 Feb. 1790, Chamberlain).
2. The French author and social critic Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) compared the French and English theaters in Letters 18 and 19 of his Letters on England (1st English ed., London, 1733). NB credited his friend with having read the famous French philosophe, although GT is not known to have owned any titles by Voltaire (NB to GT, 24 March 1790, DHFFC 19:986). And although the New-York Society Library, then located on the third floor of Federal Hall, lists an English edition of Voltaire’s Letters in its 1789 catalog, the Library’s charging ledger does not list GT’s name among the book’s borrowers. In a much later letter to GT, TBW identified Voltaire, along with Thomas Paine “and the D—l,” as “some of your old friends” (TBW to GT, 4 Nov. 1818, Wait Letters).
3. NB’s thoughts, from his letter of 21 February, supporting full funding of government securities at face value and assumption of the states’ war debts, are excerpted in DHFFC 18:595-97.
4. GT here plays on the orthodox Protestant belief in justification by faith rather than works (Romans 3:28). This was an ironic twist for GT, given that the Protestant Reformation arose in large part as a challenge to the Catholic emphasis on “works” (especially in the corrupted form of purchasing indulgences for dead souls).
5. GT probably refers to the historian Jeremy Belknap (1744-98), minister of Boston’s Federal Street from 1787 until his death. He is the only clergyman known to have written letters to Wingate during this period, including on the subject of public credit, although none of them matching GT’s description of this letter has been located. The “divine maxim” is from Proverbs 14:34.
6. Both the British political philosopher Henry St. John, viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1757) and French philosophe Voltaire, particularly in his Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), showed evidence of anti-Semitism in their writings (Thomas Macknight, Life of Lord Bolingbroke [1863], p. 598).
7. The episode now thought to have peacefully resolved territorial rivalry through inter-tribal marriages between Rome and its neighbors in ca. 750 b.c. was, already well before Thatcher’s lifetime, popularly depicted in historical literature and artistic renderings as the legendary “Rape of the Sabine women.”
8. The suppression of a four year-long rebellion in Rome’s Province of Judea climaxed in its legions’ notorious sack of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 a.d., and the beginning of the last major Jewish diaspora, known as the Roman or Edom Exile.
9. A reference to the Indian subcontinent’s subordination to Great Britain through surrogate indigenous client rulers or (after 1717) the East India Company.
1. Between 16 March and the date of GT’s writing, most of the recorded House debate revolved around the procedural handling of petitions. Private claims—then, and throughout the First Congress—accounted for the overwhelming majority of these petitions. But even the committee report on Quaker antislavery petitions, which was taken up on 16 March and constituted the single lengthiest subject of debate over the ensuing week, largely sidestepped the foregone conclusion and focused instead on how Congress would express what it could not do to answer the petitioners’ prayers.
2. GT’s calculations proved accurate: on 12 April, in the first floor vote in the COWH to assume the states’ war debts, the entire eight-man delegation from Massachusetts voted in favor, as did the two voting members from New Hampshire, Abiel Foster and Nicholas Gilman. The third member from the Granite State, Samuel Livermore, could not vote, as he was then chairing the committee. In the full House, Livermore would ultimately vote in favor of assumption while Gilman would switch to the negative. For the best succinct treatment of the ebb and flow of votes leading up to the Compromise of 1790, see Kenneth R. Bowling, “Dinner at Jefferson’s: A Note on Jacob E. Cooke’s ‘The Compromise of 1790’,” WMQ, v. 28, 4(Oct. 1971):629-40.
3. The two members of the five-man North Carolina House delegation who had arrived by this time were Dr. Hugh Williamson, a stalwart anti-assumptionist, and John Baptiste Ashe, who initially favored assumption but changed his position by 10 April (DHFFC 14:740-41).
4. Massachusetts’s gubernatorial election of 1790 pitted the incumbent John Hancock against James Bowdoin II, the perennial candidate of the anti-Hancock faction, whose only prior tenure as governor in 1785-87 was marred by high inflation and the aggressive suppression of “Shays’s Rebellion.” Hancock won the April election overwhelmingly. Bowdoin died less than six months later.
1. As recently as 22 February, Sewall was complaining about ambiguities and deficiencies in the Punishment of Crimes Act’s provisions for capital convictions. In addition to clarification about the issuance of warrants for capital convictions (which language remained unchanged, as GT had predicted on 7 February; see No. 40, above), Sewall had enquired about the manner of execution:
Are they to be beheaded, shot, drowned Hanged, or Bur[n]t, &c &c. This Idea may at first appear unnecessary—you will say perhaps that Hanging has been the common mode of Execution, and doubtless that will be adopted. Be it So But then is it not Easy for the Legislature to Say so & in case they say nothing about it and the Court should order the Convict to be Shot, will it be Illegal (David Sewall to GT, 22 Feb. 1790, DHFFC 18:606).
The House did act upon an unidentified member’s motion by adding a section, ultimately agreed to by the Senate and signed into law with the rest of the bill on 30 April: “That the manner of inflicting the punishment of death, shall be by hanging the person convicted by the Neck until dead.”
The matter was of more than purely hypothetical interest to Sewall. Since July 1789, Thomas Bird had languished in Portland’s jail awaiting trial for piracy. Sewall presided over the trial and conviction on 5 June 1790, and Bird’s public hanging on 25 June became the first execution under federal law in the United States (Thomas Bird to George Washington, 5 June 1790, PGW:Presidential 5:478-81; Peleg W. Chandler, ed., “Notes on the Early Jurisprudence of Maine,” The Law Reporter 3[Boston, 1841]:46).
1. TBW’s letter of 21 April discussed fees for a post rider from Pownalborough (present-day Dresden) to Portland, asked GT to enquire of John Fenno about procuring print type, and warned that GT’s constituents would resent Congress’s failure to assume the states’ war debts: “What in God’s name have you been doing, Gentlemen?” (TBW to GT, 21 April 1790, DHFFC 19:1282).
2. “Man can arrive to very few general Truths in morals, politics, or Theology—For knowledge, in these subjects, not founded on experience is worth but little; and the longest life is too short, after it is duly prepared to observe, to make many usefull experiments—And the system, founded on the most accurate estimate of facts, will always be objected to by the multitude; because of its novelty—that is, its perfection” (GT to TBW, 6 April 1790, DHFFC 19:1157).
1. “After an Eight months silence I once more set down to write you a few lines, as thinking by this time it is probable you may wish to here from your friends in Yarmouth; tho’ you take care not to let them hear one word from you—And if we did not once in a while see your name in print we might possable forgo that ever there was shuch a man as I am now writing to” (Thomas Thacher to GT, 15 April 1790, DHFFC 19:1235).
2. James Hawes (b. 1732), a native of Yarmouth, died in Attleboro, Massachusetts on 27 November 1789 (Leonard H. Smith, Jr., ed., Cape Cod Library of Local History and Genealogy [2 vols.; Baltimore, 1992] 1:1052).
3. The Mary Thacher of Boston who wrote to GT on 9 May 1790, seeking his assistance in the disposition of an estate in Pennsylvania, may have been Mary Given Thacher (ca. 1741-1817), a native of Maryland, who was the second wife of GT’s first cousin, Capt. Elisha Thacher (1734-95), a sea captain of Barnstable, Massachusetts. Thatcher would recall with fondness the couple’s generosity under more affluent circumstances, when he lived with them in Yarmouth sometime between 1775 and 1780. At this time, Capt. Thacher and his wife were living under more straitened circumstances in Boston (GT to SST, 18 April 1790; Mary Thatcher to GT, 9 May 1790, DHFFC 19:1266-67, 1468; Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, pp. 313-14).
4. Elizabeth (1756-1844) and Sarah (b. 1758) were daughters of Daniel Taylor and Elizabeth Joyce, of Yarmouth. The younger Elizabeth married Capt. John Bassett (1753-1805) in 1786; Sarah was married to Joseph Gorham (b. 1754), whose older brother Isaac was married to Thatcher’s older sister Sarah. Joyce Taylor (b. 1753) was their older brother (Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, pp. 338, 340).
5. Probably Desire Thacher Taylor (1722-1800), widow of Captain William Taylor (1713-post 1765) of Barnstable, Massachusetts. Although they were second cousins (their paternal grandfathers being brothers), Thatcher might well have called her “Aunt Taylor” out of deference to her significantly older age (Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, pp. 171-72, 311-12).
6. Cape Cod’s fishing fleet relied heavily on salt imported from Rhode Island to cure its main export, and on the bounty paid on salted fish exported beyond the limits of the U.S. (as provided under the Impost Act of 1789). Thomas had pointed out to his brother the burden imposed upon the already beleaguered fishermen if they had to pay the impost duty on salt from Rhode Island, and then forfeit the bounty on the summer’s catch of salted provisions exported back to Rhode Island after it became part of the union: “to loose it will wholley brake-up the business in this place” (Thomas Thacher to GT, 15 April 1790, DHFFC 19:1237).
7. George Partridge (1740-1828) was a schoolteacher of Duxbury, Massachusetts, and former state legislator and member of the Continental and Confederation congresses when he was elected to the First Federal Congress as representative for the Plymouth-Barnstable District, comprising Plymouth, Barnstable, Dukes (Martha’s Vineyard), and Nantucket counties. He was defeated for reelection but served several more terms as state representative.
8. The Rhode Island Trade Bill renewed and intensified Congress’s policy of treating “Rogue Island” as a foreign state under the first revenue and tonnage acts. Congress temporarily suspended that policy late in the first session, in anticipation of the recalcitrant state’s ratifying the Constitution. But after repeated failures to call a ratifying convention, and a begrudgingly-authorized convention that adjourned after only one day, impatient Senators like Oliver Ellsworth (Conn.) seized upon “a pretty bold measure” by presenting the bill in the Senate on 13 May, where it passed five days later with every New Englander but Paine Wingate (N.H.) voting with the 13-8 majority. The bill’s stronger sanctions and the demand that within six months the state pay its share of government expenses up through 4 March 1789, was viewed as “tyrannical, and arbitrary” by some. But the gamble worked: delegates hastily convened on 24 May and ratified five days later, by a majority of two votes—after four Antifederalist members discretely absented themselves. The Rhode Island Trade Bill, which was sent down to the House on 19 May, did not come up for debate there before 1 June, when Congress was notified of Rhode Island’s ratification and the COWH was discharged from further consideration of the bill (DHFFC 2:314, 6:1810-14, 19:1562, 1583, 1739; Maier, Ratification, p. 459).
9. Thomas had asked GT to support the appointment of Barnstable’s federal revenue collector Joseph Otis as assistant federal marshal, in which case “he will employ me to ride with him through One or Two Towns.” But Thomas insisted, “I dont mean for you to do any thing but what is exactly agreeable to your plan of politicks” (Thomas Thacher to GT, 15 April 1790, DHFFC 19:1236).
1. This was Mifflin’s “Token of my friendly remembrance of thee” from his weeks lobbying Congress on behalf of the antislavery petitions of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers), the New York Yearly Meeting, and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society between 6 February and 25 March 1790. Although much maligned for his intrusiveness both in and out of Congress, “I am not uneasy thereat knowing my Motive, and shall be pleased to have similer oppertunities with many of you again” (Warner Mifflin to GT, 4 May 1790, DHFFC 19:1429).
2. “I had considerable acquaintance with friend Mifflin, during his attendance, as one of the Committee from the Society of friends, upon Congress” (GT to TBW, 6 Nov. 1790, DHFFC 21:52).
3. Mifflin had protested his disinterestedness in promoting the petitions’ cause: “I want no favour from Goverment as to any thing pecuniary. . . . It has been said that I acted as I did to gain the favour of the delegates of Congress to carry points, in a Political Line” (Warner Mifflin to GT, 4 May 1790, DHFFC 19:1429).
4. James Pemberton, chairman of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s committee of correspondence, sent GT a packet of (unidentified) antislavery publications at some point over the ensuing months. GT gratefully acknowledged the gift while his reelection was still pending: “I do not expect to be returned in the new Congress, & therefore ’tis probable I may never see you again—but if you, or your friends shall make a Journey into the eastern part of Massachusetts, I must insist on their calling to see me” (GT to James Pemberton, 3 March 1791, DHFFC 21:997). GT apparently confused James Pemberton, whom he had never met, with the younger brother John, who had lobbied with Mifflin in New York in the winter and spring of 1790.
5. Mifflin was only the most conspicuous of the eleven “deputies” from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting who attended on Congress until their petitions were referred to a House committee. Only four remained after the committee’s first meeting on 15 February: Mifflin, Samuel Emlen, Jr. (1730-99), John Parrish, Jr. (1729-1807), and John Pemberton (1727-95), whose letters to his older brother James in Philadelphia constitute the fullest first-person account of the lobbying effort. For a full account of that effort, see William C. diGiacomantonio, “ ‘For the gratification of a volunteering society’: Antislavery and Pressure Group Politics in the First Federal Congress,” JER, v. 15, 2(Summer 1995):169-97.
1. Psalm 76:10.
2. Matthew 18:17.
3. By a concurrent vote on 22 June, the Massachusetts legislature elected Beverly merchant George Cabot to the U.S. Senate upon the expiration of the two-year term that Tristram Dalton had drawn in the first classification of senators. Dalton, whom the eastern commercial interest had nominated as their dark horse compromise candidate for the state’s second U.S. Senate seat in 1788, had proven a capable if unexceptional senator. The vote was close and must have surprised many in the Massachusetts delegation since, by Theodore Sedgwick’s sensible appraisal, “there certainly is no more reason to leave him out than there was originally to choose him.” Christopher Gore questioned whether “any of our delegation attempted, by a correspondence with their friends, to promote Mr. D’s reelection.” GT certainly never campaigned on Dalton’s behalf. He was friendly with both candidates, but there is no reason to believe that he ever came to share TBW’s later opinion that “Since the death of Hamilton, there has not been, and is not, as a politician, a man to be compared with Mr. Cabot” (Theodore to Pamela Sedgwick, 27 June 1790, DHFFC 19:1942; Christopher Gore to Rufus King, 28 June 1790, DHFFC 19:1949; TBW to GT, 29 Jan. 1813, Wait Letters).
4. Matthew 24:44.
5. GT had criticized Massachusetts’s “Act for rendering processes in law less expensive” (Ch. 43, 15 Nov. 1786) and a supplemental act (Ch. 59, 28 March 1788) in ten of the first eleven numbers of his newspaper editorials published under the pseudonym “Crazy Jonathan” in 1787-88. To disgruntled citizens whose antipathy towards the legal establishment was still smoldering in the wake of Shays’s Rebellion, Crazy Jonathan warned against the unintended consequences of frequent changes in methods of jurisprudence. More specifically, he questioned the constitutionality as well as fiscal soundness of the Act’s aim to streamline legal processes by empowering all justices of the peace to take legal cognizance of civil actions before allowing them to proceed, when necessary, to the courts of common pleas (Nos. 1-6 and 8-11 in CG, 13, 20, 27 Sept., 4, 11, 18 Oct., 9 and 15 Nov. 1787, and 8 and 15 May 1788).
1. GT’s first documented mention of reading Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, ou de l’Education (1762; 1st English ed., London, 1763) is found in his journal entry for 21 December 1784. The next day he recorded “My whole attention this day has been on Emillius—made no visit.” On 23 December, he journaled:
I still continue reading Emilus—and have been much please with a Sentence or two in Vol. 1st. page 282 [Book III, paragraph 60]. “It is a folly to require them (children) to apply themselves to things, merely because they are told in general Terms, that such things are good for them while they are ignorant in what that good consists; we may in vain assure them they will find their Interest therein as they grow up; while they are uninterested by their present use, they are incapable of comprehending the future”—this may, I think, with great justness be said of the manner used in the Pulpit of advising, exhorting & persuaiding People to embrace Christianity. Mankind are with respect to the things they are unacquainted with mere Children—and as often as they have no precise determinate Ideas of a thing as to the happiness or misery it may bring along with it, and yet pursue, or avoid it, by the Authority or persuaison of those imagined their superior—they act more like children who are drove or led about by their Masters in geting their Lessons, than Rational Creatures—The Joys of the New Jerusalem take less hold of peoples feelings that the prospects of Gaining one hundred pounds by a Voyage to the West-Indias—And tho the Pulpits should sound for ages to come, as they have for ages past, with the Terrors of Hell Torments—the generality of mankind will never be put off from those pursuits that appear highly probable of securing their worldly Interest—unless they can be convinced, by feeling a natural Connection between those pursuits and the Torments of Hell pains awaiting them in another world—I have long since thought there must be a Reform in the mode of Lecturing mankind before there can be expected a general Reformation of their Sentiments & Views (TFP).
2. Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1755; 1st English ed., London, 1761), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s essay on the impact of civilization upon mankind, was written for a prize competition in 1754 but not published until the next year.
3. Observations on Man (1749) by the English metaphysician David Hartley (1704-57), and Treatise on Man: His Intellectual Faculties and His Education (1772; 1st English ed., London, 1777) by the French philosophe Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715-71).
4. Printed in 1761 under its formal title, Julie, or the New Helois, Rousseau’s celebrated epistolary novel Eloisa explored the ethics of personal autonomy in the face of rational and societal norms.
5. “Tho you are pleased to compliment me on account of my good taste in the choice of books; I assure you, in this, you are almost alone—but I am, sometimes, so odd as to estimate a departure from the common road of thinking, a marke of accuracy in judgment” (GT to Sarah Sayward Barrell, 8 April 1790, DHFFC 19:1178).
1. The “conjectures” were evidently posted in Sewall’s (unlocated) letter of 12 July.
2. James Sullivan had earlier observed to GT that “When we cast our Eye on the map . . . & consider the extent Westward we should I think conceive the Potomack the central place” (James Sullivan to GT, 22 Aug. 1788, Coll. 420, John S.H. Fogg Autograph Collection, MeHi).
3. GT seems to be referring to the impediments upon immigration and natural population growth posed by the southern plantation system’s reliance on slave labor to sustain its land- and labor-intensive modes of agriculture.
4. Solon (639-559 b.c.), Athenian statesman and lawgiver, whom the biographer Plutarch (46?-120) credited with instituting constitutional reforms that were not the best the Athenians could be given, but the best they were capable of receiving.
5. In good conscience.
1. This letter has not been identified.
2. NB’s letter warned of efforts in the second federal election to oust GT by “every artifice,” including claims that he had supported high government salaries, voted a high compensation for Baron von Steuben’s military claims as inspector general of the Continental Army, and most damagingly, that he lumped Bibles with wool cards for purposes of the impost, “thus lightly esteeming what they would have others think they conceive to be of the highest importance” (NB to GT, 10 July 1790, DHFFC 20:2066). Wool cards are hand-held paddles studded with thistles, used for combing through wool and other fibers to disentangle and clean it.
3. Socinians were a sect of nontrinitarian Christianity, predecessors of modern Unitarianism, who emerged in 16th century Poland and Transylvania (part of modern Romania) as followers of the Italian theologian Faustus Socinus (1539-1604).
4. Although difficult to interpret, Thomas Lloyd’s shorthand notes for his Congressional Register for 17 April 1789 suggest GT unsuccessfully moved to add all printed matter—including Bibles, but also “plays, farces, tragedies, and novels”—to the list of paper products scheduled for a seven and a half percent ad valorem duty. Of this list, only blank books and paper were ultimately taxed above the five percent rate for all non-enumerated items under the first Impost Act of 1789 (DHFFC 5:955-56, 10:177). Oddly, GT’s notes of House debates for this period (1 April-7 May 1789, in TFP), do not record his own contribution to this interesting debate.
5. Printers sought federal encouragement of their trade within weeks of the First Congress convening, in petitions soliciting contracts for official government printing and paper supplies, which were arranged directly through the Senate Secretary and House Clerk. Other measures indirectly encouraging the domestic printing industry included providing members with newspapers of their choice at public expense (as Congress had done since 1779), and certifying the publication and dissemination of federal statutes in at least three public newspapers and in additional copies for Senators, Representatives, and state executives, under the Records Act of September 1789 (DHFFC 8:676-80, 736-42, 745-47).
Shortly before the First Congress met, a circular subscribed by five New York City booksellers and printers attempted unsuccessfully to generate a petition seeking congressional authorization for the exclusive production and sale of domestic bibles (Hugh Gaine et al., Circular, 10 Jan. 1789, Zinman Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia). On 25 February 1790, the famous printer and antiquarian Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831) of Worcester, Massachusetts wrote Thatcher of his “strong inclination to print Bibles” and that “Congress ought to have the right of privileging persons for that purpose.” Worcester judge Edward Bangs broached the same subject on Thomas’s behalf just a week earlier, suggesting that Thatcher privately discuss it with Fisher Ames and others members of Congress, but no action seems to have been taken on either letter (Isaiah Thomas to GT, 25 Feb. 1790, Coll. 420, John S.H. Fogg Autograph Collection, MeHi; Edward Bangs to GT, 16 Feb. 1790, DHFFC 18:556).
The only First Congress patent petition to result in a private bill was Francis Bailey’s petition seeking patent protection for his anti-counterfeit printing technique and soliciting government contracts that utilized the technique. The Bailey Bill was presented in the House on 29 January 1790, passed on 2 March, and sent to the Senate, where its further consideration was overtaken by passage of the Patent Act in April 1790 (DHFFC 8:73-84).
6. In July 1777, Philadelphia clergy petitioned the Continental Congress to supervise an original American printing of the Bible, to offset the wartime’s dwindling supply. Given the difficulty of securing paper and type, Congress agreed to a committee recommendation to import 20,000 bibles from Europe, but no action was taken. In 1781, Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken petitioned Congress to authenticate his printing of the first American edition, and Congress authorized him to advertise their endorsement of the historic edition he published the following year (DHFFC 8:306).
7. Playing cards did not appear as an enumerated item in the House version of the first Impost Act until added in the Senate on 10 June, at ten cents per pack (DHFFC 5:977).
8. A paraphrase of Psalm 26:2 and Jeremiah 11:20.
9. Athanasius of Alexandria (ca. 293-373) was an Egyptian bishop and theologian of the early Church.
1. “I have my doubts whether you will be reelected. Opposition arises from quarters from whence it was the least expected. Ambition and Friendship are very unneighbourly passions—they will not live lovingly together in the same habitation—where the former prevails there is no room possitively no room for the latter. You may, perhaps, long have believed this doctrine—Now you are about to experience the truth of it. But no more of this matter. ‘It makes me angry while I sing’ ” (TBW to GT, 17 July 1790, DHFFC 20:2160). Wait quotes from “A Cradle Hymn” (1715) by British clergyman Isaac Watts (1674-1748).
1. In the first runoff election on 26 November, York gave GT 45 votes against Nathaniel Wells’s seven (https://elections.lib.tufts.edu/catalog/tufts:ma.uscongress.8.ballot2.1790 [accessed July 2015]). The previous general election in York, on 4 October, had given GT only 18 against Wells’s 26 votes (https://elections.lib.tufts.edu/catalog/tufts:ma.uscongress.8.1790 [accessed July 2015]).
2. In the early summer of 1789, Spanish warships seized British merchant ships trading out of Nootka Sound, on the west coast of present-day Vancouver Island, British Columbia, which Spain claimed among its territorial possessions. The incident escalated to a war crisis when the aggrieved British traders petitioned Parliament and the government of William Pitt “the Younger” announced preparations for war with Spain in May 1790. Spain ultimately yielded all points in dispute under the Treaty of El Escorial (October 1790). The Nootka Sound Affair epitomizes how intricately otherwise disparate strands were interwoven throughout the Euro-American geopolitics of the time: revolutionary pressures at home prevented France’s Bourbon crown from honoring their “Family Compact” to support Spain’s ruling Bourbons in the crisis (May 1790), and Spain in turn was unable to support their Creek allies, who were forced to negotiate the cession of territory in Georgia under the Treaty of New York (August 1790). Pending the crisis’s resolution, American merchants eagerly anticipated the commercial windfall of supplying interrupted trade among its two largest colonizing neighbors on the continent, even while American mariners were facing the threat of renewed impressment in the ports of England (DHFFC 19:1690-91).
3. Brigadier General Josiah Harmar led a punitive expedition of 400 federal troops and 1500 Kentucky and Pennsylvania militia against hostile forces of the Miami Confederacy (consisting of the Miami and elements of the Shawnee and Cherokee), occupying present-day central Indiana. Much of the invasion force returned to Ft. Knox (Vincennes, Indiana) without meeting any serious opposition, but a larger force out of Ft. Washington (Cincinnati, Ohio) suffered a decisive defeat on 22 October (DHFFC 19:1859).
1. Caleb Jewett (1753-1802), a Dartmouth College graduate of 1776 with a reputation for controversy, served as pastor of the Congregational Church in Gorham, Maine, from 1783 to 1800 (McLellan and Lewis, Gorham, pp. 190-92).
2. GT won 41 of the 44 votes cast in Gorham in the first runoff election held on 26 November (https://elections.lib.tufts.edu/catalog/tufts:ma.uscongress.8.ballot2.1790 [accessed July 2015]).
3. Balloting in the first runoff election had closed on 26 November. “Electioneering, I suppose, is now over, & the matter decided—but how I cannot even form a probable conjecture—However, I assure you, if I am left out it will neither give me pain, or mortification” (GT to SST, 28 Nov. 1790, TFP).
1. [Elijah Kellogg?] to the CG, 20 Dec. 1790, DHFFC 22:1420-22. Kellogg (1761-1842) was pastor of Portland’s Second Church (Congregational), 1788-1811. The writer identified himself as “The Author of the Above-mentioned Thanksgiving Sermon” targeted in two pro-GT campaign pieces criticizing “A certain pert Thumper of the ‘Drum ecclesiastick’,” and “a young clergyman” who “(perhaps at the instigation of a few factious individuals) has commenced the skirmish of publick abuse from the pulpit” (“A Card” and “Ultimatum” [Samuel C. Johonnet], CG, 29 Nov., 6 Dec. 1790, DHFFC 22:1407, 1409). Less than two years later, Kellogg married the daughter of Capt. Joseph McLellan of Portland, who had led the campaign to defeat GT in the second federal election.
2. Matthew 23:23. GT recycles this expression from his “Crazy Jonathan” essay, No. 13 (8 Jan. 1789; see Miscellaneous Writings, below).
3. Kellogg quoted “The pretended depth and difficulty in matters of state is a mere cheat. From the beginning of the world to this day, you never found a Commonwealth, where the leaders having honesty enough, wanted skill enough to lead her to her true interest at home and abroad” (DHFFC 22:1421), from Book I, Chapter XII of “Libertas,” part of the utopian treatise Oceana (1656) by the English philosopher James Harrington (1611-77). The title appears on an undated list of books that GT compiled as a partial catalog of his personal library (TFP).
4. The Athenian philosopher and social critic Socrates (ca. 469–399 b.c.) was tried for corruption of morals and disrespect to the city’s gods, and condemned to commit suicide.
5. From Essay IV, Chapter 8, “Of a True Understanding,” in De l’Esprit (1758), the most famous work of the French philosophe Claude Adrien Helvétius, and first published in English as Essays on the Mind (London, 1759). Multiple copies and translations of the Essays were available for GT’s use at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
2. Communications relative to Harmar’s expedition in the Northwest Territory were received in the War Department on the evening of 13 December 1790 and enclosed in President Washington’s address to the House on that subject the next day (DHFFC 5:1358-65).
3. GT refers to an unofficial account that he read either as it circulated privately or as it appeared in the non-extant issue of the (Penn.) Harrisburg Journal of 25 January, which was not reprinted in Philadelphia papers until 16 February. The news was officially conveyed to President Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox by federal judge Rufus Putnam in letters dated 8 January and transmitted to the House on 27 January. Along with the communications relative to Harmar’s expedition, transmitted a month earlier, these reports added to the momentum for raising an additional regiment for the federal army and other provisions for the defense of the western frontier under the Military Establishment Act of 3 March 1791.
4. Stephen Collins (1733-94) was a prominent Quaker merchant of Philadelphia, and a sympathizer with the revolutionary cause during the war. NB’s younger brother William (1743-76) started his mercantile career in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, but suffered reversals of fortune after moving to Philadelphia by 1774; Collins, a friend and business associate, served as administrator of his mismanaged estate (Finding Aide, Coll. 2129, Barrell Family Collection, MeHi; Winthrop Sargent, ed., Letters of John Andrews, Esq., of Boston, 1772-1776 [Cambridge, Mass., 1866], pp. 3-6).
5. One of the more radical sects to emerge during the theologically experimental era of the English Commonwealth (1649-60). Like their contemporaries the Quakers, and the Shakers who came after them, the Ranters were named for their style of worship.
6. The following description suggests that GT was witnessing a sermon by Rev. Joseph Pilmore (1734-1825), assistant rector of St. Paul’s (Episcopal) Church, on Third Street below Walnut, from 1789 to 1794. Born in England and educated through John Wesley’s personal patronage, Pilmore served as a Methodist itinerant preacher in America until he converted to the Protestant Episcopal Church after the Revolutionary War. He preached at St. Paul’s every Sunday night, “where he had a vast assembly of attentive hearers” numbering seven hundred communicants. The immediacy and close attention evident in GT’s account here, informed by the importance he attached to his own religious experimenting and experiences, warrants a closer inspection of Pilmore’s manner:
In person he was of portly and noble bearing . . . and his appearance altogether was unusually prepossessing. The two most remarkable characteristics of his preaching, as I remember it [recalled one young colleague in later life], were evangelical fervor and simplicity. . . . He wrote his sermons. . . . [and] began not only by reading, but by reading very deliberately, and with little animation; but he would gradually wax warm, and you would see his eye begin to kindle, and the muscles of his face to move and expand, until at length his soul would be all on fire, and he would be rushing onward extemporaneously almost with the fury of a cataract. And the only use he would make of his manuscript in such cases would be to roll it up in his hand, and literally shake it at his audience. When he was in these excited moods, his gesture was abundant. . . . He had a sonorous and somewhat rotund voice, though not very musical. . . . Some of his brethren, I believe, were disposed to consider him as over-zealous, if not positively fanatical; and they reprobated some of his free movements, as scarcely consistent with the rules of his Church (William B. Sprague, ed., Annals of the American Episcopal Pulpit [New York, 1859], pp. 266-70).
7. The cry of Paul and Silas’s repentant jailor in Macedonia, as recorded in Acts 16:30.
8. Benjamin Huntington (1736-1800), a lawyer of Norwich, Connecticut, served sporadically in the Confederation Congress from 1780 to 1783 and again in 1788, when he would have become acquainted with GT. During this session, they shared two rooms in a boardinghouse on Front Street, where fellow representatives Benjamin Goodhue, Jonathan Grout, George Leonard and George Partridge (all of Massachusetts), and Senator Paine Wingate (N.H.) also took rooms. Despite being the First Congress’s expert committee member on patent and copyright legislation, Huntington was one of the two Connecticut incumbents not reelected to the Second Congress (DHFFC 14:501-06, 22:1859-61).
1. The petitions mentioned here, submitted to the Massachusetts General Court in November 1788, were Portland’s response to the legislature’s order in March of that year, for a six mile square tract between the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers to be set off and appropriated for the foundation of a college in Maine. In March 1791, Cumberland County Senator Josiah Thacher promoted a bill for establishing a college in Gorham (near Portland), but it failed to pass the House. Legislation was taken up again in the winter of 1791-92, discreetly omitting Cumberland County as the intended site, and the bill establishing Bowdoin College in Brunswick was enacted in June 1794 (Jedidiah Morse, The American Geography [1789; reprint, New York, 1970], p. 198; “Historical Sketch of Bowdoin College,” [Boston] The American Quarterly Register, v. 8, 2[Nov. 1835]:14).
2. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 b.c.–43 b.c.), the Roman philosopher, lawyer, and politician, defended Stoic philosophy in his treatise Tusculan Disputations (ca. 45 b.c.), said to have been written at his villa in Tusculum, outside Rome.
1. “If you had known what a Cordial one kind look or closing hand would have been to me, when you last passed, your feelings would have constrained you to [have] turn’d aside for a few moments,” wrote Samuel Phillips Savage to his negligent son in law (10 Dec. 1791, Foster Family). But with the chastisement came relief for GT’s anxieties: “The sight of your hand writing, tho a little altered, affords me inexpressable delight—a pleasure the more poignant as it was a sudden contrast to the grief of mind but a little before occasioned by a Letter from the Doctor [Samuel Savage] informing me of your dangerous situation” (GT to Samuel Phillips Savage, 12 Jan. 1792, MG 836, Savage Family Papers, New Jersey Historical Society, Newark).
2. Capt. John Flagg kept a tavern on the main post road in Weston, Massachusetts (Daniel L. Lamson and John N. McClintock, “Weston,” Massachusetts Magazine 2[1909]:135).
3. Adding to this usual concern, GT left SST in a “little illness” when he went to Philadelphia for the first session of the Second Congress. As their daughter Lucy was born almost seven months later, it may have been nothing more than morning sickness. However, over the ensuing months SST did suffer a variety of other ailments: a “Rewmatick Complaint,” influenza, and something Thatcher called “the cursed old itch”—for which GT suggested “perhaps so little as a single drop on ten or dozen pimples could do you no possible harm” (GT to SST, 30 Oct. 1791, TFP; David Sewall to GT, 15 March 1792, Chamberlain; GT to SST, 12 March, 23 Feb. 1792, TFP). Lucy may have suffered long-term effects from her mother’s impaired health during the pregnancy; she died at age 28, the only one of GT’s ten children to predecease him.
1. To SST as well, GT blamed his temporary lapse on his being “in a roving, unsettled state—Since I took lodgings at Dr. Lynns I have wrote pretty often.” But there would be a trade-off: “being cleverly accommodated, I suspect I shall be more remiss, about meeting [worship].” This came just a month after GT made some pretense to doing better: “My friends, as well as my enemies have reproached me for not attending meeting—I have some thoughts now of removing from the former this source of pain & from the latter, of pleasure” (GT to SST, 22 Dec., 10 Nov. 1791, TFP). Dr. John Linn (d. 1793), a hospital director in the Continental Army and then surgeon in the Continental Navy, lived on Dock Street at the time of the federal census in 1790.
2. Widgery would point out that “the mode of appointment is one thing and the appointment another,” suggesting that the election might be by the authority appointed by the state constitution, but the commissioning be by congressional authority (William Widgery to GT, 5 Dec. 1791, Chamberlain). Under Chapter II, Section I, Article X of the Massachusetts Constitution, subalterns and officers up to the rank of major general were to be elected by the written ballots of subordinate officers immediately responsible to them. In the event, the Militia Bill passed by the House on 6 March “leaves the appointment of all the officers in the States, where the Constitution placed it” (GT to Samuel Jordan, 28 March 1792, TFP).
3. With the overthrow of Rome’s kings and the establishment of the Roman Republic in 509 b.c., supreme political power was vested in two consuls elected annually. Decimviri were special commissions of ten members. Although there were various types throughout the history of the Roman Republic (religious, judicial, etc.), the most important was established in 451 b.c. to settled long-standing disputes between the patrician and plebian classes. Initially charged only with compiling a new set of laws (based on Solon’s laws for Athens), the Decemviri were corrupted in the exercise of their supreme powers, and forced to abdicate two years later.
4. Widgery continued to advocate the 1 per 30,000 ratio, insisting in his reply “I have not Seen any Person yet who wishes for or Expects Less” (William Widgery to GT, 5 Dec. 1791, Chamberlain).
1. The Patents Act of 10 April 1790 established a board made up of the attorney general and the secretaries of state and war, any two of whom were authorized to judge any “invention or discovery sufficiently useful and important” to issue letters-patent, valid for up to fourteen years.
2. GT had presented a patent petition from John Stone to the House on 15 February 1790. Its claim to “a new and expeditious method . . . of driving piles attached together, whereby the construction of wooden bridges over the broadest and deepest streams may be greatly facilitated,” provoked some controversy in Massachusetts. Among its critics was Judge Sewall, whose influence may have been behind the House’s unusual decision to offer Stone leave to withdraw his petition on 20 June of that year. Stone was ultimately issued a patent for his method of driving wooden piles for bridges on 10 March 1791. The petitioner may have been the John Stone (1732-1817), of Concord, Massachusetts, who captained a Minuteman company in the Lexington Alarm of 1775 (DHFFC 8:46-47, 49, 50).
3. Daniel Cony thought Washington’s annual address to Congress on 25 October demonstrated “The President is unquestionably a Man of great prudence, possessing in an eminent degree, that peculiar virtue called Common Sense” (Daniel Cony to GT, 25 Nov. 1791, Chamberlain). The speech drew Congress’s attention especially to the militia and defense of the West, the post office and need for post roads, the importance of a Mint, weights and measures, and the disposal of public lands.
4. Sewall, in reply, blamed western interests for incurring these expenses: “mankind are too apt in all matters of finance, and such as relate to contributions for the Public, to endeavour shoving the Burthen from themselves to others. The Indian War I have always been apprehensive, would be a gulf to swallow up a large portion of the national Revennue—and further that those States who were more especially Interested in its prosecution, Would make the greatest Number of Wry faces, to any and every Necessary method of finance” (David Sewall to GT, 14 Dec. 1791, Chamberlain).
5. A copy of the enumeration of inhabitants according to the census of 1790 was communicated to the House on 28 October.
6. A Bill for an Apportionment of Representatives among the Several States, according to the First Enumeration, was passed in the House on 24 November by 43 votes to 12, with GT voting in the minority.
7. On 23 November, GT was among a minority of 21 to 38 that failed to revise the apportionment to 1:34,000. Sewall agreed with GT that arguments for a lower ratio of representatives to citizens “have not had that force, that the fabricators of them seem to have supposed,” and that districts of 40,000 “would Increase the House quite Sufficiently.” Responding to the argument that more representatives would prove harder to bribe, he observed that “If there are any Worthy Members that from their own Experience, are fearfull of being Some how or other Bribed to injure the Union—let them to avoid Temptation decline accepting a Seat—Whenever they are chosen” (David Sewall to GT, 14 Dec. 1791, Chamberlain).
8. “Lilliburlero” was the refrain to a song that became the rallying cry among the supporters of William of Orange in Great Britain’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. It was apparently a corruption of the Gaelic boast that William’s symbol, the Orange Lily, “was triumphant and we won the day.”
9. Postmaster General Timothy Pickering called upon GT “to enquire the characters of the Post masters from Portsmouth to Wiscasset, as he was about reappointing them.” It was Pickering’s “intention to continue the old contracts for carrying the mail, until the Law passes relative to the post offices & post Roads—when, tis probable, he will enter into contracts, with the transporters of the mail, for a longer term than one year at a time—I think the Law will pass this Session” (GT to Joseph Bernard, 27 Nov. 1791, TFP).
10. “The Post, I did hear, one Evening broke a hole thro’ and called for Assistance to get his Horse out—But that Hole is mended, and the Bridge is to appearance as Safe as it has been for years past.” In early 1792 the Massachusetts General Court granted £300 from the confiscated estate of Sir William Pepperrell for the rebuilding of the York Bridge (David Sewall to GT, 14 Dec., 15 March 1792, Chamberlain). Joseph Barnard (1748-1817), of Kennebunk, was the first postmaster to serve the southern Maine route under the new federal establishment (Folsom, Saco and Biddeford, p. 310).
11. George Leonard (1729-1819), whose family dominated the judiciary and early iron manufacturing economy of Bristol County, Massachusetts, failed to repeat the landslide victory he had enjoyed over Antifederalist challenger Phanuel Bishop in the first federal election. A crowded field in the second election diluted the opposition to Bishop enough to prevent Leonard emerging with a majority until a seventh runoff election on 2 April 1792 (Dubin, Congressional Elections, pp. 4, 5).
12. GT’s hypothetical scenario, blaming the impasse in Massachusetts’s Sixth (Bristol) District on congressional statute rather than state regulation, illustrates his frustration with the state legislature’s exclusive power over federal elections. On 21 August 1789, he joined every Antifederalist and a few other Federalists in the House to vote in favor of amending Article 1, Section 4, by providing that “Congress shall not alter, modify or interfere in the times, places or manner of holding” a congressional election, “except when any state shall refuse or neglect” to ensure one. The proposed amendment—one of several recommended by the Massachusetts ratifying convention, among other states’ conventions to do so—was defeated by 28 votes to 23 (Helen E. Veit, Kenneth R. Bowling, and Charlene Banks Bickford, eds., Creating the Bill of Rights: The Documentary Record from the First Federal Congress [Baltimore, 1991], pp. 14, 35, 52).
13. The subject had indeed already been brought forward, in both chambers: the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Ceracchi (1751-1801) had petitioned the House and Senate on 31 October 1791, “proposing to execute, on a certain design, and on certain terms, a monument to perpetuate American liberty and independence.” The petition was tabled in each chamber. The Senate motion referred to by GT, un-journalized because it had been withdrawn, was probably Butler’s attempt to have it taken up again, which the House in fact did on 6 December when it assigned three members to a joint committee with the Senate on fulfilling the Confederation Congress’s resolution of 7 August 1783 for an equestrian state of George Washington. The Senate again declined to act, but the House referred the petition to another committee, whose report of 17 April 1792 was tabled while members considered its ambitious scope. It recommended paying Ceracchi a salary for up to ten years to complete not merely the (bronze) equestrian statue of Washington, but four allegorical groupings (in marble) around the base, the whole reaching sixty-feet high with fifteen-foot high allegorical figures—Policy restraining Mars, Clio recording Apollo’s praises of the new nation, Neptune “exhorting” Mercury (trade), and Minerva sitting on an Egyptian ruin and leaning on Osiris. Anyone unable to envision this pastiche was encouraged to see a sketch of it on display at Oellers’s Tavern at Sixth and Chesnut, directly across from Congress Hall. It is not clear if the visual aid helped Ceracchi’s cause, since the House ultimately agreed to a subsequent report declining to take on the considerable expense. Ceracchi’s own expenses would include a second American trip to renew his offer in 1794-95, and several portrait busts of key players (House and Senate committee members as well as Cabinet officers) intended as not so subtle douceurs. Embittered by rejection in America and Napoleon’s usurpation as the First Consul in Europe, Ceracchi helped coordinate a failed assassination attempt against his one-time hero; the same motive that led Beethoven to re-christen his Sonfonia Eroica led Ceracchi only to the guillotine—it was said, in an elaborate chariot of his own design (Ceracchi to George Washington, 31 Oct. 1791, with enclosures, PGW 9:132-36; Ulysse Desportes, “Giuseppe Ceracchi in America and his Busts of George Washington,” Art Quarterly [Summer 1963], pp. 141-79).
1. Freeman’s ponderously titled book, The town officer; or The power and duty of selectmen, town clerks, town treasurers, overseers of the poor, assessors, constables, collectors of taxes, surveyors of high ways, surveyors of lumber, fence viewers, and other town officers. As contained in the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. With a variety of forms for the use of such officers. . . . (Portland, 1791) was deposited with the Secretary of State under the terms of the Copyright Act of 31 May 1790.
2. GT probably refers here to Rep. Samuel Livermore, his fellow boarder during the Second Congress, who spoke more on the issue of post roads during this session’s debates than any other member of the New Hampshire delegation.
3. Ebenezer Hazard (1745-1817; Princeton, 1762), “the first American to attempt to preserve the documentary heritage of the nation,” edited the two volume Historical Collections: Consisting of State Papers and Other Authentic Documents; Intended As Materials for An History of the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1792-94). The New York bookseller conceived of the project as early as 1773; Congress formally endorsed the undertaking in 1778 and Hazard diligently identified and transcribed manuscripts in public as well as private collections during his extensive travels in the post office establishment until his promotion to Postmaster General in 1782. Denied reappointment in 1789, Hazard moved permanently to Philadelphia where he completed the 651-page first volume in April 1792. The 640-page second volume was available beginning in the spring of 1794. GT was among the 56 members of Congress who subscribed to the initial offering in February 1791, at four and a quarter dollars per volume, bound. Subscriptions were sluggish at first, but Historical Collections remained a major source for historical research through the mid-nineteenth century; Tocqueville himself recommended it before any other published compilation of early American documents (“Proposals for Printing,” Broadside, Hazard Papers, PHi; Fred Shelley, “Ebenezer Hazard: America’s First Historical Editor,” WMQ, v. 12, 1[Jan. 1955]:44-73).
4. Portland’s first library, opened by private subscription in 1766, was largely destroyed or scattered when the British razed the town in 1775, and its operations were suspended entirely in 1780. Four years later it was revived by 26 members subscribing two dollars each, but the value of its holding still did not exceed £64 by 1794—the year Samuel Freeman resigned as Librarian (Willis, History of Portland, pp. 380, 744-46). On 2 December 1791, Freeman asked GT to secure books for Portland’s Library Society; GT’s last known correspondence on the subject was Freeman’s acknowledgement on behalf of the Society, for his bequest of $100 worth of books, on 15 July 1806 (both in TFP).
5. An Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India (London, 1791), by Scottish historian and clergyman William Robertson (1721-93), was noted for its cultural sensitivity and its critique of British imperial policy (Stewart J. Brown, “William Robertson, Early Orientalism, and the Historical Disquisition on India in 1791,” Scottish Historian Review, v. 88[Pt. 2], 226[Oct. 2009]:289-312).
6. A brief examination of Lord Sheffield’s Observations on the commerce of the United States (Philadelphia, 1791).
7. In urging GT to have the mail rout from Portland extended beyond Wiscasset to Passamaquoddy, Freeman wrote “We have now no communication with the Eastern Part of this State—Darkness invelopes the Land—We know not the Inhabitants there nor what they are about—and they are as ignorant of us” (Samuel Freeman to GT, 2 Dec. 1791, Chamberlain).
8. “The bottom line” ever guided GT’s consideration of this controversial issue. In the Fifth Congress, he reported for a committee that had advised against adding 3000 miles of new post road when, “from the best information he could get, not any road of fifty miles in length would pay one-half the expense of carrying the mail” (1 May 1798, Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., p. 1562).
9. Arthur St. Clair (1734-1818) was governor of the Northwest Territory (1789-1802) when he was appointed major general of the new federal army raised by the Military Establishment Act of 3 March 1791. Born in Scotland and educated at Edinburgh, the former British Army officer rose from colonel in the Pennsylvania militia in 1775, to major general in the Continental Army two years later. He sat in the Confederation Congress (1785-88) and was serving as its president when GT first took his seat.
To avenge Gen. Josiah Harmar’s defeat in October 1790, St. Clair led a punitive expedition of one thousand regular army and Kentucky militia against the same confederacy of Indian tribes of the Northwest Territory. They confronted a comparable number of warriors led by Little Turle (Miami) and Blue Jacket (Shawnee), along the banks of the Wabash (near present day Fort Recovery, Ohio) on 4 November 1791, and were almost completely annihilated. St. Clair promptly rendered his official, unsparing account in three identical reports dated 9 November and dispatched separately from Fort Washington to Secretary Knox in Philadelphia. The first arrived on the afternoon of Friday, 8 December. Washington communicated it to Congress, with earlier communications and a casualty list, in a message to Congress on 12 December, where it was read and tabled in each chamber. (For the context and content of the message and enclosures, see PGW 9:274-79).
10. Since the Gen. Josiah Harmar’s defeat near the site of Fort Wayne, Indiana, in October 1790, Federal troops (including federalized state militia) had been venturing northward from Fort Washington (present day Cincinnati, Ohio) along a lengthening string of forts built one day’s march from each other, penetrating into the territory of a temporary confederacy of Miami, Shawnee, Wyandot, Delaware, and smaller tribes of the Northwest Territory. The farthest north and remotest of these outposts was Fort Jefferson (in present day Darke County, Ohio).
1. “I have attended meeting every Sunday, since my arrival, till the two last” (GT to SST, 22 Dec. 1791, TFP).
2. Richard Cutts and Benjamin Hasey, students in GT’s law office.
3. “I hope you are attentive to them at the table—see they duly notice, or as they say, health every one when they drink—When any body, whether stranger or acquaintance, speeks to them, be carefull, they make a respectful & clear reply—Their boldness & Loquacity are good omens; and the natural inquisitiveness of children every body must indulge—under due regulation” (GT to SST, 1 Dec. 1791, TFP).
4. On 16 November 1791, “Betsy” King married married Dr. Benjamin Jones Porter, considered “a man of rare conversational power and great suavity of manners” (MHSC, Ser. 2, 10[1899]:153).
1. Regarding John Stone’s petition for a new method of driving piles for bridges, Sewall had insisted upon the distinction between the Patent Board’s issuing a patent, and its actual delivery; until the latter took place, “There can in my humble Opinion be no delicacy or difficulty about it.” He also wished to know whether the Board felt empowered to prevent Stone’s patent “if they can be Satisfied the Suggestions made for its being granted, are Erroneous” (David Sewall to GT, 14 Dec. 1791, Chamberlain). On 15 March 1792, Sewall requested GT to have a copy of Stone’s patent made out, to be paid out of Sewall’s next quarter’s salary as federal district judge. The request seems to have been intended to help Sewall adjudicate some challenge to the repair and rebuilding of the York Bridge (David Sewall to GT, 15 March 1792, Chamberlain).
2. A petition from Quakers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, “praying that Congress will adopt such measures as in their wisdom may be deemed salutary and effectual for promoting peace and friendship with the original holders of this land,” was presented in the House on 22 December 1791 and tabled without debate.
3. On 7 September 1791, delegates from Washington, Westmoreland, and Allegheny counties, Pennsylvania convened an extra-legal assembly in Pittsburgh to air their grievances—principally against the excise on whiskey levied by the Duties on Distilled Spirits Act of 3 March 1791, but also high federal salaries, the Bank Act of 25 February 1791, and the high interest paid on the federal debt and failure to discriminate between original and secondary holders of public securities under the Funding Act of 4 August 1790. The resulting petition to repeal the excise was presented in the House on 22 November 1791 and referred to the Secretary of the Treasury “for his information” (Thomas Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution [New York, 1986], pp. 111-13).
1. GT was appointed to the select committee on the post office and post roads on 28 October 1791. On 29 December, he moved unsuccessfully in the full House to extend the post road beyond Wiscassett to Penobscot (FG, 31 Dec. 1791).
2. This Senate amendment to House bill for reapportionment, received on 24 November 1791, would have brought the size of the House down from 112 to 105 members. The House refused to yield, and after the Senate voted to adhere to its version on 20 December, the bill stalled. On 23 March 1792, GT cast his vote with the majority that agreed, by the narrowest of margins (31 to 29), to the Senate’s compromise amendments establishing a House of 120 members based on dividing the new enumeration by 30,000. Because the divisor was applied to the aggregate population of the union rather than of each state, and the resulting allocation gave more than one representative for every 30,000 in many instances, Washington vetoed the bill on 5 April—the first presidential veto in U.S. history. Four days later, GT cast his vote with the majority of 34 to 30 that set the ratio at 1:33,000 in a new Apportionment Bill subsequently passed by the Senate and enacted on 14 April.
3. Sewall had written: “Since the storm of electioneering has blown over, affairs are quiet among us, and we enjoy a great calm. But our respite is short—the hurricane is biennial. But it is conjectured by some of our political astronomers, that it will not sweep the whole Maine at its next period; but by being divided into several veins the impetus and the danger will be lessened together” (Henry Sewall to GT, 28 Nov. 1791, Chamberlain).
1. Tyng’s (unlocated) letter evidently alleged the official misconduct of Stephen Cross (1731-1809), merchant of Newburyport, Massachusetts, as collector of that port. For more on the allegations and the Administration’s official response, see GT to Dudley Atkins Tyng, 26 Feb. 1792 (No. 75, below).
1. Daniel Cony had written: “do Sir if practicable, if consistant with the public good bend the rout a little in this quarter”—meaning Hallowell, “the head of Navigation of the famous & important Kenebec [River]” and “the Center (nearly) of the Sublime County of Lincoln. . . . here,” he reminded Thatcher, “are a number of great folks, who tho’ eminent in the opposition to your Election yet I know you have a Soul big enough to wish, and to use all honourable means to Oblige” (Daniel Cony to GT, 25 Nov. 1791, Chamberlain).
2. Cony reassured GT in reply: “Your unwearied attention to the interest of the District of Maine, leaves no room to doubt your exertions in this particular business” (Daniel Cony to GT, 24 Jan. 1792, Chamberlain).
3. The Second Congress’s Post Office Bill was the fourth attempt to create a new federal post office establishment, until which time the Confederation establishment’s duties, regulations, and post roads (in all but one case) were temporarily adopted at the end of each session, for the duration of the subsequent session.
4. Cony had represented Hallowell in the Massachusetts House of Representatives since 1786.
6. Under a plan of study launched in 1783, Harvard’s medical school faculty at this time consisted of Dr. John Warren (1753-1815), professor of anatomy and surgery; Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse (1754-1846), professor of the theory and practice of physic; and Dr. Aaron Dexter (1750-1829), professor of chemistry and “materia medica.”
7. Rev. John Daniel Gross (1737-1812), pastor of the German Reformed Church on Nassau Street in New York City from the end of the Revolutionary War until his resignation in 1795, also served during most of that same period as Columbia’s professor of moral philosophy, geography, and the German language (Smith, New York, pp. 158-59; Cataloque . . . of Columbia College . . . From 1754 to 1882 [New York, 1882], pp. 22, 24).
8. Harvard College temporarily relocated to Concord, Massachusetts for Thatcher’s final academic year (1775-76). GT’s recollection was less forgiving than Samuel Eliot Morison’s description of this “not un-pleasant Babylonian Captivity at the future shrine of New England letters” (Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, pp. 148-50).
9. In reply, Cony expressed his happiness “that we on the general principles thereof nearly concur.” He agreed that the college ought to be established in Portland on condition that the “Seminary” might be removed elsewhere at some future time, and he proposed that the “board of Overseers”—to comprise 40-50 members drawn from throughout the District—be empowered to make that determination (Daniel Cony to GT, 24 Jan. 1792, Chamberlain).
1. The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) propounded the Principle of Sufficient Reason in his book Théodicée (1710), stating that nothing takes place without a “sufficient reason,” or complete explanation, and—by extending this to an argument for the existence of God—that no sufficient reason for a positive truth can be explained without reference to that which can no longer be explained (God).
2. Sir John Strange (1696-1754), British politician and judge, compiled Reports of Adjudged Cases in the Courts of Chancery, King’s Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer (2 vols., London, 1755), covering the years 1714-45.
3. William Gordon (1728-1807) emigrated from England in 1770 and enthusiastically espoused the revolutionary cause while serving as a Congregational pastor in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He enjoyed unprecedented access to private papers of the movement’s political and military leaders in composing his triumphal History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment of the Independence of the United States, which its first British publishers would only bring out in a highly diluted edition (4 vols., London, 1788). The first American edition was published in New York City in 1789.
4. François-Jean de Chastellux (1734-88), as a member of the Académie Française since 1775, was already a well known man of letters in his native France before arriving in America as a major general in the allied French army. While serving as liaison to George Washington, he compiled notes for his Travels . . . in North America, in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782 (1786; 1st English edition, 2 vols., London, 1787). Many of Chastellux’s observations came in for criticism in Brissot de Warville’s Critical Examination (Philadelphia, 1788).
5. GT’s only significant omissions from his sketch of Roger Sherman (1721-93) are that he also served as mayor of New Haven from 1784 until his death, and that, as one of the longest serving members of the pre-federal Congresses, Sherman distinguished himself by being the only individual to sign the four great charters of the American Revolution: the First Continental Congress’s Articles of Association (1774); the Declaration of Independence, for which he served on the drafting committee; the Articles of Confederation (1777); and the Constitution, which he helped broker with his “Connecticut Compromise” and later helped ratify at the state convention. GT was not the only contemporary to detect the wily nature behind Sherman’s rustic simplicity: Jeremiah Wadsworth (Conn.) thought him “as cunning as the Devil. . . . if he suspects you are trying to take him in, you may as well catch an Eel by the tail,” while fellow Federal Convention delegate William Pierce (Ga.) thought him “unaccountably strange in his manner” but “extremely artful in accomplishing any particular object” (Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 [1911; reprint, 4 vols., New Haven, Conn., 1966] 3:34, 88-89). The honorific “Father” was often bestowed upon Sherman in deference to his age and reputed piety, but GT’s use of the term takes on a sarcastic tone that suggests he was still smarting from Sherman’s sanctimonious reproach when GT attempted to lump Bibles with plays and novels under the first Impost Act of 1789 (DHFFC 10:177).
6. James Dana (1735-1812; Harvard, 1753) began his tempestuous tenure as pastor of the First Congregational Church of Wallingford, Connecticut in 1758. The challenge posed to Dana’s ordination by the New Haven Consociation, on suspicion of his being a “secret Socinian” or proto-Unitarian, became “Connecticut’s longest and most heated ecclesiastical struggle” between subscribers to the Congregational (Old Light) model of church authority, and the Presbyterian (New Light) model championed at Yale. For these reasons, Dana “was naturally something of a hero in Cambridge,” where Thatcher was first exposed to his writings several years later. Reconciled, to a certain degree, with New Haven’s church fathers over their shared antipathy to Great Britain during the Revolution, Dana resigned from Wallingford in 1785 and filled the pulpit of the First Church of New Haven from 1789 until he was removed for ill health in 1805 (Harvard Graduates 13:305-22). He was awarded a D.D. by Edinburgh in 1768.
7. Arminians were originally followers of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609). As GT’s letter goes on the suggest, mainstream New England Congregationalism had regarded it as an heretical movement, although by this time the label was being applied with random precision to any suspect religious current.
8. Connecticut’s Council of Assistants, like members of colonial Massachusetts’s colonial Council, were elected by the House of Representatives to serve as advisers to the governor. The Assistants, however, also served as an upper house of the legislature, with veto power. Connecticut’s Constitution of 1818 abolished the body and established a Senate.
9. James Dana’s Examination of . . . President Edward’s Enquiry on Freedom of Will (Boston, 1770) and Examination . . . Continued (Boston, 1773) were his counter-argument to A careful and strict enquiry into The modern and prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will, Which is supposed to be essential to Moral Agency, Vertue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame (Boston, 1754) by Jonathan Edwards, Sr. (1703-58). Edwards, who launched the First Great Awakening from his Congregational pulpits in Northampton and then Stockbridge, Massachusetts, served briefly as president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), where he helped raise his orphaned grandson, Aaron Burr. Dana’s first Examination appears on an undated list of books compiled by GT as a partial catalog of his personal library (TFP). The same catalog lists Edwards’s The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (Boston, 1758).
10. Jonathan Edwards, Jr. (1745-1801; Princeton, 1765) served as pastor of White Haven Church, Roger Sherman’s home congregation in New Haven, Connecticut, from 1769 to 1795. In addition to being a controversialist devoted to defending his father’s teachings, Edwards’s more lasting contributions to the intellectual life of early America were as a linguist and ethnologist of Native American peoples.
11. This was written over the word “communication.”
12. Edwards, Jr. wrote The salvation of all men strictly examined; and the endless punishment of those who die impenitent (New Haven, Conn., 1790) in response to Salvation for all men, illustrated and vindicated as a Scripture doctrine (Boston, 1782) by his father’s principal rival, Dr. Charles Chauncy (1705-87), Congregational pastor of Boston’s First Church (“Old Brick”) from 1727 until his death. GT’s name appears on the list of subscribers published with the first edition of Edwards’s Salvation, and the book appears on a list he compiled as a partial catalog of his personal library (TFP).
1. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia was first published anonymously in Paris in 1785, with a first English edition printed in London two years later. The only full-length book of Jefferson’s writings ever published in his lifetime, Notes was intended as a compendium of facts about the state’s economy, government, demographics, geography, and geology, but also includes Jefferson’s personal observations about constitutionalism, church-state relations, slavery, and the viability of a pluralistic society.
2. Nathaniel Peabody (1741-1823), a physician of Exeter, New Hampshire, was a frequent member of the state House of Representatives (1776-96), state senator (1785-86 and 1790-93), and delegate to Congress (1779-80. He was elected again in 1785, but never attended). His military title derived from his service as adjutant general of the state militia (1777-79).
3. A statement of beliefs affirming Trinitarianism as orthodox Christian belief, attributed to Athanesius, a 4th Century bishop of Alexandria, and widely accepted within the Western Church by the 6th Century.
4. A statement of beliefs drawn up by the Westminster Assembly of Divines during the first English Civil War, which then became the doctrinal basis for congregationalism throughout colonial New England.
5. Originally intended as the fourth part of a three volume catechism published as Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772-74), Joseph Priestley’s History of the Corruptions of Christianity became such a lengthy and comprehensive summation of his Deist thinking that it was not completed and published separately until 1782. For many of Priestley’s adherents, like GT, this was the book that introduced them to the rationalist roots of primitive Christianity. Thatcher’s journal entry for 28 December 1784 records, “I spent the evening til near eight at Major [Jeremiah] Hills—He . . . delivered me Dr. Priestlys. History of the Corruptions of the Christian Religion—and a Book lately published in England intituled Salvation of all men. This Book is anonymous—but it is generally known to be wrote by Dr. Chauncy of Boston. These Books Mr. Hill purchased for me” (TFP). Charles Chauncy’s Salvation for all men, illustrated and vindicated as a Scripture doctrine (Boston, 1782) is among Thacher’s Tracts (v. 12), and appears on the list of books GT compiled as a partial catalog of his personal library (TFP). Other titles by Chauncy that appear in the catalog are his Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England (Boston, 1743), The Benevolence of the Deity (London, 1784), and Five Dissertations on the Scripture Account of the Fall (London, 1785).
6. GT and Rawson were second cousins; Rawson’s mother Desire (Thacher) was the daughter of Joseph Thacher, younger half brother to GT’s paternal grandfather Peter (Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, pp. 93, 138, 251).
1. Bruised by the treatment subsequently meted out to him as a lawyer during the second federal election, and having more reason than ever to doubt a future reliance on his congressional income, GT soon thereafter began seriously to consider diversifying his revenue stream. In late 1791 he partnered with George Peirson, “a young friend of mine . . . lately entered into Trade at Portland, whose prudence and integrity upon a Trifling sum had recommended him to me, & I had become interested with him in Business.” This young man “had been trading in [the] Grocery-way altogether,” but persuaded GT “it would be for our mutual advantage to go a little in the English Goods-Business.” GT discussed raising capital for this venture in a letter to TBW in mid-December 1791, and numerous letters to Dr. Daniel Kilham around this same time also dealt with efforts to provide additional capital, including a note for up to $500 that GT sought to draw upon in Boston or Newburyport, and $200 that GT had recently deposited in the Bank of the United States either in exchange or as collateral for $200 he hoped to draw upon from Kilham, payable in Boston (GT to SST, 26 Jan. 1793 [No. 86, below]; GT to George Peirson, 27 Feb. 1793, Emmet Collection: Members of the Continental Congress, 1774-79, NN; GT to TBW, 19 Dec. 1791, TFP; GT to Daniel Kilham, 4 Nov., 5, 26 Dec. 1791, 19 Jan., 1 March 1792, TFP). Dr. Daniel Kilham (1753-1841; Harvard, 1777), was an apothecary in Newburyport, Mass., which he represented in the state House of Representatives (DHROC 4:141).
Through his old Cape Cod companion, the Baltimore merchant William Taylor, GT received a £500 line of credit on a London trading house in February 1793. He told Peirson at the time, “I think for several reasons which I shall communicate on seeing you—we had better not begin in English Goods—before another year,” and instead considered expanding the Baltimore-Portland trade, even to the extent of building a 200-ton ship. GT’s inclination to avoid the transatlantic carrying trade may have been predicated upon the escalation of tensions that would result in President Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality in April 1793. Or it may have been based on temporary embarrassments following his loss of £100 “on account of another man’s debt” (by standing as surety for an unknown defaulter). In any case, he reassured Pierson that he still had some money in the Bank of New York with which he could continue to trade (GT to George Peirson, 27 Feb. 1793, Emmet Collection: Members of the Continental Congress, 1774-79, NN; Rufus King to GT [about his dividends in the Bank of New York stock], 11 May 1793, Fuller Collection of Aaron Burr, Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J.).
2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emilius preaches the value of game-playing for learning, emotional maturity, and physical dexterity: “Accustomed to having a good footing in darkness, practiced at handling with ease all surrounding bodies, his feet and hands will lead him without difficulty in the deepest darkness” (Book II).
3. The House met in a rare closed session on 16 January, and again in closed sessions as a COWH on 18 and 19 January, to discuss the President’s message of 11 January. The message enclosed Secretary Henry Knox’s reports of 26 December 1791, on the results of the Administration’s initial investigation into Gen. Arthur St. Clair’s defeat (PGW 9:425; for Knox’s reports, see PGW 9:313-23).
1. On 6 January 1792 Fisher Ames (Mass.) was added to the select committee formed on 30 November 1791, to whom had been referred Attorney General Edmund Randolph’s report for remedying defects in the Judiciary Act of 1789—primarily the confused blending of federal and state jurisdictions. (This report had been submitted to the House on 31 December 1790 and ordered printed, but was not taken up again before the end of the First Congress.) On 28 December 1791 the committee was also referred Randolph’s letter of 26 December, seeking clarification of the relationship between the attorney general’s office and the federal district attorneys. Ames’s committee reported on Randolph’s letter on 18 January, and on 23 January the House passed a resolution pursuant to the report, which was ordered to be drawn up into a bill. The bill was taken up the next day, read twice, and referred to a COWH, but no further action was taken during the Second Congress.
1. GT may have meant Cony’s letter of 16 December 1791, where Cony made extending postal routes a matter not only of fairness but national security.
In the Name of Common Sense & Common honesty let the Farmer be accomodated as well as the Merchant. A Newspaper is as gratifying to the one as the other—tis idle to say that the Merchant, the trade, & Commerce Support the post and post-offices for ultimately the consumer must pay all. Let every class of Citizens be equally priviledged & equally burdened according to their ability, their consequence & importance in the National Government
I wish to ask this Serious question, will it not be better for the government to be at Some little expence, in providing the Means for defusing public & useful information into every part of the Nation, which is inhabited with Rational Minds, rather than to be necessitated to raise & pay an Army to repel an invasion or Suppress an horrid insurrection, I am morally certain that due attention to the former, will render the latter totally and altogether unnecessary (Daniel Cony to GT, 16 Dec. 1791, GTP-Portland).
2. In a letter to a constituent in Machias a few days earlier, GT adverted to the same reason against extending the post road beyond Wiscasset; “and tho this extension has been rather a matter of my wishes than expectation, I moved the other day, when the house was considering the post-office Bill, that the mail should be carried, once a fortnight at least, to Penobscot” (GT to Ebenezer Whittier, 26 Jan. 1792, TFP). There is no record of such a motion, which in any case never carried.
3. Cony had suggested to GT that “if we were possessed with of the precedents, documents, & proceedings of the State of Virginia respecting the division of that State—perhaps t’would enable us the better to obviate Some objections that probably will be made in the General Court on this Subject.” William Widgery’s similar request a month later, for “Some information as to the opinion of the Southern members on the Subject of our Separation,” alluded more importantly to the measure’s impact on the sectional balance of power (Daniel Cony to GT, 18 Jan. 1792 and William Widgery to GT, 19 Feb. 1792, Chamberlain).
4. Art. 4, Sec. 3, para. 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that “no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”
5. “I thank you for your laboured Epistle on the Subject of the proposed Seperation, it came to hand at a very seasonable moment, and your ‘labours of love’ I trust will be rewarded” (Daniel Cony to GT, 19 Feb. 1792, Chamberlain).
6. The House had ordered Alexander Hamilton to prepare a report on manufactures on 15 January 1790. The resulting report, the first major state paper proposing federal support for manufactures to diversify the domestic economy and render it more self-sufficient by a system of bounties, subsidies, and protective tariffs, was presented to the House on 5 December 1791, ordered printed, and tabled. Newspapers nationwide began printing the monumental document in lengthy installments, beginning with Philadelphia’s own National Gazette on the day after Christmas, 1792.
7. GT confused two separate initiatives undertaken by a Portland town meeting on 28 December 1791 and reported in EH, 2 January 1792. The meeting had voted to apply to the court of sessions (today’s county commissioners’ courts) for a road roughly following the course of present-day Forest Street, cutting off the Mill Pond that then emptied into the western end of Back Cove and is today covered in part by Deering Oaks Park. The same town meeting then voted to petition the legislature “to assist the town (by Lottery or otherwise) in building a Dam and erecting Grist Mills on said Cove.”
8. See, for example, the argument by “And Amen” that public morality is sickened by the “Lottery Influenza,” in CC, 9 February 1791.
1. “I never could bring myself to like this City—It is, in my opinion, very far from being that place of enjoyment & amusement which I found New-York to be—every thing is here one quarter & some things more expensive than at New York” (GT to SST, 30 Oct. 1791, TFP).
2. Marshall Spring (1741-1818; Harvard, 1762), the descendent of a prominent Maine family, inherited a rich relation’s medical practice and estate in Watertown, Massachusetts. After the Revolutionary War, he overcame his reputation for Toryism to represent his town in the state legislature and at the state ratifying convention, where he voted in favor of the Constitution. He married the widow Mary Binney (d. 1797), of Philadelphia, in late 1791; their only child was born there on 30 August 1792 (James Thacher, American Medical Biography [Boston, 1828] 2:98-103).
2. The Roman Republic’s Tribunes were first elected in 494 b.c. to serve as a check on the power of the patrician Senate and consuls by proposing or vetoing laws and measures on behalf of the plebs. Their office began to lose its independent authority during the class wars of the first century b.c., and became largely ceremonial by the time of the Empire. This fate, like every other political development from Rome’s legendary founding in 753 b.c. up to 9 b.c., is the subject of The History of Rome by Titus Livius, or “Livy” (ca. 60 b.c.–17 a.d.).
3. In June 1791, the Massachusetts House of Representatives voted to postpone until the following session (commencing in January 1792) consideration of a petition from the Portland statehood convention of 1786, which had been submitted to the House in 1788 and tabled there in January 1789.
4. The fallacy of such calculations contributed to GT’s opinion about separation since at least late 1785, when David Sewall wrote him that statehood supporters “certainly would not have the dishonesty to Imagine they should be discharged of their proportion of the [Massachusetts] State Debt” (calculated, on the basis of one-tenth of the population, at £146,854), while at the same time robbing the Commonwealth of nine-tenths of its unappropriated lands as a further means of paying off its debt (David Sewall to GT, 2 Nov. 1785, MHSP, 3rd Ser., 58[Dec. 1924]:194).
1. Hamilton’s reports on manufactures, submitted to the House on 5 December 1791, and on estimates of receipts and expenditures for 1791-92, submitted on 23 January 1792.
2. Wells was a member of the Massachusetts Senate at this time.
3. On 16 January, Washington wrote Henry Knox advising the preparation and publication of a “statement” of all prior measures for establishing peace with Native American tribes on the frontier. The resulting report on “The Causes of the existing Hostilities . . . stated and explained from official and authentic Documents,” dated 26 January, appeared in Philadelphia’s FG and Claypoole’s Daily Advertiser two days later.
4. In response to the recommendations in Knox’s reports of 26 December 1791, James Madison presented a bill on 25 January 1792 that called for almost doubling the size of the federal army by the addition of three infantry regiments. That provision survived vigorous efforts to amend it out of the bill on 30 January, and the bill itself was passed on 1 February. On both roll-call votes, GT was among the overwhelming majority of New England members who voted with the minority (Annals of Congress, 2nd Cong., 1st sess., pp. 354-55).
5. On 1 November 1791, the House ordered Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton to report on any still-unsubscribed war debts of the states, supplemental to those assumed under the Funding Act of 1790. Hamilton’s report of 23 January 1792, which recommended extending the period for receiving further subscriptions to the federal debt, would be submitted to the House on 7 February. A letter (unlocated) that GT wrote on 23 February informed Wells of the “probability that the General Government will assume or undertake to pay the residue of the State debts” (Nathaniel Wells to GT, 8 March 1792, Chamberlain).
1. Tyng declined further involvement in Cross’s case (see No. 64, above). “I wish to be the manly and firm Friend of a good Government, but I do not wish to become impertinently forward in the Prosecution of the worst of it’s Servants” (Dudley A. Tyng to GT, 30 Jan. 1792, Foster Family).
2. Neither Hamilton’s letter to Cross nor Cross’s attached certificate have been located. The latter was probably signed by Cross’s younger brother Ralph, weigher and gauger of the port, and at least one of Cross’s sons, who served as an inspector.
3. Hamilton presented the evidence of the case against Cross in a letter to Washington on 23 April 1792, and Cross was dismissed by 3 May, when his successor was nominated. More details of the case were mentioned in Cross’s protestations to Hamilton on 25 May and 18 October 1792; when neither of those letters were answered, Cross turned to Washington himself a year later, on 25 November 1793. There he accused Tyng in all but name, as one “late crept into life and importance in his own esteem, his Connections firmly attached to the British and of course Inemical to me,” whom he saw “use all his Contrivance to stir up every person he could perswade to joyn him in A representation to the Secretary of the Treasury.” Cross speculated that Tyng’s motives included impugning the Cross brothers’ character to help win a lawsuit they were parties to, against a client of Tyng’s. In 1802, while seeking another federal appointment, Cross told President Thomas Jefferson’s Attorney General Levi Lincoln that his dismissal ten years earlier had been engineered by the Jeffersonians’ perennial bogeyman, the “Essex Junto” (PAH 12:590; PGW 10:313, 14:434-38; PTJ 38:596).
Later this same year, GT was drawn into the investigation of another case of revenue fraud involving Francis Cook, the federal collector in SL’s hometown of Wiscassett. “There are some charges of a very considerably heinous nature against the Collr. that will evidently throw a fraud upon the Revenue,” SL wrote without elaborating. If Cook ended up being removed for malfeasance (“which I hope however will not be the case”), SL offered himself for the office (“if you think it will not be a means of preventing my having the offer of any other more agreable”). GT may have discovered more upon returning to Maine after the Second Congress, and apprised Secretary Hamilton in a letter (unlocated) dated 28 April 1793. An investigation was entrusted to the federal marshal for Massachusetts but no further action is recorded, and Cook (ca. 1755-1832) remained Wiscassett’s first revenue collector until a few years before his death (SL to GT, 23 Dec. 1792, Chamberlain; Alexander Hamilton to GT, 18 May 1793, PAH 14:477; DHFFC 2:502).
4. The Militia Bill was first read in the House on 21 February and passed on 6 March by 31 votes to 27, GT voting in the negative. On 12 April the bill was returned from the Senate with amendments, the most significant of which granted the president power to call out the militia “as the exigence may, in his opinion require” to execute laws, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions. The amendment was disagreed to that day by 37 votes to 24, GT voting with the minority in favor of the amendment. The House passed the final bill on 25 April, and on 8 May the president approved an Act more effectually to provide for the National Defense by establishing an Uniform Militia throughout the United States. The act arranged units, defined the duties of officers and the rules of discipline, and required men aged 18 to 45 to serve, exempting only the vice president, officers of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, members of Congress, federal revenue officers, postal officers, ferrymen and pilots, merchant mariners, and any others exempted at the state level.
The supplemental assumption bill progressed even more slowly than the militia bill. Hamilton’s report of 23 January was finally taken up for consideration in the COWH on 22 March, but continually postponed as the order of the day until a week later, when the debate ensued in earnest. (In the meanwhile, on 23 March, the Massachusetts legislature petitioned the House to assume the balance of its debts, computed by Hamilton’s report at $1,838,000 of the total $8,331,000 left unsubscribed [ASP:Finance 1:150].) The COWH reported resolutions pursuant to Hamilton’s report on 2 April, a bill was ordered to be brought in two days later, and it was presented on 6 April. After intermittent debates, the bill was passed in the House on 7 May and approved by the president on 8 May. The Act supplemental to the act making provision for the Debt of the United States extended the period for receiving any unsubscribed state debt, on the same terms as the original Funding Act of 1790, from 1 June 1792 to 1 March 1793.
5. Citing election improprieties, ousted Rep. James Jackson petitioned Congress on 14 November 1791 to invalidate Revolutionary War hero “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s election for Georgia’s Eastern or Lower District. Departing from precedent, the House agreed to hear testimony presented from the bar of the chamber rather than refer the matter to its standing committee on elections; see No. 76, below. For more on Wayne’s contested election, see DHFFC 22:1283-87.
6. The president approved the act for making farther and more effectual provision for the protection of the frontiers of the United States on 5 March 1792.
1. “We passed twenty four hours at Saco—left all your little ones in perfect health and madam it seems intends soon to add to their number” (NB to GT, 12 Feb. 1792, Chamberlain). The Thatchers’ daughter Lucy Savage was born on 20 May 1792.
2. “While I was museing with myself how to account for my friends neglect, and had just concluded to write him, your favor of 21st. ult. came to hand last post—you may recollect my determination from the commencement of our epistolary correspondence, was not to be an intruder but to answer all your favors—have I been negligent on this score?” (NB to GT, 12 Feb. 1792, Chamberlain).
3. On 1 February 1792, Maine’s representatives and senators in the state legislature petitioned the Massachusetts House to issue a call for town meetings throughout the Maine District “for collecting the sentiments of the people” on separation. The resolution for such a district-wide canvas, to be held on 7 May, was agreed to in the House on 13 February, and the Senate concurred on 6 March. Two days later, state Senator Nathaniel Wells described for GT the debate leading up to the Senate’s concurrence by a majority of a single vote: opponents had objected “that a separation would lessen the Importance and respectability of Massachusetts State in the General Government,” that inhabitants of Maine might be pacified by having the legislature meet in the District for a part of each session proportionate to its share of the statewide population, and that a majority vote for separation would put the legislature “under an honorary Obligation” to enact the measure, whether expedient or not (Nathaniel Wells to GT, 8 March 1792, Chamberlain; [Boston] Independent Chronicle, 8 March 1792; Edward Stanwood, “The Separation of Maine from Massachusetts,” MHSP, 3rd Ser., 1[1908]:136).
4. Typical of these requests, going back to the beginning of the statehood debate, is Stephen Hall’s: “The sentiments of people are much altered with respect to a separation—many, who were in favor of it, are now against it, and vice versa. I wish for your sentiments on the subject” (Stephen Hall to GT, 20 Feb. 1789, E.L. Diedrich Collection, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor).
5. York’s Daniel Sewall predicted precisely this scenario, based on the widespread fear that an independent government would prove more costly and that statehood would presumably leave York even farther from a new state capital than it was from Boston. Sewall suggested that annexation by New Hampshire “might be effected without much difficulty, if matters were properly managed” (Daniel Sewall to GT, 26 March 1792, Chamberlain). Daniel Sewall (1755-1842) was a York town official and register of probate for York County from 1783 until he was replaced by GT’s son, George Jr., in 1820. In 1792, he was appointed postmaster and clerk to the court of common pleas (Willis, Lawyers of Maine, pp. 648-51).
6. The day when, traditionally, the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts visited the state militia encampments during their annual weeklong training.
7. Given their concordance on this important issue, Barrell’s letter of 12 February merits being quoted at length:
tho surrounded with the fascinating glitter of parade—what dont he [President Washington] feel for the defeat of [Arthur] St. Clair & its natural consequences? I judge of him from myself—for if I am distress’d who am only a passenger—what must he suffer who resides at the helm & commands the whole—for this, my friend, is a serious matter, tho I am willing to resort to your source of consolation [quoting from Thatcher’s (unlocated) letter of 21 January]—“that the events do not always turn out so injurious as our fears lead us to apprehend”—this wishing is Idle—is it not also foolish? I think so—and yet I am so great a fool as to wish we had never medled with the Indians—we might have let them enjoy their hunting unmolested—I am sure we have territory enough without encroaching upon theirs—and I cant help thinking, had it not been for those mercenary insatiable wretches—those vile land Jobbers we should have continued in peace with them—but I fear we are going to make bad worse. depend upon it my friend, an army of 8 or ten thousand men conducted as the last was, will not do the business—a General must be to blame when he suffers his Army to be surrounded—had we not better, first try what a tenth part of the expence of ten thousand will do in purchasing a peace with them—I cant help thinking such an expedition properly manag’d will procure every advantage we ought to have of those brave people without any of the disadvantages attending an army of the best regulated men troops which were ever <lined out> led into the field. consider my friend from what small beginnings the greatest Empires & Kingdoms have been destroyed—and what trifling matters have brought about the most important revolutions—dont let us do as great Britain did—their cursed pride made us free—dont let our attempt to make the Indians slaves—do by them as we wish’d Britain to do by us—and if we must fight, let it [be] upon the defensive—let them come to us, & not we go to them—by such management we may loose a thous’d men in ten years, and they many thousands—wereas we see by going to them we may loose a thousand men in one day—and this not the worst of it neither—for by our being thus drubd, we loose every advantage, while they gain all we loose—make them better soldiers—add to their courage & discipline—our soldiers get discouraged—think the warr unjust—and will not fight. I dont believe ’tis possable at present to raise five hundred men [in] this state to go against Indians—nothing can be more <illegible> than such a motion in Maine, and I hope you will never be seen in its support—try evrything before fighting—let that be the dernier resort—my heart bleeds at the loss of so many brave officers slain by Savages, at the same time I admire those Barbarians—they fought like men—nobly defended their country—and deserve the highest encomiums—what can be more heroicly humane than the address of the Indian chief? such a conduct would do honor even to our Chief—a Washington—call such men barbarians if you please—but where will you find polish’d warriers acting a more <lined out> meritorious part? all warr is barbarous, and seldom mark’d with any thing else but savage cruelty (NB to GT, 12 Feb. 1792, Chamberlain).
Daniel Cony would offer yet another justification for the same peacemaking policy: “Will you be kind enough to inform me what is probable respecting prosecuting (or not) the Indian War, are we to be involved in a tedious, & expensive quarrell about a tract of Land which tis presumed we do not nor shall not need, for many years yet to come” (Daniel Cony to GT, 28 Nov. 1792, GTP-Portland).
8. The Five Nations (also called the Six Nations or, more simply, the Iroquois) was the most storied and one of the most successful confederacies of Indian tribes in the colonial and early republican period. It consisted of the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora peoples spread across northern New York and western Pennsylvania. On 13 March 1792, a delegation of the Nations arrived in Philadelphia at the invitation of the War Department’s special envoy, Timothy Pickering, for the express purpose of introducing among them “some of the primary principles of civilization”—reading, writing, and certain mechanical arts and husbandry practices. Given the Nations’ close ties to their British allies in Canada, and the pan-Indian movement’s progress among the more hostile tribes of the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region who had just recently defeated Gen. Arthur St. Clair, the initial response to Pickering’s invitation was deeply divisive and failed ultimately to persuade the Iroquois leader Joseph Brant. Pickering was chagrined when the administration turned the visit into an opportunity to co-opt the Nations’ mediation with the waring tribes further west (PGW 10:141-43, 148-50, 151-52).
9. The House so voted on 16 March, after a total of three full days of hearing testimony that included affidavits challenging the returns from three counties within “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s congressional district. On 21 March, in a recorded tie vote decided by Speaker Jonathan Trumbull (Conn.), GT voting with the majority, the House also decided the seat would not revert by default to Jackson as the runner-up. Instead, John Milledge won the seat in a special election on 9 July.
10. The first French Constitution was adopted by the revolutionary National Assembly on 3 September 1791. GT may have shared any one of the many newspaper summaries appearing in Philadelphia beginning with Claypoole’s Daily Advertiser on 10 October.
1. Revolutionary War veteran Captain Joseph Greenleaf (d. 1795) was the first keeper of the Portland Head Lighthouse—lit for the first time on 10 January 1791 and immortalized sixty years later in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s eponymous poem, as “a new Prometheus, chained upon the rock, / Still grasping in his hand the fire of Jove.” Tending such a formidable instrument evidently entailed more work than Greenleaf believed his eighty dollars salary compensated him for, but no petition or testimonial supporting his request for a pay increase in late 1791 has been located.
2. Under the Lighthouses Act of 1789, the secretary of the treasury was authorized to contract for lighthouse keepers. In practice, this power devolved onto the collectors of the major ports, such as Benjamin Lincoln in Boston.
3. Lincoln’s letter of 1 December 1791, in reply to Alexander Hamilton’s request of 24 November (made upon Washington’s order), also argued that other lighthouse keepers were due higher compensation for the hardship of living on remote islands. Hamilton forwarded the reply to Washington on 17 January 1792 (PAH 9:551-52; PGW 7:108-11).
4. The reasons were not satisfactory for long: before the end of that year, merchants of Portland petitioned Washington to raise Greenleaf’s salary yet again. Doubtful that the administration would comply, on Christmas Eve Greenleaf himself opened a subscription to supplement his salary—a measure sharply condemned by the Treasury Department for the dishonor it brought upon the federal government. Greenleaf was forced to refund the monies raised, and his salary was increased to $160 in July 1793 (PGW 7:108-11; PAH 13:239).
1. No such letter has been located. But GT’s support is witnessed by his name’s appearance among the fourteen signatories to a covenant dated 7 March 1792, engaging “to form ourselves into a Religious Society, by the Name of the Unitarian Society, in the Town of Portland,” and to pay annually the subscribed sums in support of Thomas Oxnard’s ministry. No one subscribed more than GT (£2.8), and only the wealthy Portland merchant Samuel Waldo (1764-98) subscribed as much. By comparison, JH subscribed £1.4 (John C. Perkins, “Early Unitarianism in Maine,” Christian Register, v. 87, 19[7 May 1908]:525; Waldo Lincoln, ed., Genealogy of the Waldo Family [2 vols., Worcester, Mass., 1902] 1:311).
TBW reported the events leading up to this development in a letter to GT written shortly afterwards. (TBW never joined the Unitarian Society, but was close friends with many of the charter members and was tolerant if not sympathetic to their cause.) “You enquire for news,” he wrote, “and appear to be distressed, that slander has fallen asleep. I will relieve you. The town is in an uproar. Unitarians—a number of heretical, diabolical, and damnable Unitarians is the cause of it. About three or four weeks ago a number of these substantial Scoundrels assembled together, and said they believed in God! They wrote it on paper—they signed it—and . . . they mean publickly to worship God!!! ‘What are we coming to?’ ” (TBW to GT, 16 March 1792, Chamberlain).
TBW would later have cause to resent Freeman’s access to such confidential information as this, when it reappeared in Thomas Belsham’s recently imported Memoirs of the late Reverend Theophilus Lindsey (London, 1812). For indiscreetly publishing Freeman’s confidential letters to the British Unitarian leader, including “whatever Mr. F. happened to say respecting the attempt to establish a Unitarian Society at Portland and Biddeford . . . the said Belsham ought beyond all doubt to be strangled” (TBW to GT, 7 June [continuation of 3 June] 1814, Wait Letters).
2. Dr. Samuel Emerson (1764-1851; Harvard, 1785), a native of Hollis, New Hampshire, became a physician and settled permanently in Kennebunk (then part of Wells) in 1790 (George A. Gilpatric, ed., The Village of Kennebunk, Maine [Kennebunk, 1935], pp. 8, 19).
3. George Stacey (1764-1808; Harvard, 1784), a native of Ipswich, Massachusetts, studied law in Newburyport and commenced practicing in Biddeford in 1789 (Folsom, Saco and Biddeford, p. 302; Willis, Lawyers of Maine, pp. 130, 146-47).
4. Thomas Oxnard (1740-99) was the Crown’s deputy collector at Portland (then Falmouth) until fleeing as a Loyalist in 1775. He returned after the war and resumed his mercantile business while serving as lay reader for Portland’s St. Paul’s (Episcopal) Church. He had intended to take holy orders, until he fell under the spell of Unitarianism through reading the works of Joseph Priestley and Theophilus Lindsey, supplied to him by his friend James Freeman. Upon the schism described above, Oxnard became minister of the separatist “Unitarian Society” and served until his death, “a man of good talents, of sincere piety, and of ardent zeal” (George Henry Preble, Genealogical Sketch of the First Three Generations of Prebles in America [Boston, 1868], pp. 143-44; Belsham, Theophilus Lindsey, p. 245).
5. Matthew 10:16.
1. A riot that erupted on 14 July 1791, orchestrated by Birmingham, England’s local religious establishment and aimed at suppressing Dr. Joseph Priestley’s circle of religious Dissenters and pro-French sympathizers. Ostensibly ignited by a dinner gathering of the “Friends of Freedom” to mark the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille (a dinner that Priestley advisedly did not attend), the mob of local laborers and transients, led by a small core of more respectable but unidentified men, eventually laid waste to four Meeting Houses and twenty seven houses, including Priestley’s. The mob finally dispersed when troops, belatedly summoned by magistrates, arrived on 17 July. Despite thirty six affidavits detailing the full extent of the rioters’ actions, only three were executed for their role, and the House of Commons declined to call an official inquiry in May 1792 (Schofield, Joseph Priestley, pp. 283-89).
2. The manuscripts destroyed in the Birmingham Riots, which Priestley listed in An Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the Riots in Birmingham (Birmingham, England, 1791), included his “Illustrations of Hartley’s doctrine of Association of Ideas, and farther Observations on the Human Mind.” These, Priestley noted in his Appeal, “would perhaps have been the most original, and nearly the last, of my publications. The hints and loose materials for it were written in several volumes, not one scrap of which is yet recovered” (pp. 34-35). Also listed was his “Notes and a Paraphrase on the whole of the New Testament (excluding Revelations),” of which he claimed that a clerk was within five days of completing a transcript for the press (p. 36). “I shall soon have transcribed my Exposition of the New Testament, as it stood before the riots” (Joseph Priestley to GT, 10 March 1798, “Priestley Letters,” p. 18).
3. In Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind on the Principle of the Association of Ideas (London, 1775), Priestley summarized and defended David Hartley’s Observations on Man (London, 1749), which he had read perhaps as early as the 1760s (Schofield, Joseph Priestley, p. 52). Hartley’s “doctrine of association” sought to synthesize psychology and physiology by postulating that ideas were the inevitable, unconscious product of the association of neurological sensory inputs with whatever the brain was feeling at the moment. Priestley adopted Hartley’s theory in his attack against Scottish Common Sense realism which held that, rather than being the source of ideas, sensations merely corresponded to instinctive, immediate, immutable, and absolute ideas pre-existing in the common understanding (the “common sense”) of men.
4. Dr. Thomas Reid (1710-96) was professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow; Dr. James Beattie (1735-1803) held the corresponding chair at Aberdeen. Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) and Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770) were major testaments of Scottish Common Sense realism. In the introduction to his third volume of Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (3 vols., London, 1772-74), Priestley announced his intention of publishing a critical review of Reid’s and Beattie’s writings; his ensuing, brutal Examination of Dr. Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind (London, 1774) elicited no public response from its victim. Reid thought little of his attacker’s intellectual rigor and, as he wrote to their mutual friend Dr. Richard Price, “had resolved from the beginning . . . to give him no Disturbance” (Paul B. Wood, “Thomas Reid’s Critique of Joseph Priestley: Context and Chronology,” Man and Nature/L’homme et la nature, vol. 4[1985], pp. 37-38).
5. On 11 December 1782, Priestley sent a copy of the first volume of his History of the Corruptions of Christianity to the British historian Edward Gibbon (1737-94), who was then working on volume four of his six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776-88). In Part I of Priestley’s General Conclusions, “Containing considerations addressed to unbelievers,” he had challenged Gibbon’s characterization of Christianity as simply a superstitious but gratifying alternative to the anemic atheism of first century paganism, and “though I am far from holding myself out as the champion of Christianity, against all the world,” Priestley concluded, “I own I shall have no objection to discuss this subject with Mr. Gibbon, as an historian and a philosopher.” On 28 January 1783 Gibbon acknowledged the gift but declined the challenge, touching off a virulent exchange of letters between the two men over the reasonableness of divine revelation. Spiting gentlemanly rules, Priestley published the private correspondence shortly after Gibbon’s death, in his Discourses on the Evidence of Revealed Religion (London, 1794)—although Gibbon probably enjoyed the more durable “final word” in the last volume of his Decline and Fall, where he condemns the religious and political implications of Priestley’s fanaticism. For more on the latter, see Paul Turnbull, “Gibbon’s exchange with Joseph Priestley,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, v. 14, 2(Autumn 1991):139-58.
6. “By the English papers lately received by Capt. Codman, we learn that at the election of a minister to the Gravel-pit Meeting, Hackney, in the room of the late Dr. Price, the Rev. Dr. Priestly was chosen, by a very large and respectable majority; and that on the first Sunday in December last [4 Dec. 1791], he entered upon his charge, and preached to a crowded congregation” (EH, 2 April 1792). Richard Price (1723-19 April 1791), a prominent moral philosopher, nonconformist minister, and radical political pamphleteer, had served as “morning preacher” at Gravel Pit Chapel since 1770. Priestley belonged to Price’s closest circle and preached his friend’s memorial sermon at the Chapel on 1 May 1791.
1. David Hartley’s Theory of Association.
3. A Harmony of the Evangelists in English (London, 1780).
4. Considerations of the Theory of Religion (Cambridge, England, 1755) by Edmund Law (1703-87), who taught philosophy at Cambridge before becoming Anglican bishop of Carlisle in 1768.
1. GT took rooms at 235 Market Street, which Clement Biddle’s Philadelphia Directory of 1791 listed as the home of John Fletcher, merchant (Congressional Directories, pp. 16-18).
2. Benjamin Bourne (1755-1808; Harvard, 1775), was a lawyer from Providence, Rhode Island, which he represented in the state legislature before his election to Congress upon Rhode Island’s ratification in 1790. He served until 1796, when he resigned to become federal district judge. Theodore Sedgwick considered Bourne, a Federalist and Rhode Island’s sole Representative at this time, a “gentlemanly” and “agreeable” colleague (DHFFC 14:822).
1. Several days before the dance, JH wrote: “The Master of Ceremonies of the Saco Assembly proposes dedicating the new Assembly Room next Wednesday Evening wind & weather permitting drawing to commence at half past 5 OClock four dances being carried down de legibus decori [according to the laws of decorum] then to daunce voluntarily till 12 OClock & then to retire as the Antideluvians marched for safety.” Afterwards, JH described the occasion as “a very genteel Meeting . . . Miss Thatcher attended with her usual good Graces, I had the honor of carrying down a very good dance with her” (JH to GT, 14, 24 Dec. 1792, Chamberlain).
2. The third federal election in Massachusetts was held on 2 November 1792.
3. GT had high expectations of five year old Sally’s progress in reading. A letter written a few weeks later enclosed a “little book”—a present to Sally from his landlady’s daughter Betsey Linn. “It is the history of a Naughty boy reformed—I wish it may be the means of reforming a wild noisy little Girl” (GT to SST, 5 Jan. 1793, TFP).
4. On 15 December, JH and “Mr Gilman a young Gentleman from Exeter [N.H.] dined with Judge [Samuel Phillips] Savage at Mrs. Thatchers, the old Gentleman was in very good Spirits. Mr Gilman keeps School in the proposed Academy, next door to the assembly Room in Biddeford where the several branches of Science are taught, except praying this he sais is not comportable with a Schoolmaster except he has <lined out> extra wages” (JH to GT, 16 Dec. [P.S. to 14 Dec.] 1792, Chamberlain).
1. News of the French victory over the Prussians at Valmy on 20 September 1792 circulated in Philadelphia papers beginning on Christmas Eve and continued to be reported in more detail over the next several days. The battle marked the first decisive victory of French forces under the Constitution of 1791, fighting in the War of the First Coalition—the first attempt by European monarchies to turn back the tide of the French Revolution. France declared war on the Holy Roman Empire’s Austrian Habsburgs in April 1792, and Prussia allied with Austria in July. Before the war ended in 1797, these “Combined Powers” allied against France would include Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, Naples, and an army of French Royalists.
2. Daniel 2:31-35.
3. The famous “Tenth of August” marked the effective end of the French monarchy, when the National Guard (controlled by the Paris Commune) stormed the Tuileries Palace and Louis XVI was forced to take refuge with the Legislative Assembly. The Assembly stripped Louis of his powers six weeks later and dissolved itself to create France’s First Republic. In his reply to this letter, NB agreed that the revolutionary forces “could not have stop’d short of what they have done without injuring their cause—it was absolutely necessary to remove those cursed priests, & demolish every suspected person at the time they did—I can feel for the innocent who sufferd with the guilty, but ’twas impossable to discriminate at such a time—they have themselves to blame for being in such company—it is a crime of the highest nature to be lukewarm when every thing’s at stake” (NB to GT, 18 Jan. 1793, Chamberlain). NB alludes here to the notorious “September Massacres,” when half the prison population of Paris and hundreds of non-juring clergy and religious (those who did not swear an oath to the state-sponsored Church) were slaughtered in the streets, 2-7 September 1792. In a rare reversal, NB would have heard this news before GT; Portland’s own EH was the first American newspaper to report the massacres on 5 November, from a London paper.
4. Exodus 32:3-20.
5. The French monarchy was abolished on 21 September 1792. None of GT’s extant writings indicate what he thought about the next step: trying the former king for conspiracy against the state. Portland bookseller Daniel George would write GT, “I am not ripe for forming an opinion on this subject at present; but am not without my doubts of the strict propriety. By what law can he be tried? Was not his person declared inviolable? What an absurdity it is to place a man above law! Europe! when wilt thou be wise!” Perhaps GT felt the same concern over the legality of trying the former king, since elsewhere in the same letter George expresses his “happiness of being in sentiment with you” on the French Revolution, “which is one of the most glorious political events that ever took place since the creation of the world” (Daniel George to GT, 20 Jan. 1793, Chamberlain). Louis XVI’s trial began on 10 December and, with no dissenting vote, a guilty verdict was reached on 15 January 1793. The vote on the death penalty was more evenly divided, but inevitably fatal to Louis: he was guillotined on 21 January.
6. The passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen by the National Constituent Assembly in August 1789 was an important step towards the creation of France’s Constitution of 1791. The Rights of Man was also the name of Thomas Paine’s vastly influential defense of the French Revolution, published in two parts in London in March 1791 and February 1792.
7. Martin Luther (1483-1546) was the German professor and excommunicate priest whose writings helped launch and then defend the Protestant Reformation against perceived theological, ecclesiastical, and political corruptions of medieval Catholicism.
8. “The Doctor” was probably Dr. Samuel Emerson of Kennebunk, who had married NB’s daughter Olive on 15 August 1791. Besides being “a man of uncommon ability, with scholarly tastes and acquirements,” Emerson shared with GT a compelling interest in the development of local public schooling (Robert C. Waterston, ed., Memoir of George Barrell Emerson, LL.D. [Cambridge, Mass., 1884], p. 1).
9. The results of the third federal election in Maine were reported in CC, 12 December. GT was elected on the first ballot, with 1300 votes against his perennial challenger Nathaniel Wells’s 800 votes—although GT continued to poll well below Wells in Portland (https://elections.lib.tufts.edu/catalog/tufts:ma.uscongress.4.york.1792 [accessed July 2015]). Just a year earlier, in writing to congratulate a young lawyer on opening a law practice in William Widgery’s hometown of New Gloucester, Maine, GT closed by defending Widgery’s “attachment and friendship to me from the first of our acquaintance,” against charges that he was being recruited to oppose GT’s upcoming reelection. Instead, GT insisted their relations had been “uniform and incorruptable—I say incorruptable, because I have good evidence of attempts being made to engage him against me, & in a manner that seemed to favor his interest” (GT to Moses Gill, Jr., 22 Dec. 1791, TFP).
10. Daniel Davis out-polled Peleg Wadsworth by less than 30 votes on the first ballot, and did not receive the required majority; Wadsworth ultimately prevailed on the third ballot in early April 1793. Similarly, William Lithgow initially out-polled Henry Dearborn for Maine’s third seat (representing Lincoln, Hancock, and Washington counties), but a majority did not emerge until Dearborn’s election on the second ballot on 14 January 1793 (Dubin, Congressional Elections, pp. 7-8). SL thought that nothing but Lithgow’s health prevented him from being elected; David Sewall reported “He is at present unable to Walk, His disorder seems a total failure of Muscular motion in the Thys legs & feet—Which He ascribes to the use of mercurial Unguents” (SL to GT, 23 Dec. 1792 and David Sewall to GT, 28 Jan. 1793, Chamberlain).
11. In reply, NB concurred that the persistence of a lawyer versus commercial interest among the Lincoln District electorate was purely specious: “As to a Merchant, who ’tis pretended they wish to send, it is a mere farce—there is no such man in the district, unless they think every petty dealer, shop keeper, or every man that can send a thousand boards to the west Indias, is such” (NB to GT, 18 Jan. 1793, Chamberlain).
12. While the vice president’s election was still uncertain, JH wrote GT “I hope our good Friend Adams is not in real Danger, perhaps it is best to keep up a slow Fire of Party—Good without Evil would set the world Topsy-turvy. Therefore the old Tree of Knowledge was loaded with the fruits, Good & Evil—Tho’ our Electors were not loaded with Political Modesty yet perhaps they may mechanically do right” (JH to GT, 14 Dec. 1792, Chamberlain).
1. Legislation appropriating monies for, among other things, the civil list (including Representatives’ pay) for 1793, had been recommended to Congress’s attention as early as the president’s annual message on 7 November 1792, although it was not debated in the House until 29 November. The subject was referred to several committees before a bill was passed on 9 January 1793 and sent to the Senate, where it was heavily amended and not returned to the House until 20 February. The Appropriations Act of 1793 was finally passed on 28 February 1793.
2. “I am sorry to learn you are subjected to any unkind remarks by going to the dances; and yet ’tis no more than I expected—As soon as I heard of your going I feared that feared lest some unfriendly person would make observations which, if you heard, must be painfull to you” (GT to SST, 5 Jan. 1793, TFP).
3. Adding to SST’s pleasures that winter were a visit by her father, Samuel Phillips Savage. Reported JH, “The old Judge your good Father Citizen Savage is as happy as—I was just agoing to say a King—but they are the most miserable of the human Race, I will say—a Jacobin. . . . I was there a few Evenings since & he liked to have danced” (JH to GT, 13 Jan. 1793, Chamberlain).
4. GT’s anti-urban bias grew rather than diminished by exposure to city living: “One visit in the Country is worth a hundred in a city” (22 May 1798); “I want to be at home more than I can express—A city life is bad enough to me in the winter time; but it is more unpleasant in the spring & summer” (24 April 1800); “From the time I quit seting by the fire a city life is peculiarly disagreeable to me” (1 May 1800); and “I am sick of seeing brick walls, & stone pavements” (13 May 1800, all to SST, TFP).
1. Samuel Phillips Savage was still there in early February, surprising GT by the length of his stay. And yet, he wrote SST, “Children are always in debt to parents—I wish to pay some of the debt to your father that death has prevented my rendering to my own—Above all, my dear, teach our children to reverence & Love their Grand-papa—perhaps, they may never see him after he goes from our house—Much of the infelicity in the world arises from the want of due respect & love, in youth, towards the aged—and particularly to parents, & grand parents—Fillial affection & reverence are more congenial to the minds of children than disrespect, & that indifference too often shown to ancestors—& the aged” (GT to SST, 9 Feb. 1793, TFP).
1. Having drawn only a two-year term to the First Congress (1789-91) and failing to secure reelection, Dalton moved from Newburyport, Massachusetts to Philadelphia, where he was serving as cashier of the U.S. Mint at the time of this letter. His marriage to Ruth Hooper (1739-1826) in 1758 brought them ten children; only three daughters survived infancy. Daughter Ruth married NYC merchant Lewis Deblois in 1789, but Mary and Catherine still lived with their parents. Dudley Atkins Tyng mercilessly disparaged his former neighbors in letters to GT, mocking Dalton’s “shocking vanity,” Mrs. Dalton’s obsessive pettiness, and “all her ideotic Daughters” (Dudley Atkins Tyng to GT, 20 May, 21 June, 7 Aug. 1789, DHFFC 22: 1675-76, 1692-93, 1722-23). Thatcher’s suggestion that the daughters would have benefited by the less competitive marriage prospects back in Newburyport is as close as he comes to agreeing with Tyng’s unkind assessment. According to Atkins family lore, Dalton had actually been a major benefactor of the young but impecunious Dudley Atkins, and when their fortunes were reversed in Dalton’s later years, Tyng “assumed the charge and protection of his [Dalton’s] family” (Atkins, Atkins Family, p. 87).
2. In the same letter, Daniel Cony reported that “The Citizens of this State are highly elated & I believe most Sincerely rejoice at the successes of France—We Sir live in a day when great events have, and probably more will, shortly take place” (Daniel Cony to GT, 20 Jan. 1793, Chamberlain).
2. “Friend Waits paper is transmigrating into a scuttle-fish & darkens Counsel with words without Knowledge” wrote JH. From Portland, Daniel George was “sorry to inform you that there is a coldness between our friend Wait and all the gentlemen of your profession in this district, on account of some publications in his paper, &c None but so benevolent a mind as yours can heal the wounds.” The same day, Daniel Cony reported from Boston that “Our Friend Wait has not yet lost his Zeal and activity in this business” (JH to GT, 10 Jan. 1793; Daniel George to GT and Daniel Cony to GT, both 20 Jan. 1793, and all in Chamberlain).
3. Four installments of a series signed “The Elector,” about the third federal election, ran in TBW’s EH between 15 October 1792 and 14 March 1793. Perhaps significantly, Elector reserved his attack against lawyers until the third installment on 3 January 1793—after GT’s election on the first ballot. By the fourth installment, Elector focused exclusively on the lawyer class’s machinations for electing Daniel Davis, a Portland lawyer. “Davis acts like the Devil—and Silas [Lee] rather worse,” TBW wrote GT. “I do not know where it will end. We are all composed of combustible materials.” He apologized for speaking sharply of GT’s fellow lawyers, insisting “I am provoked to it by the neglect, the sulleness, and the frowns of every lawyer with whom Davis and Lee have had an opportunity to converse since you left home.” Despite this open avowal of his sentiments, TBW denied he was Elector (TBW to GT, 21 Nov. 1792, Chamberlain). SL, however, identified TBW as the author and reported that popular rumor even implicated GT’s role in the appearance of the essays, “from the very great intimacy, as I supposed, that existed between you & that printer.” But both SL and GT grasped the limits of TBW’s “intimacy”: “I recollect your observation that you believed him [Wait] capable not only of being disposed to sacrifice Bror. D[avis], & me, but also yourself not with standing his pretended friendship, if he could not effect the Election of W. [Peleg Wadsworth] Upon any other terms” (SL to GT, 23 Dec. 1792, Chamberlain). The alienation between SL and TBW followed closely upon the latter’s ultimate gesture of admiration in naming his newborn son, Silas Lee Wait (1791-1866).
1. Francis Archibald’s boardinghouse in Bowdoin Square (Boston Directory [1796]).
2. Vice President John Adams’s account of this journey indicates that they were accompanied by Charles Storer and the Adams family servant John Briesler. Storer (1761-1829; Harvard, 1779), Abigail Adams’s distant relation by marriage, joined John Adams’s entourage as his secretary at The Hague, Paris, and London from 1782 until returning to Boston in 1785. His trip to the seat of government at this time was probably related to his duties as secretary to Indian Commissioner Timothy Pickering in 1793-94. Briesler was a young neighbor of the Adamses’ in Braintree (now part of Quincy), Massachusetts, whom Abigail had hired as a manservant in early 1784 and took with her to Europe in the summer of that year. Briesler and his wife remained in the Adamses’ employ well into the 1790s (Adams Diary 3:156n; Adams Family 5:ix-x; John to Abigail Adams, 24 Nov. 1793, Ibid. 9:454-55).
3. Rev. Abel Flint (1765-1825; Yale, 1785) was pastor of Hartford’s Second Congregational Society from 1791 until a year before his death. He was known for his “sonorous voice and stately form, and was a preacher of more than ordinary power, and an especially graceful and impressive orator” (Yale Graduates 4:404-05).
4. Sarah Hudson Mellen (1767-1838), of Hartford, Connecticut, married Prentiss Mellen in 1795 (Maling, Mellen Descendants, pp. 119-21).
5. Ruth Bourn (1776-1869) was the eldest surviving daughter of GT’s friend and frequent fellow lodger, Rep. Shearjashub Bourn of Barnstable, Massachusetts. Mellen may have courted her while studying law under Bourn prior to his admission to the bar in 1788 (Maling, Mellen Descendants, p. 120).
6. Mary (Newell) Loring (ca. 1735-1816), widow of Israel Loring of Boston, seems to have co-managed Boston’s popular Golden Ball Tavern with her cousin Sarah Smith Loring (d. in Boston, 1790) prior to moving to New York City with her children by 1789 and opening her own fashionable boarding house at 13 Broadway, which instantly attracted the patronage of many of her former boarders among the New England members of the First Congress. Although never one of Mrs. Loring’s boarders while Congress resided in New York City, GT befriended her young family as early as April 1790, especially the daughters: Mary (b. 1763), Elizabeth or “Betsey” (b. 1765), and Eunice (b. 1767), who married Edward Neville of Charleston, South Carolina in New York City on 24 September 1793 (Charles H. Pope, Loring Genealogy [Cambridge, Mass., 1917], pp. 46-47, 48-49; Longworth’s American Almanac, New-York Register, and City Directory [New York, 1798], p. 205; Samuel Adams Drake, Old Boston Taverns [Boston, 1917], pp. 83-84; DHFFC 16:995, 1361, 18:493, 19:1133, 1433; [New York] The Diary, or Loudon’s Register, 27 Sept. 1793).
7. Philadelphia’s City Tavern, at Second and Walnut streets, was a favorite meeting place for local and national politicians since shortly after its establishment in 1773. It was demolished in 1854, but reopened as a working “tavern” for the American Revolution Bicentennial in 1976.
8. From Boston while en route to Philadelphia, GT had reassured SST that “I believe there will be no danger in going into the City,” although he thought it probable that Congress would choose to convene elsewhere. Within weeks, he could confirm “I dont hear of any person being sick in this City of the late epidemic disorder, & all minds seem freed from apprehensions” (GT to SST, 22 Nov., 6 Dec. 1793, TFP).
9. John Adams’s impressions also were of “an agreable Journey.” Writing to Abigail from Hartford, he noted that “Thatcher has taken for his Vade mecum Fontenelles History of the oracles. I mentioned to him Farmer upon Devils: a Title that charmed him so much that he is determined to send for Farmers Works” (24 Nov. 1793, Adams Family 9:454-55). GT’s reading matter was History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1st English edition, 1688) by the French popularizer of science, Bernard Le Bovier Fontenelle (1657-1757). Essay on the Demoniacs of the New Testament (London, 1775) was written by the English dissenting clergyman Hugh Farmer (1714-87). Adams was probably referring to this same trip when he wrote, years later, that “Mr Thatcher a few days ago reminded me of a Conversation between him and me, about Eight years ago in a Stage Coach.” Adams had been describing Aaron Burr’s advantages of birth and talents, “and Said that I Should not be Surprized, if these Causes should make him President of the United States in ten years time” (Adams to William Tudor, Sr., 25 Dec. 1800, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 26 Nov. 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-4728 [accessed Jan. 2018].) Burr was barely into his second year as New York’s freshman Senator; his upset election and rapid rise on the national scene would have made his political career a natural topic of speculation in 1793.
10. Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg (1750-1801), of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, served in the Confederation Congress (1779-80), and in the First through Fourth Federal Congresses (1789-97), as Speaker for the First and Third. Educated in Germany, he filled Lutheran pulpits in Pennsylvania and New York before becoming a full-time politician and officeholder in 1779. According to Rep. Zephaniah Smith (Conn.), Muhlenberg, “tho’ a worthy man has not one Talent for his office. He has no grace, dignity, or propriety in his conduct. He has the German pronunciation and is hardly to be understood when he speaks. He was elected by a cursed Intrigue of the Members from Pennsylvania” (Zephaniah Smith to David Daggett, 31 Dec. 1793, American Antiquarian Society Proceedings 4[Dec. 1887], Pt. 4, p. 370). House Clerk John Beckley believed the yellow fever panic was politically motivated to keep southerners away and “bring on the Eastern & Pennsylva. Members to decide the choice of a speaker &c.” (John Beckley to James Madison, 20 Nov. 1793, Beckley, p. 77). Muhlenberg won the Speakership and continued to enjoy overlapping endorsements from Federalists, Antifederalists, and the state’s powerful German demographic, but his tie-breaking vote in the COWH to appropriate money for the Jay Treaty in 1796 spelled the end of his role in national politics.
11. The officers included House Clerk John Beckley; veteran Continental Army officer Joseph Wheaton (1755-1828) of Rhode Island, who served as sergeant at arms from 1789 to 1807; and House Doorkeeper Gifford Dalley, who served from 1789 until his removal in 1794 for neglect of duty. He had solicited GT’s support for the appointment in a letter of 9 March 1789, having likely become acquainted when he applied unsuccessfully to be doorkeeper for the Confederation Congress in 1788 (DHFFC 8:530, 9:226).
1. While in Boston en route to Philadelphia, GT paid £178 towards the discharge of a mortgage of Jeremiah Dow to Boston merchant Ebenezer Oliver (1753-1826) and Mary Johonnot (ca. 1724-1797), Oliver’s widowed mother in law and mother of Boston merchant Francis Johonnot (1754-1815) (GT to SST, 11 Nov. 1793, TFP; NEHGR 7[1853]:143-44).
2. Edmond-Charles Genêt (1763-1834) was French minister to Russia under the ancien regime before becoming radicalized by the French Revolution. After he was expelled by Catherine the Great, France’s Girondist regime appointed him minister plenipotentiary to the U.S. Genêt arrived in Charleston, S.C. on 8 April 1793 and, after a triumphant tour through the South, formally presented his credentials to President Washington in Philadelphia on 18 May. His tumultuous tenure was cut short when Washington’s cabinet approved a letter requesting Genêt’s recall on 7 September.
GT’s reference to “communications . . . relative to Citizen Genet” lumps together the president’s annual message of 3 December (“tuesday last”) and the much more extensive documentation laid before Congress two days later, tracking correspondence exchanged from May to November 1793 among cabinet members, Genêt, and the French foreign ministry, demonstrating (in the words of Washington’s message) that Genêt’s actions “have breathed nothing of the friendly spirit of the Nation which sent him.” The annual message included the announcement of Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality, issued on 22 April 1793 during the nine month long break between the Second and Third Congresses. The Proclamation sought to spell out United States citizens’ legal rights and obligations as neutrals between the combatants of the War of the First Coalition against France (ASP:Foreign Relations 1:21-23, 140, 141-246).
3. The documentation submitted by the President on 5 December included “mutual explanations on the inexecution of the treaty of peace [of 1783]” (ASP:Foreign Relations 1:141-246). These consisted of communications—the earliest, dating back to the early 1780s—among state, Confederation, and federal officials, various British officials, colonial administrators, Great Britain’s minister plenipotentiary George Hammond, and U.S. minister plenipotentiary to Great Britain, Thomas Pinckney. They dealt not only with the surrender of British posts in the Northwest Territory and the compensation for British debts to which it was tied under the terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1783, but also the British crown’s proclamation of 8 June 1793, interdicting contraband to France and French-occupied Europe, and the capture of prizes engaged in such trade. The documents did indeed “make a considerable volume”—two volumes, in fact, printed in Philadelphia in 1793 and sold in two parts in January 1794.
George Hammond (1763-1853) was a career diplomat who served on the staff of the British delegation negotiating the Treaty of Paris (1783) and subsequently held posts in Vienna, Copenhagen, and Madrid before accepting the assignment to the U.S. He arrived in Philadelphia on 20 October 1791, but withheld his formal credentials as Great Britain’s first minister plenipotentiary to the U.S. until 11 November. Hammond served until 1795, when he returned to England to serve as undersecretary of state for foreign affairs.
Thomas Pinckney (1750-1828) was a wealthy South Carolina planter, Revolutionary War veteran, former governor, and sitting state representative when nominated for minister to London on 22 December 1791. His nomination was not confirmed until 11 January 1792, after repeated postponements while the Senate debated its role over the posting and rank of U.S. diplomats. The first U.S. minister to the British court since John Adams left London in 1788, Pinckney served until 1796.
4. “Nothing is said about the yellow fever, but as a subject of speculation—The Doctors dispute sharpely about its origen—some contend it was imported, others say it was generated in the City” (GT to SST, 21 Dec. [P.S. to 17 Dec.] 1793, TFP).
1. Within days, GT received two more letters from Sarah, dated 19 and 20 December 1793. “I am happy in hearing the Children are recovering from the Rash, mumps teeth cuting &c.” (GT to SST, 3 Jan. 1794, TFP).
1. News arrived in early December 1793 of a British-brokered truce between Portugal and Algiers that left Algerine “corsairs” (naval forces and privateers) free to roam at will beyond the Mediterranean, preying on United States commercial shipping and capturing merchant seamen for ransom. GT uses “Algerines” to refer to all the pirates that sailed out of the Barbary Coast—mostly Algiers, Tunis, and Tropoli—under the protection of those ports’ respective rulers, regents of the Ottoman Empire.
“What say the merchants on the subject of Algiers? What mode do they think will be best for Congress to pursue on this occasion? What would they say to a fleet at all times ready to protect their Trade against pirates & Algerienes?” (GT to George Peirson, 8 Jan. 1794, TFP).
2. Thomas Fitzsimons (1741-1811), an Irish-born Philadelphia merchant, banker, and the first Roman Catholic to hold public office in Pennsylvania, was a leader of the state’s revolutionary movement. He captained a military unit during the Revolutionary War and supported a strong, creditor-friendly federal government in the Confederation Congress (1782-83), in the state Assembly (1786-87), and at the Federal Convention of 1787, where he signed the Constitution. In Congress (1789-95) he quickly emerged as an expert on revenue and trade issues (DHFFC 14:778-84).
3. This may relate to money that GT had been obliged to pay in early 1793 as surety for an unidentified defaulter’s debt, which he despaired of every seeing again (GT to George Peirson, 27 Feb. 1793, Thomas Addis Emmet Collection, NN).
1. On 20 January, Rep. Thomas Fitzsimons (Pa.) reported for a committee that had been appointed on 2 January with instructions to determine the naval force necessary to counter the Algerine threat as well as the ways and means for defraying its cost. Fitzsimons’s report recommended building four ships of 44 guns each and two ships of 20 guns each, costing $600,000 to be paid for by increased tariff and tonnage duties (ASP:Naval Affairs 1:5).
1. A Bootman Bradstreet, on the 1790 tax list for Standish, Maine, had served in the Revolutionary War from New Boston, Maine.
2. Andrew G. Fraunces was the son of Samuel Fraunces, the Washingtons’ trusted steward in NYC and proprietor of lower Manhattan’s Fraunces Tavern. He clerked in the Treasury Department from 1789 until his dismissal in March 1793, when he returned to New York City and advertised himself as an agent for claimants against the United States. When the Treasury Department refused payment on two warrants issued by the Confederation’s Board of Treasury, which Fraunces claimed to own on his own behalf, his cause was swept up in the broader Republican campaign to expose departmental corruption under Hamilton. According to one Republican operative, the disgruntled former clerk claimed to possess information with which “he could, if he pleased, hang Hamilton” (John Beckley, quoting Jacob Clingman, to Unknown, 22 June 1793, Beckley, p. 74). Fraunces presented his case in a pamphlet dated 25 August 1793 and entitled An Appeal to the Legislature of the United States . . . Against the Conduct of the Secretary of the Treasury, which was among the documents he submitted with a petition to the House on 18 December 1793, seeking an inquiry into why his claims were “mysteriously denied.” The most damning innuendo did not relate to Fraunces’s claims at all, but to the Secretary’s cover up of his involvement in the fraudulent accounts of Baron de Glaubeck, a foreign officer in the Revolutionary War, and William Duer, Hamilton’s disgraced ex-Assistant Secretary imprisoned for debt since March 1792. The petition was referred to a committee whose report of 30 December led to two House resolutions on 19 February 1794, justifying Hamilton’s refusal to pay and condemning Fraunces’s innuendo as “illiberal and groundless.” For a fuller discussion of this affair, see PAH 14:460-71.
3. On 3 January 1794, during the first day’s debate in the COWH on Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson’s report “on the privileges and restrictions on the commerce of the United States, in foreign countries” (presented in the House on 19 December 1793), Rep. James Madison (Va.) moved seven resolutions outlining a trade policy based on reciprocity with Great Britain’s Navigation Acts, which since the seventeenth century had prevented foreign carriers from trading directly with Britain’s West Indies possessions. The first resolution, for laying additional duties on enumerated goods imported from European nations who had no commercial treaty with the U.S., was fiercely debated for thirteen days before being agreed to on 3 February, by 51 to 46 votes. The next day, debate in the COWH escalated over whether to name Britain as the exclusive target of the resolution, with one member accusing a Federalist colleague of being a British agent (PJM 15:148-49, 167-69; Annals of Congress, 3rd Cong., 1st sess., pp. 418, 422, 425). Pamphlets with Madison’s speeches in support of his resolutions, and the speeches of Rep. William L. Smith (S.C.) against them, are among Thacher’s Tracts, v. 52-53.
4. “I believe you will not hear much more of Mr. [James] Madisons regulations of Trade—The dissension of the subject has pretty clearly demonstrated that if they were adopted our Commerce would be on a worse footing than what it is at present” (GT to John Hobby, 18 Feb. 1794, TFP).
1. Samuel Breck (1771-1862) was born to a prominent and prosperous mercantile family in Boston. He studied for the military in France, but left early in the French Revolution and settled as a merchant in Philadelphia in 1792.
2. Samuel Phillips Savage married his third wife, Mary Meserve or Meservie (d. 1810) on 21 January 1794. An immigrant from the Isle of Guernsey, she had been housekeeper to the family for over twenty years—more recently, as nurse for Savage’s second wife Bathsheba, who died in June 1792 after a lingering illness during which she was “deprived of Reason, speachless, and half-dead wh. [with] the palsey, and a Cancer yt. [that] eats life away in a slow manner” (Park, Savage Descendants, p. 25; Samuel Phillips Savage to GT, 10 Dec. 1791, TFP). GT anticipated that SST would resent her father’s remarriage, but “Upon this you must remember your father ought to consult his own happiness, and marry the woman his affections pointed out—for old men have their fair ones—as well as young” (GT to SST, 22 Jan. 1794, TFP).
3. The publication of banns, either in church during service or over three consecutive Sundays before the marriage ceremony, was intended to give public notice of a matrimonial contract.
4. The birth of their fifth child on 25 January 1794 led GT to “fondly hope that you would not be subject to the distressing fainting fits that have, two or three times, succeeded the births of our Children.” “I have before approved of the name of Henry for our dear baby—But if you prefer that of Lewis, I agree to the change—And will leave the matter with you” (GT to SST, 7 Feb., 4 March 1794, TFP). Their sixth child, born almost exactly two years later, would be named Lewis.
1. “The subject of Invalids is not finally determined by the Court—but from what they have done I am led to the opinion that none of those who were examined under the first Law will will be admitted on the pension List—But as soon as the final judgment of Court can be known I will inform you of it” (GT to John Hobby, 18 Feb. 1794, TFP).
An act of 23 March 1792 had authorized federal circuit court judges to serve as a board of commissioners for settling claims of invalid pensioners. As each circuit court was composed of two Supreme Court justices and the federal district judges within the respective circuit, Judge David Sewall took a special interest in the subject of adjudicating pension cases. Citing a recent petition from neighbors of a man who they claimed had fraudulently obtained a pension, Sewall suggested to GT that future legislation ought to consider how pensioners could be struck off the pension list (David Sewall to GT, 28 Jan. 1793, Chamberlain). Declaring the 1792 act “inadequate to prevent the admission of improper claims,” on 28 February 1793 Congress passed an amendatory act requiring more detailed evidence of a “decisive disability” received in the line of duty, given under oath before a federal district judge or any three persons he might commission. Significantly, the new law allowed rulings under the 1792 law to be adjudicated by the Supreme Court. On 21 February 1794, Secretary at War Knox informed the House that the Supreme Court had determined that such adjudications were not valid (ASP:Miscellaneous 1:78).
2. Hobby’s petition for payment of a certificate, claimed to have been issued him by Quartermaster General Timothy Pickering in 1782, was presented in the House on 17 April 1792 and referred to Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton.
3. A specially convened Boston town meeting on 13 February ordered a committee “to report such resolutions as may have a proper influence on our representatives in Congress,” in support of American commerce. The committee’s report of 24 February endorsed Madison’s proposed retaliatory trade discrimination against Great Britain and Spain, but after two days’ debate the town meeting postponed indefinitely further consideration of the report (CC, 15, 26 Feb. 1794). Portland did not follow Boston’s example.
4. That day’s GA published several pieces, including excerpts from a letter from Norfolk, Virginia to its Representative in Congress (Josiah Parker), reporting the arrival of a French naval squadron carrying Antoine René Charles Mathurin de La Forêt (1756-1846), acting consul general to the U.S., 1785-91, before his appointment as full consul general in November 1793. He would remain in that post until his recall in June 1794. The arrival of Edmond-Charles Genêt’s yet unknown successor as minister plenipotentiary was expected imminently: “A little time will remove the veil of mystery which now envelopes this transaction.”
5. Pondicherry (modern day Puducherry), a French military and economic enclave surrounded by British territories or protected states on the southeast coast of the Indian subcontinent, had been the administrative capital of French India since 1674. Its garrison of 1700 French and Indian soldiers was besieged for three weeks by British land and naval forces before surrendering on 23 August 1793. The city remained in British hands until 1802.
6. Gen. Jean François Carteaux (1751-1813) commanded French forces during most of the siege of Toulon, France’s principal naval base on the Mediterranean, which had been occupied by an Anglo-Spanish army and fleet since August 1793. The inept Carteaux was relieved of command in mid-November but, largely owing to the tactical deployments by a rising artillery captain, Napoleon Bonaparte, the besieged army was forced to evacuate the port in mid-December.
7. Only days before, GT had written “tho I am rather of opinion a Law will finally pass for that purpose, yet ’tis something doubtfull” (GT to John Hobby, 18 Feb. 1794, TFP). As reported here, the first of the resolutions that had been reported on 20 January, authorizing the construction of six warships, was passed by 43 to 41, with GT voting in the slender majority. It was then, together with additional resolutions providing for the ways and means, referred to a “grand committee” of a member from each state, which reported a Naval Armament Bill on 5 March.
1. The House and Senate met in Philadelphia’s Congress Hall from 6 December 1790 until 14 May 1800, when the federal government decamped to Washington, D.C. The building was constructed between 1787 and 1789 at Sixth and Chestnut streets, directly west of Independence Hall on the northwest corner of State House Square. Built as the Philadelphia County courthouse, it was completely gutted and remodeled for Congress’s ten-year residency in Philadelphia. Congress Hall was further altered in 1793, following the reapportionment required by the census of 1790: a 28-foot extension to the southward accommodated the House’s expansion from 73 seats at the end of the Second Congress, to 106 seats (including Tennessee’s non-voting territorial delegate) at the beginning of the Third Congress. Besides the first-floor House chamber and second-floor Senate chamber, there was a House gallery for 300-400 spectators, a Senate gallery for approximately 50 (built when the Senate opened its doors to the public in 1795), a library, the Senate Secretary’s office, and two committee rooms. House Clerk John Beckley’s offices and additional committee rooms were located in the west wing of Independence Hall; see also DHFFC 14:xi-xiii.
2. While in Philadelphia, the Washingtons and Adamses lived in a mansion rented from Robert Morris on the south side of High (Market) Street, just east of Sixth Street. The large building, recently constructed on the site of an older house and remodeled for the government’s use, included state rooms for entertainment, living and office space for the president’s “official family” of secretaries, and space for the steward and other house staff; see also Harold Donaldson Eberlein, “190, High Street (Market Street below Sixth): The Home of Washington and Adams, 1790-1800,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 43, 1(1953), pp. 161-178.
3. Attorney General Edmund Randolph (acting for the absent Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson) formally presented Jean-Antoine-Joseph Fauchet to the President at noon, 22 February. Washington then signed the exequaturs (official permission for diplomats to perform their duties in a host country) for the four members of the new legation whom, by serving as a check upon each other, the French government intended to avoid the rogue excesses of “Citizen Genêt.” Fauchet (1761–1834), Genêt’s successor as minister plenipotentiary until June 1795, was a lawyer with no prior diplomatic experience. Unlike his predecessor, he did not speak English and was to be assisted by two career diplomats: consul general Antoine René Charles Mathurin de la Forêt and Jean-Baptiste Pétry (1757–1838), who had served as consul in various U.S. ports before filling that post in Philadelphia until July 1798. Former Paris police chief George Pierre Le Blanc would serve as secretary of the legation for just a few months before returning to Paris (GUS, 22 Feb. 1794; PGW:Proceedings, p. 286; Gouverneur Morris to George Washington, 12 Nov. 1793, PGW 14:362-64; James Monroe to James Madison, 2 Sept. 1794, PJM 15:354-57).
4. Economic and military crises led to the Paris Commune’s insurrection against Edmond-Charles Genêt’s fellow Girondists between 31 May and 2 June 1793, and the emergence of the more radicalized Jacobins as the dominant force within the French National Convention, under the dictatorial executive authority of Maximilien Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety. Girondist leaders had been purged by the ensuing Reign of Terror by the time the Washington Administration’s formal request for Genêt’s recall was presented to the French foreign minister on 8 October. The next day, the Committee of Public Safety confirmed his recall and charged him with promoting an anti-revolutionary Girondist plot to destroy the Franco-American alliance. Genêt naively expected to return to France to join the army, but the Washington Administration declined Fauchet’s token demand for his predecessor’s arrest. Granted asylum by the same administration he had once opposed, Genêt avoided almost certain execution under the Terror, married the daughter of N.Y. Governor George Clinton in November 1794, and lived out his life as a gentleman farmer in upstate New York (“Editorial Note: The Recall of Edmond Charles Genet,” PTJ 26:685-92; Edmund Randolph to George Washington, 24 Feb. 1794, PGW 15:277).
5. In June 1779, the Continental Congress requested portraits of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, “that, by being placed in our council chamber, the representatives of these states may daily have before their eyes the first royal friends and patrons of their cause.” According to the time-hallowed tradition of European diplomatic portraiture, the request was timed to commemorate a significant dynastic event: the birth of the royal couple’s first child the previous December. But as it also coincided with Congress’s appeal for more financial aid, it might be said that “courtly sensibilities and monetary concerns ran on parallel tracks.” The French foreign ministry obliged by sending atelier copies of the life-size Louis XVI in Coronation Robes (1781) by Antoine-François Callet (1741-1823) and Marie-Antoinette in Ceremonial Dress (1778) by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842). The paintings arrived in Philadelphia in March 1784 but remained on display at the French minister’s residence until the Confederation Congress moved to New York’s city hall in 1785 and were installed without ceremony in Congress’s chamber by August of that year. They remained somewhere in the building after it was converted to Federal Hall, and followed Congress to Philadelphia where they hung in the Senate Chamber of Congress Hall until moved once again to the Capitol in Washington, D.C., where they are thought to have been destroyed during the British occupation in 1814. Copies presented by the French government for the 1976 bicentennial currently hang once again in refurbished committee rooms in Independence National Historical Park’s Congress Hall (T. Lawrence Larkin, “A ‘Gift’ Strategically Solicited and Magnanimously Conferred: The American Congress, the French Monarchy, and the State Portraits of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette,” Winterthur Portfolio 44, 1[2010]:31-75; DHFFC 9:394n).
1. Probably referring to Dexter’s lengthy speech of 23 January, printed in the [Boston] Mercury, 21 February, and Ames’s speech of 27 January, printed in CC, 15 February.
1. Chief Justice John Jay and GT’s friend Sen. Rufus King (N.Y.) emerged as two of Genêt’s most prominent and public detractors in early August 1793, when vague and anonymous reports began to filter from Philadelphia into the NYC press accusing the French minister of a “secret assault” against the Washington Administration’s strict neutrality policy by threatening to appeal directly to the people ([Alexander Hamilton] “No Jacobin,” DADA, 31 July 1793; “Decius,” [NYC] The Diary, or Loudon’s Register, 2 Aug. 1793). The catalyst for this standoff was Genêt’s defiant outfitting of the French privateer Petite Démocrate despite personal pleas by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State Alexander J. Dallas. Hamilton and Secretary of War Henry Knox later claimed to have learned of Genêt’s stubborn defiance second-hand, from Pennsylvania’s Governor Thomas Mifflin. But even after the ship sailed, over Washington’s explicit objections, the president acceded to Jefferson’s request that the episode and Genêt’s resulting recall not be made public immediately. Hamilton and Knox leaked the story to Jay and King, who openly acknowledged that they were the source of the anti-Genêt allegations spreading to NYC, and that they authorized others to repeat it ([NYC] The Diary, or Loudon’s Register, 12 Aug. 1793). Congress was not officially informed of Washington’s request for Genêt’s recall until 5 December 1793; the same day, the Philadelphia press printed testimonials from Jay, King, Hamilton, and Knox explaining the hidden reasons for the recall. A few days later, Dallas publicly repudiated Gov. Mifflin’s interpretation of Genêt’s threat to appeal directly to the people. Encouraged by some prominent Philadelphia lawyers’ assurances that he had legal grounds, Genêt formally demanded that the Administration prosecute the Chief Justice and Sen. King for libel, but Attorney General Edmund Randolph recommended instead that he bring a civil suit. The would-be defendants, feeling abandoned by the Administration, insisted on the release of documents substantiating their letter of 12 August. Washington made peace with King and Jay around the same time that Fauchet arrived to replace Genêt—and the threatened lawsuit was dropped (Harry Ammon, “The Genet Mission and the Development of American Political Parties,” JAH, v. 52, 4[March 1966]:725-41; Thomas Jefferson to Edmund Randolph, 18 Dec. 1793, PTJ 27:587-88).
2. This information was contained in two letters recently received by Sen. John Brown (Ky.), which he shared with Attorney General Edmund Randolph on Thursday, 27 February, excerpts of which Randolph transmitted to President Washington later that day: the first was to Brown dated Lexington, 25 January; the second was an intercepted (and since unidentified) letter from Dr. James O’Fallon to a Capt. Herron, dated 18 October 1793. Brown regretted that “he cannot commit it to the public eye, nor would he wish, that it should be communicated to congress officially. He means it only for the private information of the President; tho’ he does not object to its being spoken of, as intelligence, received from Kentucky.” Rumor of the news the letters conveyed “was in circulation” on 28 February, and had “obtained general belief” by 4 March (Edmund Randolph to George Washington, with enclosure, 27 Feb. 1794, PGW 15:289-93; GUS, 28 Feb.; PG, 4 March).
When French Minister Genêt arrived at the seat of government in the early summer of 1793, he found letters addressed to him by George Rogers Clark (1752-1818), who had won the northwestern frontier for the revolutionary cause during the War for Independence. Clark offered to lead a French-funded force of 800 frontiersmen to liberate Spanish Louisiana, thereby permanently ensuring the longstanding desideratum of western settlers for free trade through New Orleans. (Other armies were to attack the lower Mississippi from the Carolinas, and Spanish East Florida from Georgia.) The proposal coincided perfectly with Genêt’s formal instructions from Paris. With unofficial assurances from Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson that military actions conducted outside the borders of the United States would not jeopardize the policy of strict neutrality formally promulgated by the Washington Administration on 22 April 1793, Genêt commissioned Clark commander of the “Legion of Revolution and Independence of the Mississippi” and sent the noted botanist André Michaux westward as his covert liaison. (Michaux went with Jefferson’s double blessing, since he proceeded under the pretext of a scientific expedition sponsored by the American Philosophical Society.) The grandiose plan began to unravel almost immediately: Genêt failed to secure advances on the American debt to France, to fund the enterprise; Jefferson, his closest sympathizer within the Administration, resigned at the end of December 1793; Genêt received his official recall in January 1794; on 6 March his successor issued a proclamation revoking any commissions “tending to infringe” American neutrality (which GT would have seen in newspapers beginning with GUS, 7 March); and Washington issued a second, stronger proclamation of neutrality on 24 March (Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Origin of Genet’s Projected Attack on Louisiana and the Floridas,” American Historical Review, v. 3, 4[July 1898]:650-71; DeConde, Entangling Alliances, pp. 235-50; Editorial Note: Jefferson and André Michaux’s Proposed Western Expedition, PTJ 25:75-81).
3. On the 5 February vote whether to continue debating Madison’s remaining resolutions, GT sided with the minority of 47 against 51. Despite the vote, the resolutions were never taken up again.
4. “Letters have been recieved from General [Anthony] Waynes Army—Informing that a Detachment had advanced & taken possession of St. Clairs battle Ground, & entrenched themselves there, so as to defy the Indians—They have buried the remaining bodies of St. Clairs soldiers—& recovered his Cannon—some Letters further say that in a skirmish with a party of Indians, the indians were routed, & had sent into Wayne proposing a treaty—but whether this was only a feint to gain time, or honourable, was doubted—And the General was determined to act with caution” (GT to John Hobby, 18 Feb. 1794, TFP).
5. The same “grand committee” of a member from each state that had been appointed on 2 January to report on naval armaments, was instructed on 7 January 1794 to report on the fortification of ports and harbors. The committee report was presented and referred to the COWH on 11 February but not taken up there until 5 March, when the same grand committee was instructed to report a bill. A Bill to provide for the Defense of certain Ports and Harbors was presented on 10 March.
6. Alexander Hamilton’s report, signed 27 February and submitted to the House on 3 March 1794, disputed the validity of the quartermaster general’s certificate for which Hobby had petitioned for payment in April 1792. The report in any case referred Hobby to seek redress under the provisions of an act of 12 February 1793, suspending acts of limitation for certain types of unadjusted Revolutionary War claims (PAH 16:31n, 79-80). On 17 March Hobby was given leave to withdraw his petition.
1. Oliver Ellsworth (1745-1807; Princeton, 1766) was a Federalist lawyer from Windsor, Connecticut. Before serving in the U.S. Senate (1789-96), he served in the Continental and Confederation Congresses (1778-83), on the state supreme court (1785-89), and at the Federal Convention, where he played a major role in negotiating the “Connecticut Compromise.”
2. Both the retaking of British-occupied Toulon by French forces in December 1793 and the abandonment of a British offensive against St. Malo were reported in a letter from Guernsey, 8 January 1794, which GT would have seen in the IG, 1 March (reprinted from NYDG, 25 Feb.). Francis Edward Rawdon-Hastings, Earl of Moira (1754-1823), had been appointed major general in October 1793 and charged with coordinating British efforts to assist a Royalist uprising in Normandy. The reconnoiter failed and his forces, decimated by sickness, returned to England in January 1794 for a planned allied campaign on the Continent (Paul David Nelson, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, First Marquess of Hastings: Soldier, Peer of the Realm, Governor-General of India [Cranbury, N.J., 2005], pp. 118-19).
3. Written from his ninth year of captivity in Algiers, Richard O’Bryen’s letter to James Simpson in Gibraltar, dated 28 November 1793, enjoyed a wide circulation—from New Hampshire to Baltimore—beginning in NYC on 7 March and reprinted in Philadelphia on 11 March; Hobby would have seen it in Portland’s EH, 31 March. O’Bryen (1758-1824), a native of Maine, mastered a Philadelphia ship captured by an Algerine corsair off the Portuguese coast, and became spokesman for the dozens of American mariners then being held for ransom by the Dey of Algiers, thought to be the most powerful of the so-called “Barbary pirates.” For more on their plight, their petitions to Congress for relief, and the treaty that ultimately redeemed them in 1796, see DHFFC 8:1-4. James Simpson, (1747-1820) was a British merchant and Russia’s consul at Gibraltar, where he would also be appointed U.S. consul later in 1794.
4. Notably, given the tense state of Spanish-American relations in the Old Southwest, O’Bryen’s letter also suggested that “A Camp on the Mississippi would make Spain do much in this quarter”—presumably to add pressure on the captives’ behalf (GUS, 28 March).
5. GT was among the majority of 50 to 39 that passed the Act to provide a Naval Armament on 10 March, after an extensive debate in which William B. Giles (Va.) opposed funding for what he dubbed “aquatic sheriffs” (Annals of Congress, 3rd Cong., 1st sess., pp. 491, 497-98).
6. The Act to provide for the Defense of certain Ports and Harbors, as described here by GT after its first two readings, passed its third reading unaltered in the House on 12 March, but every Maine port except Portland was struck from the bill when it was amended and reported out of a Senate committee on 14 March (Annals of Congress, 3rd Cong, 1st sess., pp. 69, 499).
7. On 27 February, a House committee was ordered to report whether and what alterations ought to be made to the 1793 amendatory invalid pension act.
8. John Jervis (1735-1823), 1st Earl of St. Vincent after 1797, served in the British Navy during the Seven Years War and the American Revolutionary War before reaching the rank of admiral in 1787. He also served as a member of Parliament, 1783-94. Appointed naval commander of the Leeward Islands station, Jervis arrived off Barbados with 18 ships in January 1794 and completed the conquest of the French West Indies between the occupation of Martinique in late March to the capture of Guadaloupe in late April (James Ralfe, The Naval Biography of Great Britain [4 vols., London, 1828] 1:284-85).
1. The “democratic societies” of the 1790s continued a tradition of extra-legal political organization that had helped foment the American Revolution by disseminating political propaganda through a network of committees of correspondence. Their general political orientation was Francophile, anti-monarchical, and anti-centralization of the national government, for which latter stand President Washington would accuse them of abetting the Whiskey Rebellion. Thomas Jefferson credited Alexander Hamilton with claiming they were Genêt’s brainchild, although the earliest (the German Republican Society) was founded by April 1793, before the French Minister’s arrival in Pennsylvania. The second and ever the largest, the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania, was founded three months later; its principles and goals were expressed in a series of resolutions passed on 9 January 1794 (GA, 11 Jan.). By the time of the Jeffersonian “Revolution of 1800,” forty one such societies had sprung up—nine in Pennsylvania alone. Their more precise role in the organization of a Jeffersonian Republican “party” remains open to debate, but GT’s alarmed assessment supports the contention that “the societies asserted the public sphere’s independence from the state and refused to accept limitations on public deliberation,” and thereby “constituted a profound challenge to the Federalist conception of legitimate associational behavior” (Harry Marlin Tinkcom, The Republicans and Federalists in Pennsylvania, 1790-1801: A Study in National Stimulus and Local Response [Harrisburg, Penn., 1950], pp. 81-87, 286n; Fischer, American Conservatism, pp. 110-11; PJM 15:56-57; Albrecht Koschnik, “The Democratic Societies of Philadelphia and the Limits of the American Public Sphere, circa 1793-1795,” WMQ, v. 58, 3[July 2001]:617, 625).
2. The meeting, held in the courtyard of the Pennsylvania state house (“Independence Hall”) on 18 March and chaired by wealthy Philadelphia merchant Stephen Girard, passed resolutions decrying British insults and assaults on American dignity and trade, and demanding that the federal government oppose British measures while comparable French actions against American commerce “be regarded with a generous indulgence” (Philadelphia Gazette, 20 March 1794).
1. The letter to Secretary of State Edmund Randolph from Joseph Fenwick (1762-1849; U.S. consul at Bordeaux, 1790-98), dated 4 January 1794 and received on 18 March, discussed the fate of the approximately 200 ships (half of them American) detained in the port of Bordeaux by an embargo imposed by the French government on 12 August 1793. Randolph shared the letter with the president on 19 March, but Washington returned it the next day and there was no public acknowledgment of the news it conveyed until later that month. Under pressure from the U.S. Minister Gouverneur Morris and Consul Fenwick, the Committee on Public Safety lifted the embargo on 27 March and promised to indemnify their owners or captains for damages (Stephen Girard to Alexander Hamilton, 26 Feb. 1794, PAH 16:55n; Edmund Randolph to George Washington, 19 March 1794, PGW 15:414-16; PGW:Proceedings, p. 291; “Letter from Bordeaux,” 4 Jan. 1794, NYDA, 25 March 1794).
2. The Act to provide a Naval Armament was passed in the Senate on 19 March and signed by the president on 27 March.
3. The Act to provide for the Defense of certain Ports and Harbors was passed in the Senate on 17 March and signed by the president on 20 March.
1. The committee appointed on 27 February to consider changes to the Invalid Pensions Act of 1793 reported on 21 March that the Secretary at War ought to place on the pension list all those names returned by the district judge or commissioners under the 1793 act and return to the district judge the names of those whose evidence remained incomplete, “that they may have an opportunity to complete the same” (Annals of Congress, 3rd Cong., 1st sess., p. 734). This report was not taken up and agreed to in the COWH until 29 May.
2. On 25 March 1794, the President submitted to Congress two letters from St. Eustatius dated 1 and 7 March from Fulwar Skipwith (1765-1839; U.S. consul at Martinique since 1790), reporting that one hundred and fifty U.S. ships had been captured by British naval vessels and taken as prizes to British and Dutch ports in the West Indies (ASP:Foreign Relations 1:428-29). The House immediately took up and agreed upon a resolution laying an embargo for thirty days on all ships in U.S. ports bound to any foreign port. With a minor amendment, the resolution was agreed to in the Senate and signed by the president the following day.
3. President Washington had ordered governors to hold their state militias in readiness to enforce the detention of vessels, required shippers to post bond that their cargo deliveries were restricted to the U.S., suggested that Congress clarify that fishing vessels were not exempted from the embargo, and noted that foreign vessels (except privateers) were exempted (ASP:Foreign Relations 1:429).
4. On 27 March, Rep. Jonathan Dayton (N.J.) moved to sequester debts owed by U.S. citizens to British subjects and to secure their payment into the Treasury, “there to be held as a pledge for the indemnification of such of the citizens of the said States as shall have suffered from the ships of war, privateers, or from any person, or description of persons, acting under the commission or authority of the British King, in contravention of the laws of nations, and in violation of the rights of neutrality.” The motion was referred to the COWH and debated at length through the following day, after which no further action was taken.
5. “Attorney General” was smudged out and “Secretary of State” written over it.
6. In addition to Hobby’s letter of 15 March, one of the other two dated from Portland the same day was written by George Peirson (acknowledged in No. 104, below); the third letter has not been identified.
7. GT cites GUS’s 28 March report of the Second Battle of Wissembourg, in which an army of the French Republic made a “general and irresistible attack” against the center of an allied army of Prussians and Austrians, who were forced to retreat east of the Rhine, surrendering all Alsace to French occupation.
8. Henry Dundas, future 1st Lord Melville (1742-1811), was a Scottish Tory politician who served as Home Secretary under his good friend William Pitt the Younger until some of those duties were transferred to the newly created War Ministry, where Dundas served as First Secretary from July 1794 to 1801. Dundas’s original orders of 6 November 1793, not issued until the last day of that year, ordered British ships to detain, for “lawful adjudication” in British admiralty courts, all vessels carrying goods to or from French West Indian colonies. A committee of American merchants in London immediately petitioned the British cabinet for clarification. New instructions, dated 8 January 1794, revoked those of two months earlier and instead ordered detained only those ships carrying goods from the French West Indies to Europe, ships carrying goods anywhere else if they were the property of French “subjects,” ships carrying naval and military stores bound for the French West Indies, and ships attempting to run British blockades of any French West Indies island or to smuggle arms into any such island, blockaded or not (ASP:Foreign Relations 1:430, 431). News of his new orders of 8 January arrived on the Peggy from Antigua, and was printed in GUS, 28 March. GT would seem to have favored the conciliatory interpretation of apologists who claimed that Dundas’s instructions showed restraint by deliberately leaving American ship owners open to indemnification by not condemning captures outright (a judicial resort) but only detaining them (Philadelphia Gazette, 31 March 1794).
9. Sir Guy Carleton (1724-1808), 1st Baron Dorchester after 1786, joined the British army and rose from ensign in 1742 to Governor General of Quebec (1768-78, 1785-95) and commander in chief of all British forces in North America in the last years of the Revolutionary War. In a speech delivered at Quebec on 10 February 1794 to a deputation of Indian tribes from lower and upper Canada, Dorchester commiserated that the U.S. had broken assurances of peace with border Indian nations, averred that Britain “bore the language of the United States with patience,” but nevertheless predicted war between the two nations before year’s end (GUS, 26 March; reprinted in EH, 7 April). An editorial in GA, 27 March, regarded the speech as “a proof of the base arts which that nation employs to keep alive the flame of war upon our frontier.” The indiscretion of such a speech, and its mysterious leak to the American press (probably via N.Y. Governor George Clinton’s agent in Montreal), raised questions about its credibility (Bemis, Jay’s Treaty, p. 267n).
1. The salutation’s misnomer is inexplicable, except for this possible clue: “For the last six or eight weeks I have wrote more than two sheets of papers a day in Letters—to my friends—Sometimes I forgot to whom, as well as what, I wrote last—And tis probably I often write the same thing to the same person several times over” (GT to SST, 19 April 1794, TFP). GT was writing to Daniel George around this time, although there is no extant letter from GT to him bearing this precise date.
2. News of the embargo arrived in Portland “by express” the same day GT wrote this letter. Peirson believed the measure “is generally approved of here.” Public opinion was informed by an expanding litany of depredations: “the last Vessel which arrived here from the WI but a few days since, brought home Fifty Eight of our countrymen, who had their Vessels condemned and all their property taken from them.” In retaliation for the return of these shipless mariners, “some supposed congress would declare war or grant an armed neutrality, others where [were] advocates for an embargo.” As a practical matter, for their joint business interest, Peirson asked “Pray what is Your oppinion, do you think it will be best to sell our present Stock, or keep it on Hand” (George Peirson to GT, 5 April 1794, GTP-Portland).
1. John Vaughan (1756-1841) was a Philadelphia wine merchant and civic leader who had emigrated from England by way of France in 1782. He was the third son of Samuel Vaughan (1720-1802), a West Indies planter, London merchant banker, and American sympathizer whose family left an imprint on two movements close to GT’s heart: the economic development of Maine, through their proprietary holdings around Hallowell; and the rise of Unitarianism. Twenty years later, TBW asked GT “to write to your friend Mr. Vaughn” on his behalf; “A wish sometimes escapes me that I might have some acquaintance with Mr. V.—but it is instantly repressed by the reflexion that I have neither learning, wealth, nor fame” (TBW to GT, 7 May 1814, Wait Letters).
2. Letters from the London mercantile firm of Bird, Savage and Bird, dated 1 and 10 January 1794, arrived in Boston on the packet from Halifax on 27 March and appeared the next day in the [Boston] Mercury, along with the text of the new instructions of 8 January. The letters were reprinted in EH, 7 April.
3. The Revolutionary War hero, the comte de Rochambeau, surrendered his 900-man French garrison at Fort Bourbon, guarding Fort-de-France, Martinique, on 22 March 1794, following a month long siege by British land and sea forces.
4. The “grand committee” of a member from each state (with Ames representing Massachusetts) was appointed on 26 March. Its report, submitted to the House on 17 April, was referred to the COWH and debated almost daily from 23 April until 7 May, when the COWH reported resolutions to the House recommending a variety of direct taxes, as well as impost and tonnage duties. In roll-call votes that day, GT voted with the majority against striking a tax on carriages used for public conveyance or stamp taxes for legal documents. On 27 and 29 May, GT voted for the resulting stamp tax and carriage tax bills, respectively, and he voted for the “bill laying duties on stamped vellum, parchment, and paper” when it was defeated on its third reading on 27 May. The Act laying duties on Carriages was passed in the Senate on 4 June and signed by the President the next day.
6. On 26 March, the GUS and IG both printed Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s letter to Kentucky militia Gen. Charles Scott, dated 10 February 1794 from Greenville, Ohio, reporting that he had agreed to a proposed 30-day truce with the tribes of the Maumee Valley, on condition that they return all American prisoners to Ft. Recovery (the site of St. Clair’s defeat more than two years earlier), although he questioned whether the proposal was not an “insidious manœuvre” to stall for more time to mobilize. The same developments had been reported more confidentially to government officials (and perhaps, indirectly, to GT) from Wayne’s letters to Secretary of War Henry Knox, dated 18 January 1794 and received by 7 March. On 20 March, Wayne would report through the same official channels that the terms of the truce had not been met and that he was resuming preparations for the campaign (PGW:Proceedings, p. 289).
7. Ebenezer Davis (ca. 1753-1799) settled in Portland around 1785, where he was a local officeholder of Federalist persuasion and old-fashioned habits. He had joined his neighbors from central Massachusetts in responding to the Lexington Alarm of 1775 and rose from private to ensign throughout most of the major campaigns of the Revolutionary War—from Breed’s Hill and the Siege of Boston, to the New York and New Jersey campaigns of 1776, Brandywine, Monmouth, and Yorktown—before ending his Continental Army career in 1783 as lieutenant and brigade quartermaster in Capt. John Hobby’s company of the 3rd Regiment of the Massachusetts Line. Although he held a commission as state militia captain from 1787, and Rep. Peleg Wadsworth recommended him for an appointment during the Quasi-War with France, he never received a federal army commission (David G. Haskins, Jr., Biographical Sketches of Captain Ebenezer Davis, and his son [Cambridge, Mass., 1873], pp. 3-6; “Candidates for Army Appointments” [9-28 Dec. 1798], PAH 22:320-39).
8. On 17 April 1792, Hobby petitioned the House for payment of a certificate he had been assigned by Quartermaster General Timothy Pickering, for wartime services. The petition was referred to the secretary of the treasury, whose report on it was submitted and tabled on 3 March 1794. On 17 March, Hobby was given leave to withdraw his petition, which presumably became the basis for the claim filed about this time with the auditor.
1. Boston-born William Tyng (1737-1807) settled in Falmouth (now Portland) when he was appointed the king’s high sheriff of Cumberland County in 1767. Commissioned colonel in the British Army in 1774, he resided in NYC throughout the war and joined the exile of British Loyalists to New Brunswick, Canada. He returned to Maine in 1793 with his wife Elizabeth Ross (m. 1769), and lived the rest of his life in Gorham (Timothy Alden, Jr., Memoirs of Edward Tyng . . . and of Hon. William Tyng [Boston, 1808], pp. 6-8).
2. Former Attorney General Edmund Randolph succeeded Jefferson as secretary of state from 2 January 1794 until his resignation on 19 August 1795, under circumstances foreshadowed by GT’s initial assessment here.
3. “Do tell me a little about Genet?” NB had asked. “I suppose you know him—every one sees him to be a man of prodigious powers—what—for a figure—is he? tall or short? hand some or ugly? is he agreable in conversat[ion] an amiable companion? or how what?”
4. About this time, GT was involved in a frustrating effort to get Genêt to pay a bill of exchange held by a constituent (GT to Daniel Hooper, 24 December 1793, TFP). GT’s abiding goodwill towards the non grata Frenchman shows his capacity for separating public errands from private opinions.
5. The only known correspondence between GT and the new French minister, Jean-Antoine-Joseph Fauchet, probably related to the fallout from Genêt’s unpaid bills (see previous footnote). On 31 March 1794, Fauchet sent GT a two-page letter (unlocated). GT’s reply indicates his constituent’s intention to resubmit the unpaid bill of exchange, and closes with “sincere congratulations on the success of the Republic of France” (GT to Fauchet, 2 April 1794, TFP).
6. NB had written, “I dislike the plan proposd of a Naval force to protect our trade against the Algerines—it will put great sums into the contractors pockets who engage to build the Navy. but I will venture my life they will never answer the purpose for the expence of such a Navy will be more than all the trade to that part of the globe is worth, and a dead loss to the Nation. I have seen no debates upon this subject, but I am sure, ’twill be more for our benifit to buy a peace with them, as many other nations do, and not expose our weakness & folly, as there is no Navy we can support equal to the force the Alger[ines] can send against them.”
7. “I like yr. reasoning upon the french revolution,” NB wrote, “and am pleasd at your sensibility on that subject & readings to excuse what superficial reasoners call cruelty in them—and tho I have been paind at some of their proceedings, yet I have constantly ben an advocate for them, nor can I blame them for takeing off the head of that sweet delicate Queen [Marie Antoinette] [whom] we have heard so much of from the celebrated orator Burk[,] for if one tenth be true, which she is chargd wth. nay if only the necklace, tis sufficient in my mind to excuse their severity.” The “Affair of the Necklace” was an attempted fraud that resulted in the conviction of an impoverished noblewoman for deceiving a courtier into buying a diamond necklace in the queen’s name. The scandal, publicized in the noblewoman’s memoirs published in English as early as 1791, left the queen legally exonerated but condemned by public opinion for an extravagant lifestyle that had made such a deception credible in the first place, and that would contribute to her execution for high treason on 16 October 1793. The member of Parliament and political theorist Edmund Burke (1729-97) defended France’s royal family and the ancien regime generally in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790).
8. On this date, Rep. Abraham Clark (N.J.) moved to suspend all commercial intercourse with Great Britain until compensation was made for damages from the recent detention or condemnation of American shipping as well as for enslaved blacks carried away in 1782-83, and until the western posts were evacuated. The proposal was debated until 18 April, when James Madison amended it by moving to postpone non-intercourse until 1 November. The measure would pass the House on 21 April but be defeated in the Senate by Vice President Adams’s tie-breaking vote on 28 April.
9. “Add for the information of our friends, that News from England has dispelled our fears of war. . . . Tell our friends—it is my opinion the Embargo will not be continued beyond the thirty days” (GT to SST, 5 April 1794, TFP).
1. “I find this is the apprehension of some of the merchants in this City” (GT to [Unknown], 18 April 1794, TFP).
2. George III’s speech to the British House of Lords and Commons upon the opening of Parliament on 21 January 1794 was first printed in GA, 11 April (from a St. Eustacia newspaper, via NYC). The king asked the Commons to fund a continuation of the Coalition’s war against France, to which the opposition leader Charles James Fox responded with one of the most famous speeches of his career.
1. Benjamin Hasey’s departure to open his own law practice may not have been altogether unwelcome to GT, who felt his law student’s residency with the Thatchers was strained at times. “It pleases me that Mr. Hasey was so much like other people as to ask for the Horse to visit his friends—It always hurt me that he should seem to endeavour to live in the family like an intire stranger, & avoid all kind [of] domestic sociality” (GT to SST, 11 Jan. 1794, TFP).
2. The concern about overcrowding expressed here, shortly after the birth of their fifth child Henry, became critical following the birth of their next child Lewis, two years later:
The whole of last night I was dreaming about building an addition to the house—And you will readily see how much I was distressed; for, as you well know, nothing is more wearisome to me, in my waking hours, than to contemplate the immense care of building. However, I have come to a determination, tho I reserve a right upon hearing new arguments, to come to a different one on my return—I say I have come to a determination to add a Kitchen to our house, & make a seting room of the present Kitchen—I can think of nothing better—If you can—on my return we will hear & examine the arguments (GT to SST, 13 Feb. 1796, TFP).
3. GT chafed at his neighbors’ continuing lack of interest in public education: “what a pitty that the people about the falls set so lightly by a good education that all of them together cannot afford to pay a schoolmaster!” (GT to SST, 24 Dec. 1796, TFP). Beside the occasional law student who doubled as a family tutor, GT hired at least one other private instructor for about a year: Elizabeth (Dillingham) Nason of Sandwich, Cape Cod (Henry Savage Thacher annotation on letter from Nason to GT, 10 June 1803, TFP).
2. Nathaniel C. Higginson (1768-94; Princeton, 1787), son of the influential Boston merchant and arch-Federalist Stephen Higginson, was admitted to the bar in Philadelphia in 1790 and resided there until his appointment as agent to the British West Indies. His instructions from Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, dated 11 April, directed him to spend up to $5000 from the U.S. treasury as surety for costs and damages sustained by U.S. merchants appealing the British detention or condemnation of their vessels. Higginson chartered a ship to Barbados on 16 April but died of yellow fever in Dominica in mid-July, before the conclusion of his mission (Princetonians, pp. 198-201; AH to Nathaniel C. Higginson, [16 April 1794], PAH 16:288-89).
3. For George Hammond’s letter to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, dated 11 April, see ASP:Foreign Relations 1:432-33.
1. Interlineation in TBW’s hand altered this phrase to read “merchandise here.”
2. Acting upon the reliability of news from Europe posed constant challenges around this time. On 18 April, “1 oClock—this moment a handbill is brought into the House” contradicting earlier reports that the British had conquered Fort Bourbon; hours later “arrived here a man from New-York who left that place the day before—towards night,” reporting that the French had indeed been repulsed. “What permanent Judgment can we form on such contradiction of testimony?” (GT to [Unknown], 18-19 April 1794, TFP).
3. “By Letters from Spain of a late date it appears that nation is very uneasy at her connection with Great-Britain—And I believe, she begins to fear as much permanent danger from the apparent maritime Superiority of England over all other nations, as from the leading principles & conquering arms of the Republic of France” (GT to [Unknown], 18-19 April 1794, TFP).
1. The resolution (un-journalized, if it was indeed moved on 7 May) was taken up, briefly debated, and deferred on 8 May (Annals of Congress, 3rd Cong., 1st sess., pp. 657-58).
2. The president signed the resolution the same day.
1. Following a postponement on 8 May, the House resumed consideration of the issue on 12 May by taking up a resolution to extend the embargo until 20 June. In a preliminary vote, GT sided with a majority of 52 to 34 against an amendment that would have embargoed trade only with the British West Indies and Canada. Then, “after considerable debate,” he voted with an overwhelming majority (73 to 13) to defeat the resolution altogether. “It appeared to be the general opinion of the House, that the Embargo ought to cease on the twenty fifth of this month—And that it should not be continued unless some new facts and circumstances should turn up unknown at this time—It is my opinion from the best information I can collect from Europe, West Indies and different parts of America that there will not be a continuance of the embargo—but you will not[e] this opinion is founded on the present appearances of things” (GT to George Peirson, 13 May 1794, TFP).
2. Among Philadelphia newspapers, the GA took the lead in criticizing Chief Justice John Jay’s diplomatic appointment. Its publisher, Benjamin Franklin Bache (1769-98), learned the printing trade from his maternal grandfather and namesake, and began the GA in October 1790 with the equipment inherited upon Franklin’s death earlier that year. On 8 November 1794, the paper became the notorious Federalist-baiting, pro-Jeffersonian Aurora.
1. From David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749), Part One, Chap. 4 (“Of the Six Classes of intellectual Pleasures”), Sect. 3 (“Of the Pleasures and Pains of Self-interest”), p. 458.
2. “Theopathy” was an expression apparently coined by Hartley to “comprehend all those Pleasures and Pains, which the Contemplation of God, and his Attributes, and of our Relation to Him, raises up in the Minds of different Persons, or in that of the same Person at different Time” (Part One, Chap. 4, Sect. 5, Prop. 98, p. 486).
1. On 12 May 1794, “a legal and very numerous” town meeting convened in Boston’s Faneuil Hall and unanimously passed two resolution expressing the citizens’ full acquiescence in continuing the Embargo of 1794. The resolutions, signed by town clerk William Cooper, were also addressed to James Madison “or Col Parker, or Mr. Giles.” In an un-journalized action, Goodhue read the resolutions aloud before the House on 15 May (CC, 14 May; Boston Gazette, 19 May; William Cooper to James Madison, [12 May 1794], PJM 15:331; GUS, 16 May).
1. This question of whether such a tax met the definition of a direct tax (and therefore unconstitutional under various provisions of Article I) would ultimately be litigated in Hylton v. U.S. (1796), in which the Supreme Court ruled the carriage tax constitutional. It was the Court’s first exercise of judicial review—seven years before Marbury v. Madison more famously used judicial review to rule part of a federal statute (the Judiciary Act of 1789) unconstitutional. In a letter to his wife on 26 February, Justice James Iredell described defense attorney Alexander Hamilton’s valiant three hour long speech before the Court, “attended by the most crouded Audience I ever saw there, both Houses of Congress being almost deserted on the occasion” (DHSCUS 7:490).
2. James Madison, Josiah Parker, and William Branch Giles.
1. John Graves Simcoe (1752-1806) served with the British Army in the American Revolutionary War, rising from ensign to lieutenant colonel by war’s end. His celebrated wartime exploits contributed to a reputation for excitability and a rampant anti-American prejudice that was perhaps ill-suited to fill the post of first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada (1791-96). Comprising most of present-day southern Ontario, the province included much of what imperial militarists like Simcoe regarded as “extraprovincial Indian Country”—U.S. territory where the king of England claimed certain rights of stewardship for Native Americans. In February 1794, Dorchester ordered Simcoe to re-occupy an abandoned fortified site on the Maumee River just southwest of present-day Toledo, Ohio. This new Fort Miami, combined with fortifications at the mouth of the river, was intended to block a rumored advance upon British-held Detroit either from Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s position further upriver or from the American foothold at the east end of Lake Erie at Presque Isle (Erie, Pennsylvania). The fort closed its gates to Britain’s Indian allies retreating from the nearby Battle of Fallen Timbers in August of that year, and under the terms of the Jay Treaty it was abandoned by the British in 1796 (Bemis, Jay’s Treaty, pp. 173, 239, 247).
2. Secretary of State Edmund Randolph’s letter to Britain’s Minister George Hammond, dated 20 May 1794, urged him “to admonish those who shall throw obstacles in the way of negotiation and tranquility, that they will be responsible for all the unhappy consequences.” Hammond’s response of 22 May insisted that Lord Dorchester’s actions were beyond his authority to control, that he had no knowledge of Lt. Gov. Simcoe’s military movements, and that there were many instances of American hostilities upon which “I might have conceived myself justified in dilating” (ASP:Foreign Relations 1:461-63). The president transmitted Randolph’s and Hammond’s letters to Congress on 21 and 23 May respectively.
3. “Had these militia proceeded to the place of their destination & met Simcoe with his Troops tis probable acts of violence & Hostility would have taken place” (GT to John Hobby, 30 May 1794, TFP).
4. Additional thoughts that GT entertained about the ameliorating and edifying effects of the French Revolution, written even at the height of The Terror, might be inferred from Daniel George’s reply to his unlocated letter of 10 May: “You have here spoken the language of truth, that is, you have spoken my language. . . . I maintain that, circumstanced as the French nation was, with the prejudices of centuries to oppose, and eradicate, it was impossible but that many things must take place that would give pain to a susceptible mind. But will a person, who is dangerously ill, take no medicine, however salutary, because it tastes a little bitter in the mouth?” Still, GT must have evinced signs of misgivings even this early, since George claimed “the liberty of shewing your letter to some friends, as reports have been industriously circulated that you are an enemy to the French Revolution” (Daniel George to GT, 27 May 1794, TFP).
1. In a rapid series of unjournalized maneuvers, Rep. Alexander Gillon (S.C.) presented such a petition personally handed to him by five shipmasters, which was read and tabled. Gillon then moved the reinstatement of the embargo, but withdrew the motion with the intention of renewing it on 26 May. Instead, on that day, the House appointed a committee to bring in a bill empowering the president to “lay, regulate, and revoke Embargoes” at his own discretion, which passed the House on 30 May and was signed by the president on 4 June (Annals of Congress, 3rd Cong., 1st sess., p. 722).
1. An Act laying duties upon Carriages for the conveyance of Persons, an Act laying duties on licenses for selling Wines and foreign distilled spirituous liquors by retail, and an act “to facilitate and secure the collection of the revenue on distilled spirits, and stills,” were all signed by the president this day.
2. The invalid pensions acts of 23 March 1792 and 28 February 1793 had authorized federal judges to review claims for invalid pensions. GT served on the committee charged on 29 May with bringing in a joint resolution and a bill for bringing into effect the House resolution passed that day, directing the secretary of war to place on the invalid pensioners list “all such persons, returned by the District Judges of the several districts, under the act of Congress [of 28 February 1793], as shall appear, by the evidence accompanying such returns, and such documents as may be in the office of the War Department, to come clearly within the act aforesaid, and are reported by the Secretary of War as having evidence complete.” Both the proposed bill and a joint resolution were reported on 31 May. The latter, in addition to repeating the House resolution of 29 May, directed the Secretary at War to remove from the invalid pension list all those named under the 1792 act. This joint resolution was passed in the House on 5 June, and in the Senate four days later. The bill, authorizing payment of the claims returned under the 1793 act and confirmed by the joint resolution of 5 June, was passed in the House on 3 June and in the Senate on 7 June.
3. Hobby’s petition of April 1792, seeking payment of a certificate issued him by the quartermaster general in 1782. It had been reported on, on 3 March 1794, and Hobby was given leave to withdraw the petition two weeks later, but it was never brought before Congress again before the end of the session.
4. King Frederick William’s manifesto, dated Berlin, 13 March, cited Prussia’s “unparalleled efforts” in maintaining armies on two distant fronts (France in the west and Poland in the east), his allies’ refusal to subsidize his armies, and his own reluctance to arm the Prussian peasantry, as his reasons for withdrawing all but 20,000 of his 70,000 troops from the First Coalition of European powers raised against revolutionary France (PG, 4 June 1794).
5. Georges-Jacques Danton (b. 1759), leader of the moderate Girondist wing of the Jacobins in the early stages of the French Revolution, was accused of profiteering and corruption by his more extreme former allies, convicted in a political show-trial, and executed on 5 April 1794. It was first reported in Philadelphia in the GUS, 4 June.
6. Both David Thompson and Benjamin Rand were commissioned ensigns in the First Infantry Regiment of the federal army on 12 May 1794.
1. On 16-17 July, an armed mob of 700 farmers attacked “Bower Hill,” the garrisoned home of James Neville in present-day Scott Township, southwest of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Neville (1731-1803), a French and Indian War veteran who rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and had served as excise inspector of Allegheny County since 1791, was besieged in his home after he and the federal marshal attempted to serve writs against local farmers who had defaulted in registering their stills. The mob’s leader, Continental Army veteran Major James McFarland, was killed but Neville escaped in the melee. GT would have read of the incident in the “Extract of a letter from Pittsburg, dated July 18,” reprinted in Portland’s EH, 16 August, from the GA, 26 July. But perhaps the best account of it and the events surrounding this most violent episode of the Whiskey Rebellion remains Alexander Hamilton’s official letter to Washington, [5 August] 1794, first printed in the DADA of 21 August, widely reprinted thereafter, and transmitted to Congress on 19 November 1794 (PAH 17:24-58).
2. Malachi 4:6.
3. Ezekial 40:3-43:18.
4. Judges 16:23.
5. Exodus 32:20.
6. Coxe’s reply of 27 September refers to a recent private letter from John Jay in which “His language . . . upon the subject of his Mission is satisfactory.” The Whiskey Rebellion, Coxe continued, was “rapidly subsiding” and would “be so put down as to give reputation to the Government on the score of Efficiency in the foreign world,” while unofficial reports indicated that Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s expedition had dealt “a severe blow” to the Indians of the Northwest Territory. Coxe expressed confidence that Wayne’s and Jay’s successes would make Timothy Pickering’s difficulties “vanish” in negotiating the eventual Treaty of Canandaigua with the Iroquois League, signed 11 November 1794 (Tench Coxe to GT, 27 Sept. 1794, Chamberlain).
7. John Jay in London, and William Short and William Carmichael in Madrid.
1. GT arrived in Boston on Friday, 17 October, after three days’ overland travel from Biddeford. Among other excursions, he spent the night of 21 October visiting Christopher Gore at his summer estate and experimental farm in Waltham (built in 1793, destroyed by fire in 1799, and replaced by the famous “Gore Place” in 1806); his host and “Mrs. [Rebecca Payne] Gore expressed a great desire to see you.” In addition to various household purchases, “I have bought a Ticket in the [Harvard] Colledge Lottery.” GT left by stage for NYC on 24 October (GT to SST, 23 Oct. 1794, TFP).
2. The boardinghouse of Robert Wallace, shopkeeper, at 72 Mulberry (Arch) Street. GT moved in that evening and together he and Wadsworth would remain the Wallaces’ boarders, even following them to new quarters at 77 North Third Street for the Fourth Congress until the end of Congress’s residence in Philadelphia in 1800. For parts of the Fourth Congress, they were joined by Moses Robinson (Vt.) and Jeremiah Smith (N.H.), and in the Fifth Congress, by William Shepard (Mass.), David Bard (Pa.), and GT’s sometime-nemesis, Matthew Lyon (Vt.) (GT to SST, 18 Nov. 1797, TFP; Congressional Directories, pp. 20-33 passim; Philadelphia Directory and Register [1794]; Philadelphia Directory [1799]).
3. “We are totally discouraged from trying to live in this place,” Joseph Wheaton had written GT from Philadelphia on 1 October. “The yellow fever has actually made its appearance in several parts of the City, and with all the malignant symptoms of the last Summer.” And yet, he wrote confidentially, “the people appear seized with the same appathy which proved so fatal to them last year.” Thatcher had expected to lodge with the Wheatons, but the reappearance of yellow fever induced the family to sell their house and relocate to the country. Wheaton assumed the government would follow: “I think Congress will not sit here this winter” (Joseph Wheaton to GT, 1 Oct. 1794, Chamberlain). Joseph Wheaton (1755-1828), a Continental Army veteran, served as the House’s first sergeant at arms from 1789 until his resignation during the Tenth Congress.
4. Among Maine residents, Phillips Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire “had been the chief resort of such as aspired to a higher education” before 1791. Fryeburg Academy, the third incorporated in Maine (1792), began a year earlier as a grammar school with seventy-five students paying seven shillings per week for each eleven-week term, under the instruction of Paul Langdon (1752-1834; Harvard, 1770), the second son of Dr. Samuel Langdon, Harvard’s president when GT graduated from there. The younger Langdon remained preceptor until he was succeeded briefly by the future statesman Daniel Webster in 1802. Langdon’s sister Elizabeth married GT’s close friend, Judge David Sewall, in November 1790 (F.B. Sanborn, “Doctor Langdon,” Granite Monthly 36[1904]:279, 281; J.T. Champlin, “Educational Institutions in Maine, while a District of Massachusetts,” MHSC 8[1881]:159, 163).
GT would become a benefactor of Fryeburg Academy as a trustee and the donor of a scholarship for females. His attempt to resign as trustee was declined on the grounds that “The patronage & advice of one in an elevated station of life may be of the greatest benefit to an Academy, which stands in need of your Fostering Care” (Judah Dana, on behalf of Academy, to GT, 28 Nov. 1806, TFP).
5. “Yours of the 22d November, which came to hand two days ago, informs me also that Phillips set out the day before for the Acadamy. But why was you so jejune in your account of his going? . . . In two or three former Letters I have reminded you how very short you always are on the very subjects I want the most particular account of—And none interests me more than every thing concerning Phillips going from home to School” (GT to SST, 6 Dec. 1794, TFP).
6. “I shall be very sorry if he cant go & board with Captain Brown—But the place of boarding is of secondary consideration” (GT to SST, 12 Nov. 1794, TFP). Henry Y. Brown (1730-96), a captain in the French and Indian War, was the original proprietor and most prominent citizen of Brownfield, Maine, adjacent to Fryeburg. Joshua B. Osgood, another of GT’s correspondents, was Brown’s son in law (Collections of the Maine Historical Society 4[1856]:280).
7. Mehitable Bangs Cobb’s older brother was Edward Bangs (1756-1818; Harvard, 1777), a native of Barnstable, Massachusetts, studied law in Newburyport under Theophilus Parsons, and joined a law practice in Worcester in 1780. In 1788 he married Hannah Lynde (1760-1806); the “child” was Edward D. Bangs (1790-1838) (William Lincoln, History of Worcester, Massachusetts (Worcester, Mass., 1837), pp. 233-34.
8. Barzillai Hudson (1749-1823) took over the management of his second wife’s newspaper, Hartford’s Connecticut Courant, when he married Hannah Watson in 1779. By 1791 he was senior editor of the highly influential newspaper, with one of the largest circulations in the country. Hudson’s daughter Sarah (by his first wife Margaret Seymour Hudson) would marry Mellen Prentiss in 1795.
9. “I like my new lodgings very well; & think it will turn out so much cheeper than my Lodgings the last Session as to clear enough to pay for Philips’ board & schooling for four months—which is an object worth attending to” (GT to SST, 12 Nov. 1794, TFP).
1. The fourth federal election in Massachusetts was held on 3 November 1794. By this time the Commonwealth had abandoned the complex method introduced in the third federal election and reverted back to the single member districts in which a simple majority determined the winner. In the initial ballot for the fourteenth district (also called the Third Eastern District), GT won a large plurality over his perennial challenger Nathaniel Wells, in a scattered field of candidates. He would prevail with 68 percent of the votes in a second ballot, held on 17 January 1795. Statewide, Federalists lost one House seat to the Democratic-Republicans, and while the delegation maintained its Federalist majority (10 to 4), Democratic-Republicans controlled an overall majority (56%) of the seats in the U.S. House—for the first and only time before the “Revolution of 1800” (Dubin, Congressional Elections, pp. 10, 12).
2. On 9 October, William Findley (then a sitting member of Congress) and David Redick met with George Washington at Bedford, Pennsylvania, where the president was reviewing the federalized militias called out to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. They came as deputies of a convention of moderates from western Pennsylvania who had voted resolutions a week earlier, expressing their “general disposition to submit to all laws” and authorizing the two men to “detail such circumstances as may enable the President to judge whether an armed force be now necessary to support the civil authority.” Washington insisted that the army would not stand down without “the most unequivocal proofs of absolute submission,” but would only be used to help magistrates enforce the excise laws (Western Pennsylvania Delegates to George Washington, 2 Oct. 1794, PGW 17:6-8; George Washington [attributed to Alexander Hamilton] to Edmund Randolph, 11 Oct. 1794, PAH 17:319-21).
3. GT’s business partner spoke for many Maine merchants when he wrote months later that “The public are very anxious to hear the particulars of the treaty” (George Peirson to GT, 28 Feb. 1795, TFP). But the formal text of Jay’s Treaty did not arrive in Philadelphia until early March 1795, and would not be officially publicized until June 1795.
4. Non-contiguous holdings comprising much of present-day Belgium and Luxembourg, ruled by the Holy Roman Empire from 1714 until annexed by France in 1794.
1. Washington’s annual address was delayed more than two weeks following Congress’s scheduled convening on 3 November, owing to the lack of a quorum in the Senate. GT must have been gratified by the speech’s similar reception by constituents back home: “I am very much pleased with the open, candid firmness of the President in his Speech to both Houses of Congress” (JH to GT, 7 Dec. 1794, Chamberlain).
2. GT’s reelection was “an event that I feel exceedingly indifferent about. The pleasures of one evening at home weigh down all the pleasure of a Session. . . . And if I am not elected I shall not be sensible of the least degree of mortification” (GT to ST, 12 Nov. 1794, TFP).
3. GT would dine again with the Washingtons on Christmas Eve, before sharing Christmas dinner the next day with the comptroller of the Treasury, Oliver Wolcott, Jr. (GT to SST, 24 Dec. 1794, TFP).
4. TBW’s Eastern Herald and Benjamin Titcomb, Jr.’s Gazette of Maine, both out of Portland.
1. Acts 20:9.
2. Zion Lutheran Church, at Fourth and Cherry streets, was the largest church in the city at the time of its total destruction by fire on the night of 26 December 1794. Dedicated in 1769, it served as the venue for several public ceremonies, including Congress’s thanksgiving service for Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in 1781, and the official eulogium for Benjamin Franklin’s death, held in 1791. The church’s organ, installed in 1790, was the largest on the continent (Faris, Old Churches, pp. 142-43).
3. Possibly Stephen Row Bradley (1754-1830; Yale, 1775), a lawyer from Vermont, which he represented in the U.S. Senate as a Democratic-Republican from its admission into the Union in 1791 until 1795, and again in 1801-13.
4. GT’s assessment was apparently widely held and had entered local lore by the time one historian in 1926 insisted that the church “might have been saved if all who were attracted by the blaze had been willing to fight it. But, while many joined the line of the bucket brigade, others who thought this in accordance with the indifference to religion imported from France, refused to help” (Faris, Old Churches, p. 143).
5. Rev. Nathaniel Webster married Judith Brown in 1779, the same year he was installed as pastor of Biddeford’s Congregational church (Harvard Graduates 17:304).
6. GT had already anticipated that their family would be augmented by taking in one of the two oldest daughters of SST’s recently widowed sister Lucy Savage Bigelow, just as they had taken in GT’s own niece Tempe ten years before. “I am very glad to hear you express such chearfullness in taking one of her children to live with us as our own. . . . I hope you will assure her that we shall most willingly become father & mother to one of her children.” But which one? “Sally [b. 1788] is a little beauty—And I should be charmed to adopt the little creature if her nearness of age to our Sally & Lucy would not make it more inconvenient for us, & possibly troublesome to themselves.” Besides, she “has a little too much buck-rum, & inclining to a majestic Stateliness for a girl of her age.” He suggested taking ten year-old Anna Haven (“Nancy”). “I hope you will get her with you before I get home—I want to find her with the rest of our children—If Joseph [Savage] wants to keep her I shall not consent—she is to be ours & I will not give her up to any body.” Within a year of Nancy’s moving to Maine, GT supposed she had become “a toast of the times—& begins to think herself about seventeen years old—at that age Girls flourish most & feel the happ[i]est—& few are ever willing to be older” (GT to SST, 19 Dec. 1794, 3 May 1796, 25 Feb. 1795, 26 March 1796, TFP).
1. Samuel Nasson claimed that if he had supported Nathaniel Wells rather than GT in the first federal election, Wells’s friends would have supported Nasson’s own bid for York County’s state Senate seat, which instead he lost repeatedly in the early 1790s (Samuel Nasson to GT, 16 June 1789, DHFFE 4:581-82). Perhaps GT’s reference here is to a fresh attempt by Nasson finally to capitalize on such a bargain with Simon Frye, who was elected state senator for York County in May 1794 and stood (unsuccessfully) for GT’s seat in the fourth federal election six months later. Frye (1737-1822) was one of the first proprietors of Fryeburg, its first representative to the General Court (1780), a frequent state senator, and judge of the county court of common pleas (Willis, Lawyers of Maine, p. 277).
2. Gen. Charles Pichegru’s Army of the North began France’s offensive against the United Provinces in October 1794 and entered Amsterdam on 19 January—the day after the Statholder William V went into exile in England. From Boston, GT’s mercantile agent Matthew Parke wrote “The French & republicans here are this day celebrating the late Success of the French in the establishment of Freedom in Holland; they dine at Fenual-hall—about 300” (Matthew Parke to GT, 7 April 1795, Chamberlain).
3. Thaddeus Kosciuszko (1746-1817), a native of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, migrated to the United States in 1776, volunteered his services as a military engineer in the Continental Army, and ended the Revolutionary War as a brigadier general. He returned to Europe in 1784 and led a Polish uprising against Russia that ended with his army’s decisive defeat at Battle of Maciejowice on 10 October 1794.
1. Philadelphia’s two principal opposition newspapers, Benjamin Franklin Bache’s Aurora and Eleazar Oswald’s IG, published editorials attacking the treaty’s provisions as they became known in early February, through either rumor or British prints. But the official text of the treaty itself, and Jay’s accompanying report, did not arrive in Philadelphia until 7 March, and Washington resolved to keep its contents secret until it could be submitted for ratification by a special session of the Senate, called for 8 June. On 11 March, Oswald’s paper printed the first of fourteen essays over the pseudonym “Franklin”—the most sustained and probably the most widely read critique of the treaty. Candidates for its authorship include the French minister Fauchet and Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State Alexander J. Dallas (Donald H. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period [Albany, N.Y., 1969], pp. 194-97; John C. Miller, The Federalist Era, 1789-1801 [New York, 1960], pp. 416-17, 833-34n).
1. Rev. Jedidiah Morse’s Elements of Geography (Boston, 1795) was deposited for copyright on 3 December 1795. Its subtitle suggests the book’s appeal to GT: “. . . adapted to the capacities of Children and youth—and designed from it’s cheapness . . . as a useful winter evening’s entertainment for young people in private families” (James Gilreath, ed., Federal Copyright Records, 1790-1800 [Washington, D.C., 1987], p. 86). Morse (1761-1826), longtime pastor of the First Church (Congregational) of Charlestown, Massachusetts, where he railed against Unitarianism and the French Revolution, was best known in his time as “Father of American Geography” for his American Geography (1789), and best known today as father of the inventor of the telegraph. His published sermon Signs of the Times (Charleston, Mass., 1810) can be found among Thacher’s Tracts (v. 101-02).
2. A Vindication of Mr. Randolph’s Resignation (Philadelphia, December 1795) was Edmund Randolph’s 103-page defense against the suspicion of misconduct that had led to his resignation as secretary of state on 19 August 1795. The misconduct was exposed in official dispatches from the French minister Fauchet, captured at sea by the British and given to the British minister George Hammond, who gave selections to the two new members of the Administration most sympathetic to the British cause—Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Jr. and Secretary of War Timothy Pickering. Poorly translated by Pickering and shared privately with the president (who could not read French), the dispatches implicated Randolph in secret deliberations with Fauchet involving vague requests for money and disclosures about confidential cabinet discussions. House Clerk John Beckley was not alone in blaming Randolph’s perceived betrayal for Washington’s abrupt about-face in support of Jay’s Treaty, over his secretary of state’s well-known misgivings. The president waited until he ratified the treaty on 18 August before finally confronting Randolph the next day, whereupon the man who had been his most trusted cabinet officer resigned on the spot. The discredited secretary immediately began gathering exculpatory evidence—including, with Washington’s permission, documents from State Department records. But the odor of conspiracy clung to Randolph’s explanations. Federalist printer John Fenno reveled in turning the opposition’s constant accusations of “mysticism & dark proceedings, conclave jugglings & what not,” back on their authors. Like GT, Fisher Ames admitted to feeling “stupefied” by the Vindication, which only added to his belief that “something strange, and because it is strange, probably wicked, has been done or attempted” (Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau, “George Washington and the Reputation of Edmund Randolph,” JAH, v. 73, 1[Jan. 1986]:15-34; John Garry Clifford, “A Muddy Middle of the Road: the Politics of Edmund Randolph, 1790-1795,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, v. 80, n. 3, 1[July 1972]:286-311, esp. 305-11; John Beckley to DeWitt Clinton, 13 Sept. 1795, Beckley, p. 98; John Fenno to Joseph Ward, 26 Oct. 1795, “Fenno Letters,” p. 205; Fisher Ames to Oliver Wolcott, Jr., 31 Dec. 1795, Ames 2:1126-27).
1. From the time of his arrival in Philadelphia, Joseph Priestley had the use of the meetinghouse of the First Independent Church of Christ, a congregation of ex-Baptists organized upon Universalist principles in 1791, which was located on the south side of Lombard between 4th and 5th streets (John Thomas Scharf, History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884 [Philadelphia, 1884] 2:1444).
2. Priestley’s sermon this day inaugurated his series of “Discourses on the Evidences of Divine Religion.” As Priestley reported to Theophilus Lindsey the next day, it was “a very numerous, respectable, and very attentive audience. I was told there was a great proportion of the members of Congress, though the notice of my preaching was very imperfect.” He delivered five more Discourses over the ensuing two months, during which time “A considerable proportion of the members of Congress, and all the principle officers of state, are my constant hearers. . . . Mr. Adams, the vice-president, is most punctual in his attendance” (Joseph Priestley to Theophilus Lindsey, 15 Feb., 8 April 1796, quoted in Graham, Revolutionary in Exile, pp. 88-89).
3. For several weeks beginning in late November 1774, the Universalist missionary John Murray faced down disruptive audiences hurling water, eggs, and in one instance a stone to protest his preaching universal salvation as guest preacher at the Eleventh Congregational Church on School Street in Boston (Judith Sargent Murray and Thomas Whittemore, eds., The Life of Rev. John Murray [Boston, 1833], pp. 169-70, 174-80).
4. GT refers to an episode in the life of Elihu Palmer (b. 1764; Dartmouth, 1787), who left a Presbyterian pulpit on Long Island to lead a Baptist congregation in Philadelphia in 1789. In March 1791 he formed a more heterodox “Universal Society,” whose meeting place was closed to them when its landlord was threatened with prosecution by the city’s Episcopalian hierarchy. Palmer fled, but continued to preach deism from Georgia to his native Connecticut, until his death in 1809 (G. Adolph Koch, Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason [1933; reprint, Eugene, Ore., 2009], pp. 57-60).
5. William Russell (1740-1818) had been a merchant of Birmingham, England, where he was so closely affiliated with the dissenters’ religious and political agenda that his home was one of those destroyed during the Birmingham Riots of July 1791. He followed Priestley into exile, settling in Philadelphia in the summer of 1795. At the time of this letter, Priestley was staying with the Russells at their rented home at 319 High (Market) Street. Russell became a founding member of Philadelphia’s Society of Unitarian Christians later that summer.
6. In his reply to GT’s introductory letter of 25 April 1792 (No. 79, above), Priestley expressed much gratification for “the generous sympathy of such persons as you on my sufferings by the riot in Birmingham” and, with such attestations in mind as he contemplated emigrating to America, confided “I imagine that the neighbourhood of Boston will, on the whole, suit me best.” Priestley eventually settled in splendid isolation in Northumberland, Pennsylvania (where his home and chemistry laboratory still stand, lovingly preserved and curated by volunteers for the Pennsylvania Historic and Museum Commission). He traveled the 140 miles to Philadelphia for extended periods, but swore off such visits after staying there for much of the winter of 1796-97: “As to travelling in this country, and especially going so far as New England, which alone I wish to see, I have given up all thoughts of it.” Thereafter, the only trips he would aspire to were guilt trips: “I still flatter myself that you may look in upon me in going to or returning from Congress,” he wrote GT, anticipating the government’s removal to the Potomac. “The difference cannot be much. I would go further than that to see you” (Joseph Priestley to GT, 23 Feb. 1793, 22 June 1797, Coll. 420, John S.H. Fogg Autograph Collection, MeHi; Graham, Revolutionary in Exile, p. 94; Priestley to GT, 10 May 1800, “Priestley’s Letters,” p. 37).
7. Senator George Cabot’s biographer, editor, and great-grandson wrote that he admired Christianity “as a moral system. But he was never able to remove the doubts, of which he made no concealment, as to its supernatural origin,” and later in life he took the predictable step of abandoning the Congregational Church for Unitarianism (Cabot, p. 578).
8. James Iredell (1751-99), a lawyer of Edenton, North Carolina, was one of the Federalist leaders behind the state’s eventual ratification of the Constitution in 1789. The next year he was appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court, where he served until his death. On the basis of essays, diary entries, and letters, the modern editor of Iredell’s papers believes him to have been “a very religious young man, hostile to deism and other forms of speculation regarding Christianity.” Such pious prejudices would have made him an odd champion of Priestley. But Iredell’s theology seems to have been more ethical than doctrinal, and by 1772 he was already admitting “that my Principles & Practice of Religion grow rather more loose than formerly.” Iredell enthusiastically described this first direct exposure to Priestley’s preaching in a letter to his wife on 25 February, as a result of which, “I have been anxious to wait upon him, and shall as soon as I can, but our Court has been so constantly engaged that it has not yet been in my power” (Don Higginbotham, ed., The Papers of James Iredell [3 vols. to date; Raleigh, N.C., 1976-present] 2:11n, 195; DHSCUS 7:490).
9. GT (or perhaps Priestley?) conflates two verses, from Proverbs 9:10 and 14:16.
10. Elhanan Winchester (1751-97) headed Philadelphia’s First Independent Church of Christ when Joseph Priestley preached there. Among the Thacher’s Tracts (v. 75-76) is Winchester’s discourse, The three woe trumpets of which the first and second are already past, and the third is now begun: under which the seven vials of the wrath of God are to be poured out upon the world (London, 1793). The collection of books that GT donated to Bowdoin College includes two other titles by Winchester: The Universal Restoration, exhibited in four dialogues between a minister and his friend (London, 1792) and The Process and Empire of Christ: from his birth to the end of the Mediatorial Kingdom: a Poem (London, 1793).
1. Impresario John Bill Ricketts brought his famous circus from Scotland to Philadelphia by April 1793, when up to 800 spectators could watch tightrope walkers, acrobats, clowns, and Ricketts himself perform feats on his horse in an open air arena at Market and Twelfth streets. George Washington, a particular fan of good horsemanship, was an occasional patron. In 1795 Ricketts’s “New Amphitheatre” opened in a more permanent, enclosed wooden arena with a conical roof, on the southwest corner of Market and Sixth streets directly across from Congress Hall. The destruction of the Circus by fire in 1799 ruined Ricketts’s fortunes in America; he toured to the West Indies, and the entire act was lost at sea while returning to England in 1803 (Carrie Rebora Barratt and Ellen G. Miles, Gilbert Stuart [New York, 2004], pp. 250-52).
2. Oeller’s Hotel, which eclipsed the City Tavern as Philadelphia’s grandest public hospitality venue following its opening in 1791, was located directly west of the Circus, on the south side of Chestnut Street.
3. The year before, on the occasion of Washington’s 63rd birthday, GT wrote “I was invited but did not go—it was rainy & wet; it appeared too much trouble to dress—I had in the day time waited on the President which satisfied me—I grow less & less fond of going out nights—& I expect soon to become so much of a home man as to make all going abroad irksome” (GT to ST, 25 Feb. 1795, TFP).
4. George Searle (b. 1751), a native of Newburyport, Massachusetts, was early apprenticed to his maternal uncle, Christopher Gore’s father John Gore, as a painter and paint merchant in Boston. In 1779 he married Dudley Atkins Tyng’s older sister, SST’s dear friend Mary (1753-1836). One contemporary blamed Searle’s “overset” mind on his being “extravagantly successful” in mercantile ventures; alternatively, family lore blames it on his being “unfortunate in business.” While passing through Newburyport en route to this session of Congress, GT saw Mary Searle and noted that “her grief on account of her husband, who is by no means recovered of his disordered state of mind[,] is visible in her countenance—About a fortnight ago he sailed for Philadelphia, for the benefit of the Hospital there—which is said to be good for disordered minds.” George Searle died chained to a block in Philadelphia’s insane asylum at the Pennsylvania Hospital on 10 January 1796 (GT to SST, 18 Nov. 1795, TFP; Atkins, Atkins Family, p. 72; boston1775.blogspot.com/2007/08/samuel-brech-encounters-two-insane.html [accessed August 2016]).
5. GT learned of his son Lewis’s birth (on 16 January 1796) by a letter from Dr. Aaron Porter, which he was relieved to see was not sealed with black wax (“frequently the harbinger of death or misfortune”), suggesting it had been a difficult pregnancy. He was happy to hear “that the old Lady’s spirits are much revived—And that the boy is a fine one—I had rather it had been a Girl—but ’tis a matter of no consequence—since you & the dear creature are well.” In a letter from Prentiss Mellen he learned “that you propose to call our little stranger Lewis; a name I am very much pleased with—It is the name of my brother, who died in the year 1778—about three years older than myself—It is also the family name of my Mother.” Lewis was the second of their three children born while GT was away attending Congress, and his absence at such times seems to have begun to weigh heavily: “You can have no idea how much I want to see you all. Does Little Lewis begin to laugh & kick his feet—at that age & till they are weaned, they are my delight” (GT to SST, 2, 13 Feb., 26 March 1796, TFP).
6. Tracy Anna Bevan (1774-1831) was the newlywed wife of George Stacey.
7. Soon after opening a law practice in Biddeford around 1789, Stacey fell “into some disagreeable entanglements with the other sex, and becoming dissipated, he was obliged to make a sudden departure from that place.” In 1793 he appealed to GT to speak on his behalf with Tench Coxe in an unsuccessful bid for a Treasury Department appointment. He evidently served in the mercantile line, and by 1800 his reputation was sufficiently recovered to merit one of President Adams’s “midnight appointments” as commercial agent and acting consul at Mauritius, until he was replaced by the Jefferson Administration in 1802 (Willis, Lawyers of Maine, pp. 130, 146-47; George Stacey to GT, 31 Aug. 1793, Foster Family; Folsom, Saco and Biddeford, p. 302; PTJ 36:331-36).
1. The first session of the Fourth Congress began on 7 December 1795.
2. In 1837, James Freeman Clarke described what GT would have experienced forty years earlier. In his essay “Encouragement for Preachers,” Clarke quotes his conversation with a “Kentucky gentleman” who reminisced about attending a religious service in Philadelphia during President Washington’s time: “A venerable man, with floating gray hair, and a remarkably benevolent expression of face, ascended the pulpit. . . . It seemed to me as I listened, that he had entered into my mind, and divined my thoughts, and addressed himself especially to me. . . . Every word sank deeply into my mind, and the impression has never faded away or lost its power over me. That preacher I learned was Dr. Priestly” ([Louisville, Ky.] Western Messenger, v. 4-5[1838]:323-25). James Freeman Clarke, an influential Unitarian minister and social reformer, was the step-grandson of GT’s friend, Rev. James Freeman.
3. Various accounts of the battle of Loana, Italy, fought on 23 November 1795, were first reported in Philadelphia in CADA, 24 March.
4. France’s accords with Prussia and Spain under the Peace of Basel (1795) left Austria, Portugal, and the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily as Great Britain’s only remaining major allies in the First Coalition to defeat France’s revolutionary establishment.
5. II Kings 10:27.
6. Exodus 32:4, 20.
7. Following two weeks of debate, the motion was carried on 24 March by a vote of 62 to 37, Thatcher voting with the minority.
8. On 30 March Washington finally responded on that “It does not occur that the inspection of the papers asked for can be relative to any purpose under the cognizance of the House,” thereby setting the stage for a significant debate over the president’s prerogatives in the conduct of foreign affairs. Although that constitutional issue was of perennial interest to GT, in this debate he focused on another area of special interest to him: proper parliamentary procedure. When Thomas Blount (N.C.) moved to refer the president’s message to the COWH, GT immediately protested “Why a reference? The House asked a question; the President answered in the negative—for what purpose refer the answer? what would be gained by it?” The members’ opinions on the treaty were already well known, and a selection of their speeches was expected to be published as a pamphlet; if that was not sufficient, suggested GT, “the gentlemen had better direct the pamphlet to be copied on the Journals.” William B. Giles (Va.)—GT’s other emerging nemesis in the House—“had not expected the subject would have been treated with ridicule, and that members in reply should advise others to go and write pamphlets.” GT recognized that disputing the president’s constitutional interpretation of the treaty-making power in a COWH was a way of entering the anti-Treaty majority’s protest into the official record; “in the English Parliament they frequently heard of a minority protesting, but he never heard of a majority doing so. . . . If gentlemen were dissatisfied with the reasoning of the President, let them go individually to him and say, ‘you have given us a major and a minor, but you have drawn a wrong conclusion’” (Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 760, 762-63, 766, 767). On 7 April, the House resolved not only that it could deliberate on the expediency of carrying a treaty into effect, but that it need not justify its reasons in asking the executive for documents “which may relate to any Constitutional functions of the House.” The two resolutions were each carried by 57 to 35, GT voting with the minority both times.
1. “The Treaty will be dispatched one way or the other in a few days & then we shall all make up our minds for home—What will be the event of the Treaty is uncertain—There is yet a small majority against it: we hope to work some of them over before a vote is taken—The people begin to be uneasy, & to make a stur through the Country” (GT to SST, 28 April 1796, TFP).
1. Wells, Maine was one of 38 communities in Massachusetts whose petitions were presented in the House on this day, “praying that such law or laws as may be necessary to carry into effect, with good faith, the late treaty made between the United States and Great Britain, may be enacted.”
2. The House Journal rarely indicated which member had presented a particular petition, while the Annals rarely mentioned routine petitions at all. But newspaper accounts of the proceedings reported the swarm of petitions like Wells’s that continued to flow into the House and were tabled because the matter had already been settled by the vote of 30 April. GT himself presented such petitions on 2 and 9 May, and would again on the 27th (PG, 3 May; GUS, 10 May, 28 May 1796).
3. Joseph B. Varnum (Mass.) was “accidentally absent” when the resolution “to make the necessary appropriations for carrying the Treaty with Great Britain into effect” was passed in the COWH on 29 April; another member was absent due to illness, three were on leave, and one member’s resigned seat had yet to be filled (Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 1st sess., p. 1280). He was the only one of those absent members who then voted with the minority of 48 to 51 against the resolution in the full House the next day. Writing GT almost twenty years later, Varnum may have been alluding to this vote when he defended his support for the War of 1812: “I have long been of opinion, that had the people of this Country been united in demanding of Great Britain our rights, they would have been granted to us, and the War would not have commenced” (Varnum Letter).
4. “There is danger, & will be so long as the majority of the House are of the principles that have manifested themselves occasionally for almost three years past—It is time for the people to decide whether the Virginian or New-England system of policy shall prevail—And they must elect their Legislators accordingly” (GT to NB, 21 May 1796, Barrell Correspondence).
1. An Essay on the Origin of Evil (1st edition [Latin], 1702; 1st English edition, translated by Edmund Law, Cambridge, England, 1731; 4th edition, 1758), by William King (1650-1729), the Church of Ireland’s archbishop of Dublin from 1703 until his death. The title appears on a list that GT evidently compiled as a partial catalog of his personal library (Booklist, n.p., TFP), and the 1739 edition is currently among the books GT bequeathed to Bowdoin in 1824 (catalog, MeB).
2. Considerations on the Theory of Religion (1st edition, Cambridge, England, 1745), by Edmund Law (1703-87), who taught philosophy at Cambridge before serving as Bishop of Carlisle from 1768 until his death. Law’s “commentary” on King refers to his extensive annotation published with the first English edition of William King’s Essay on the Origin of Evil (1731).
3. John Pipon (1762-1821; Harvard, 1792) resided for a time in Biddeford before returning to Cambridge in 1798 to prepare for the ministry. He declined a call to serve in the pulpit of Wells’s newly formed Second Church (Congregational) and instead accepted the pulpit of the First Parish in Taunton, Massachusetts, where he was ordained in 1800 and remained until his death. Noting the same qualities that must have impressed GT, one contemporary wrote that Pipon’s sermons “were sound, and never doctrinal. The topics of dispute which divided the religious community were carefully avoided, and no offence given to tender consciences. . . . He delighted to witness the liveliness and cheerfulness of his friends” (Samuel Hopkins Emery, History of Taunton, Massachusetts [Syracuse, N.Y., 1893], pp. 229-32; Jonathan Greenleaf, Sketches of the Ecclesiastical History of the State of Maine [Portsmouth, N.H., 1821], p. 23).
1. William Lunt, “my joiner” (GT to JH, 21 Dec. 1797, TFP, on which JH scribbled out a receipt for paying Lunt $20 on 24 March 1798).
2. Within the illness-prone family, it was three year old Henry’s obscure medical condition that most concerned GT in this early winter of 1796-97. “Notwithstanding the opinion of the Doctor I am very apprehensive for poor Harry—Soors in the heads of children do not always terminate in their deefness, but sometimes they do, this is enough to give me very great uneasiness.” His uneasiness persisted two months later: “Poor Henry! I cant put his sufferings out of my mind—I tremble lest his disorder should destroy his hearing!” (GT to SST, 17 Dec. 1796, 7 Feb. 1797, TFP).
3. GT soon was considering sending niece Nancy Bigelow to live with their neighbor Mrs. Frothingham instead of school: “Dancing, & writing, & reading are accomplishments more or less usefull according to our situation in Life—I will not say that they are over rated; but I will say there are other accomplishments far more necessary and which are better learnt by example than precept” (GT to SST, 7 Feb. 1797, TFP).
4. On 6 December, GT wrote SST that he “enjoyed good health, excepting the Rhumatism in my right shoulder & arm, of which I complained a little before I left home, but it has grown more & more painfull, notwithstanding Doctor Chadwicks stroaking irons—I can with difficulty & much pain put on & off my coat.” By 22 December he was taking small doses of sulphur morning and night (“recommended & practised here as the most certain remidy”), but soon he came to appreciate his condition’s advantages as well: “The Rhumatism in my arm & shoulder is a good excuse, & a profitable one too, to all invitations & solicitations to visit & walks.” The ailment was “a favour, it serves as a continual excuse from all visits either friendly, or ceremonious—& gives me all my time to myself.” Thus “Bodily pain may in a great measure be destroyed by mental pleasures” (GT to SST, 6, 22, 27, 29 Dec. 1796, TFP). “Chadwick’s stroking irons” competed with Elisha Perkins’s metallic tractor, which had made its appearance in Philadelphia only the year before and was already highly regarded as an effective treatment for rheumatism. Perkins’s instrument, resembling a horseshoe nail, was stroked over the patient’s afflicted body part (Drinker 2:784n).
5. Washington’s decision not to seek a third term was publicly announced through the publication of his famous Farewell Address in CADA, 19 September 1796.
6. Henrietta Liston, newlywed wife of the even more newly appointed British minister to the United States (1796-1800), was one of those ladies drawn to the president’s speech at the opening of the second session of the Fourth Congress because (she wrote her uncle in Glasgow) it was “the last He may, probably, ever make in public.” She continued:
the Hall was crowded and a prodigious Mob at the Door, about twelve oClock Washington entered in full dress, as He always is on publick occasions, black velvet, sword &c., followed by the three Secretarys,—Secretary of State, of War, and of the Treasury; a group of people with white staffs, He was preceded by the Sergeant at Arms, with His Mace—He bowed on each side as He past to an arm chair upon a platform raised some steps from the ground and railed-in; after composing himself He drew a paper from his pocket.—Washington Writes better than He reads, there is even a little hesitation in his common speaking, but He possesses so much natural unaffected dignity, and is so very noble a figure as to give always a pleasing impression. I happened to sit very near him, and as every Person stood-up at his entrance and again when He began to read I had an opportunity of seeing the extreme agitation He felt when He mentioned the French (Henrietta Liston to James Jackson, 9 Dec. 1796, “Diplomat’s Wife,” p. 606).
7. Of six year old George, Jr., GT writes SST: “I am much pleased to hear our dear George is so much of a man as to go to School through snow & ice, cold & rain—Encourage him all you can—Tell him how much pleasure it affords me to hear of his manly conduct” (GT to SST, 7 Jan. 1797, TFP).
1. “I write but little, because of my Arm, which is no better” (GT to ST, 7 Jan. 1797, TFP).
2. “The Idler,” a famous series of 103 essays on the art of living, penned mostly by Dr. Samuel Johnson, was published in London’s weekly Universal Chronicle (1758-60). The Library Company of Philadelphia acquired the two-volume 6th edition, probably shortly after its publication in London in 1790 (Catalog of the Books belonging to the Library Company [Philadelphia, 1807], p. 142). GT may be referring loosely to essay no. 19 (19 August 1758), in which “that great philosopher Jack Whirler” wastes his lifetime in endless haste instead of prioritizing the time he is given.
1. “In company I am under a kind of complisant [complicit] necessity of drinking when I do not wish to, & sometimes what I have but little relish for” (GT to SST, 7 Jan. 1797, TFP).
2. Susannah Broom Davy and her husband William Davy (1757-1827) were part of the Socinian Migration from their native England to Philadelphia, where they arrived shortly after their friend Joseph Priestley in August 1794 and where, by 1797, William had established himself as a prominent shipping merchant in the West Indies trade.
3. Priestley’s second series of lectures on his “Discourses on the Evidences of Divine Religion,” continuing the series held to such acclaim the previous winter and spring, probably gave GT the appearance of being well attended only because they were held in a smaller venue, at the (then recently re-chartered) University of Pennsylvania. His son Joseph Priestley, Jr. later recalled that many of the more prominent patrons who frequented the first series stayed away “partly from the prejudices that began to be excited against him on account of his supposed political opinions (for high-toned politics began then to prevail in the fashionable circles)” (quoted in Graham, Revolutionary in Exile, p. 95).
1. “Nothing, since my last, has turned up in the political world that makes me any more apprehensive of a war with France than when I wrote—I mention this because friend [neighbor John?] Chadwicks prophesies seeme to have alarmed your fears—I have no doubt but we shall jogg along through all the difficulties very well” (GT to SST, 16 Feb. 1797, TFP).
1. Edmund Burke’s Two letters addressed to a member of the present Parliament on the proposals for peace with the Regicide Directory of France (Philadelphia, 1797) exists among Thacher’s Tracts (v. 30). Other Burke titles bound in the same volume include A letter from Mr. Burke to a member of the National Assembly in answer to some objections to his book on French affairs (4th U.S. edition, New York, 1791); Two letters from the right honourable Mr. Burke, on the French Revolution (Dublin, 1791); A letter from the right honourable Edmund Burke to a noble lord on the attacks made upon him and his pension (1st U.S. edition, Philadelphia, 1796); and A letter from the honourable Edmund Burke to his Grace the Duke of Portland on the conduct of the minority in Parliament containing fifty-four articles of impeachment against the Rt. Hon. C.J. Fox (London, 1797).
2. In his efforts to augment his library on the French Revolution, GT on 9 December 1793 asked NYC bookseller Richard Belden for a London or Dublin edition of Speeches of M. de Mirabeau, the elder, pronounced in the National Assembly of France, translated by James White (London, 1792), which turned out to be unobtainable. Much later, he was more successful in procuring the Memoirs of C.M. Talleyrand de Perigord (2 vols., London, 1805), by Lewis Goldsmith Stewarton (Richard Belden to GT, 11 Dec. 1793, Foster Family; TBW to GT, 28 May 1809, Wait Letters).
1. Suspected of anti-republican aristocratic tendencies throughout the 1780s, by 1797 the energies of the various state societies of the Cincinnati were safely channeled into veterans rights advocacy and other charitable works, while the national society’s annual May gatherings dwindled in relevance and visibility. The ceremony described here was conducted by the state society of Pennsylvania accompanied by officers of the state militia, marching together from the state house in Independence Square to Washington’s residence at Sixth and Market streets (CADA, 23 Feb. 1797; Minor Myers, Jr., Liberty Without Anarchy: A History of the Society of the Cincinnati [Charlottesville, Va., 1983], pp. 180-89).
2. Henrietta Liston also attended Washington’s birthday ball, and although her description lacks the color and drama of Thatcher’s, certain details complement his account: “Ricketts Amphitheater was fitted up and in the Evening a Ball given to about a thousand Persons; the President appeared in the American Uniform, (blue and buff,) with the Cross of Cincinnatus at his breast in diamonds, it is on this occasion only that the order is permitted to appear. . . . I went in about seven oClock to the Presidents Box, from which we had a very compleat view of the Company; the Country dances and cottillions were danced verging from the Centre, which admitted of ten, fifteen couple[s] in each, so that three hundred Persons moved at the same time. The American Ladies dance better than any set of People I ever saw. . . . the appearance was very beautiful, many pretty Women and all showing in their dress, cheerfull, happy, and gay; the Men did not make quite so good an Appearance, except the President himself, who moved a Monarch, and the foreign Ministers in Court-dresses” (Henrietta Liston to James Jackson, 24 [?] Feb. 1797, “Diplomat’s Wife,” pp. 608-09).
3. Washington’s reply, delivered on the same occasion, thanked the Massachusetts delegation for its state legislature’s prayer for his continued health and long life in retirement (George Washington to Theodore Sedgwick et al., 24 Feb. 1797, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 26 Nov. 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-00344 [accessed Jan. 2018]).
4. Because the session was scheduled to adjourn just one day before John Adams’s inauguration as president on 4 March, “I propose to tarry to the ceremony—Hence tis doubtfull whether I shall be able to set out for home before the Sunday or Monday, which will be the fifth & sixth of March” (GT to SST, 16 Feb. 1797, TFP).
1. “I really have no faith in the pokers, as you call the metallic points—And tho the Rhumatism of my arm has not abated I cannot submit to be stroaked” (GT to SST, 7 Feb. 1797, TFP).
2. Perhaps a bound edition of the sixteen issues of the magazine of this name, printed biweekly in Philadelphia in 1795.
1. The first session of the Fifth Congress was not scheduled to begin until 6 November 1797, but by a proclamation dated 25 March, newly inaugurated President Adams declared that “an extraordinary occasion exists for convening Congress” on 15 May (Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 1st sess., p. 49).
2. Jonathan Dayton (1760-1824; Princeton, 1776), a lawyer from Elizabethtown, New Jersey, served as Speaker of the House during the Fourth and Fifth Congresses. The veteran Continental Army officer, state legislator, and Signer of the Constitution, served in the House from 1791 to 1799, and the Senate thereafter until 1805. Besides the Clerk, the officers of the House included sergeant at arms Joseph Wheaton, and Thomas Claxton, who served five years as assistant doorkeeper before being promoted to doorkeeper in 1794, a post he retained until 1821 (DHFFC 8:518-20).
3. Supporters of John Beckley’s reappointment tried to prevent an immediate vote, in order to give under-represented Republicans another day to take their seats. In brief statements from the floor, GT initially opposed the motion for a nomination (which would require postponing an immediate vote) but ultimately insisted on the harmlessness of waiting one more day. His comments indicate either an ignorance of the tactical implications of an immediate vote, or an active resentment of such partisan-driven intrusions into matters of routine procedure. Philadelphia lawyer Jonathan Williams Condy (1770-1828) beat out Beckley by 41 to 40 votes, and would retain the office until resigning during the first days of the Sixth Congress. The Aurora called the proceedings to unseat Beckley “extremely indecorous,” while Jefferson correctly interpreted the vote to mean “that the republican interest has lost by the new changes” (15 May 1797, Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 51-52; Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, John Beckley: Zealous Partisan in a Nation Divided [Philadelphia, 1973], pp.156-57).
4. A Matthew and Zebediah McKessuk were listed as heads of separate households in Biddeford’s 1790 federal census.
5. “Phillips is a very lazy boy, tho his Grand papa [Samuel Phillips Savage] & Aunt Lucy [Bigelow] both assured me he was otherwise a very docile one” (GT to ST, 7 Jan. 1797, TFP).
1. President Adams’s first state of the union address was delivered before a joint session of Congress meeting in Congress Hall’s House Chamber on 16 May. The address directed the special session to consider recent actions by the Directory—the five-man executive established under France’s Constitution of 1795. In just over two years as the United States’s minister plenipotentiary in Paris, James Monroe had not only failed to reconcile France to the Jay Treaty, but emboldened the French government’s stubborn belief—dating to Genêt’s mission—that the United States government was fundamentally at odds with its own people, as regarded relations with France. Washington recalled Monroe in November 1796 and appointed Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to succeed him. Adams’s address relayed the Directory’s message that they would refuse to receive another American minister “until after the redress of grievances . . . which the French Republic had a right to expect,” and that Pinckney had already been expelled from France (Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 1st sess., p. 55).
From as far away as the Ohio frontier, Elijah Backus echoed GT’s assessment of “the firmness, exhibited by our Executive, on this occasion—I am sure the speech of the President must have been applauded: but alas! of what avail is firmness; without strength I am totally at a loss what you have to do—What circumstance can our Govt. get hold of, to serve as a mean of consideration with the French? Will another envoy extraordinary flatter them into good humour” (Elijah Backus to GT, 4 June 1797, MS 128 Backus-Woodbridge Family Papers, Ohio Connection).
Perhaps the most rousing part of Adams’s speech—certainly one that spoke to GT’s own ideas of national dignity and the degradation of the French government under the Directory—described the unexampled tirade that Paul Barras delivered during the Directory’s valedictory audience with James Monroe on 30 December 1796: “France,” said Barras, alluding to the Jay Treaty, “will not abase herself by calculating the consequences of the condescension of the American Government to the suggestions of her former tyrants.” He expressed no doubt that the American people “will weigh, in their wisdom, the magnanimous benevolence of the French people with the crafty caresses of certain perfidious persons who meditate bringing them back to their former slavery” (ASP:Foreign Relations 2:12). In Adams’s opinion,
[Barras] evinces a disposition to separate the People of the United States from the Government; to persuade them that they have different affections, principles, and interests, from those of their fellow-citizens, whom they themselves have chosen to manage their common concerns; and thus to produce divisions fatal to our peace. Such attempts ought to be repelled with a decision which shall convince France, and the world, that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence; and regardless of national honor, character, and interest (Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 1st sess., p. 56).
The text of Barras’s speech, communicated to the House by the Department of State on 19 May, would provide fodder for one of GT’s more colorful speeches; see No. 145, fn. 2, below.
1. The Thatchers’ friends and one-time neighbors Matthew and Mehitable Bangs Cobb had moved to Portland in late 1795 (“Elder Henry Cobb Family,” http://www.hcobbfamily.com/getperson.php?personID=I4198&tree=Tree1 [accessed Jan. 2017]).
2. GT’s only recorded speech during this debate was delivered on 30 May while the COWH was considering whether Paul Barras’s “insulting speech” on behalf of the French Directory, referenced at length in Adams’s state of the union address (see No. 143, fn. 1, above), merited some notice in the House’s reply to the President. GT “knew of only one reason for passing over it in silence, and that if it was true had some weight with him. That Barras spoke as the organ of the French nation there could be no doubt; but he had his doubts whether he knew himself what he said. The Speech had strong marks of delirium, and he could not help believing that when he delivered it, he was either drunk or mad. If the world went on for 6,000 years to come, they would never again behold such a production. He then examined the different parts of it in a ludicrous way peculiar to himself” (GUS, 31 May 1797). GT’s remarks were still remembered more than six months later, at the height of the Griswold-Lyon “affair of honor,” when Boston’s Independent Chronicle (12-15 Feb. 1798) speculated that his “imprudence . . . in calling the Directory Drunkards, may possibly be as highly resented by the Executive of France, as the conduct of Mr. Lion is by the Legislature of America. This dunghill hero would be slagger’d, should citizen Barras call him to an account.” The next issue of the Independent Chronicle (15-19 Feb.) contrasted the warlike “junto” forming against France, with Thatcher’s reputation for refusing to duel: “The well known moderation of Mr. Thatcher did not allow him to share in the honor of throwing the gauntlet of war. A more humble part of this silly farce was therefore assigned the meek son of Massachusetts. By him Citizen Barras, President of the Executive Directory, was very politely dubbed a drunkard.”
3. “I read yours of the 18th. & 21st. with grief & sorry at the very unkind and unfaithfull behaviour of Mr. Kissic [McKessuk]! I have no doubt but you have done all in your power to induce him to keep his word—And I am glad you refused to advance him any more money—He is a base, dishonest, deceitfull man. . . . If on my return He has done nothing, I fear I shall be angry enough to arrest him for the money advanced & hold him to pay the utmost farthing[—]a measure, that will be very painfull to my feelings” (GT to SST, 29 June 1797, TFP).
1. See DHFFC 19:1082-86.
2. William A. Duer, Reminiscences of an Old Yorker (New York, 1867), pp. 70-72; COWH debate of 30 May, in GUS, 31 May 1797 (see No. 145, fn. 2, above); Abigail Adams to William Stephens Smith, 9 April 1814, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 30 March 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-2477 (accessed April 2017).
3. “Obituary.”
4. John Beckley’s Book of Minutes, 24 March 1792, Beckley, p. 28.
5. “Tradition of Old Times,” (Montpelier, Vt.) Universalist Watchman and Christian Repository, v. 17, 40(18 April 1846):320. In another version of the story, GT moves to replace the eagle with a hen (FG, 26 March 1792). Taking his cue from GT, one newspaper editorial suggested “how simple and a propos it would have been, since they have retained the Eagle on one side, to have placed fifteen emblematic pigeons on the other—A device, which perhaps (all things considered) would be much more in character” ([Philadelphia] Freeman’s Journal, 28 March 1792).
6. “Tradition of Old Times,” Ibid. By 1863, yet another source would conflate the various strands of the old story while adding some colorful new twists: GT’s unnamed antagonist moved to add the eagle, not replace it. The House was kept in a “merry mood” by GT’s “humorous speech,” which “alluded to the fact that Rome had once been saved from the barbarians by the cackling of geese.” This presumed insult resulted in a challenge to which GT is said to have responded by insisting on his wife’s permission first; in the meanwhile, he proposed a surrogate chalk figure drawn on the proverbial barn door (Willis, Lawyers of Maine, pp. 108-09). The embroidery of oral tradition can be admired further in the reminiscence of Cullen Sawtelle (1805-87; Bowdoin, 1825), U.S. Representative from Maine (1845-47, 1849-51), who added the strikingly detailed circumstance that the barn stood “on the old road” between Washington City and Georgetown (now both in D.C.) ([Cullen Sawtelle], Reminiscences of My Early Life [Marblehead, Mass., 1972], p. 40).
7. “Obituary.” “Thatcher’s wit was sometimes of the sharpest and most exasperating quality,” wrote one writer who, without foundation, blamed it for GT’s unpopularity among Portland’s voters (Griffin, Maine Press, p. 35).
8. John Fenno to Joseph Ward, 17 June 1797, “Fenno Letters,” p. 220; Lorenzo Sabine, Notes on Duels and Duelling (Boston, 1859), pp. 66-67. Accounts of GT’s encounter with Blount were not free from some of the same imaginative but probably apocryphal layering that embellished accounts of his earlier affair with Lyon. In one,
The Judge, on reading the message from Blount, after adjusting his wig and revolutionary hat, said to the bearer—“Give my respectful compliments to your master, and tell him he cannot have a definite answer to-day. Let him be patient a short time, till I can write to Portland and receive an answer. I always consult my wife on matters of importance, well knowing that she is a better Judge of family affairs than myself. If she consents to take the choice of becoming a widow, or having her husband hanged for murder, I certainly will fight Mr. Blount. Tell him not to be in a hurry; it will not take more than three weeks to receive her election ([New York] The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal, 4[July 1832]:342).
9. [Anonymous] to GT, n.d. (postmarked Boston, 10 Sept. 1797), S-268, George Thacher Papers, MeHi.; signed “a member of society.”
10. Fisher Ames to Dwight Foster, 24 June 1797, Ames 2:1253.
11. Fisher Ames to Christopher Gore, 25 Feb. 1798, Ames 2:1267; Henry Tazewell to James Madison, 11 June 1797, PJM 17:23.
12. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 4 March 1798, PJM 17:89. The Griswold-Lyon affair has received due attention in many notable treatments of the political culture of the early American republic; see especially Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, Conn., 2001), pp. 159-98.
13. “Obituary”; Leach Philadelphia Portraits Collection, PHi. “Cartel” (from Old Italian, “letter of defiance”) here refers to the card or note conveying the insulted party’s demand for satisfaction. In addition to the commentary cited here, see Abigail Adams to Mary Smith Cranch, 6 July 1797, Adams Family 12:190. Thatcher’s enduring interest in the phenomenon of duelling is evident from a number of published sermons on the subject bound among Thacher’s Tracts (v. 59-60), including several moralizing on Alexander Hamilton’s own duel with Aaron Burr in 1803, and one entitled The folly, guilt, and mischiefs of duelling (Hartford, 1805), preached at Yale College by its president Timothy Dwight in September 1804.
15. “Resolved, that provision ought to be made by law, for putting 80,000 militia of the United States, in equal proportions from the several states, in a state of requisition” (Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 1st sess., p. 282).
16. “Mr. Thatcher objected to the phrase requisition. However fond that gentleman might be of the French phrases, he did not wish to imitate them in their expressions in our legislative acts. He had no objection to the holding such a number of men in readiness. He hoped the sentiment would be expressed in American language.
Mr. Blount supposed he should be told, because he used the word requisition in his resolutions, that he was one of the factious. He believed if the gentleman looked over the old Congressional proceedings, he would find that the demands made upon the States were called requisitions. He had, however, no objection to any other word which had the same meaning. He thought the objection a trifling one, and such as the gentleman ought to be ashamed of making” (Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 1st sess., p. 384).
17. “Mr. Brown,
You will oblige me by publishing in your paper of to-day, the enclosed copy of my note to Mr. George Thatcher, of yesterday, with the note subjoined to it, of this date.
I am,
Your most obedient,
THOs. BLOUNT.
_____
SIR,
My respect for the people you represent, and not your own conduct, induces me so far to regard you as a gentleman, as to call upon you, as though you was a gentleman, to give me satisfaction, such as an injured gentleman has a right to require, for the very gross, ungentlemanly, and dastardly insult you gave me this morning in the course of debate, when you was shielded from the chastisement you deserved by the rules of order, and my veneration for the House, of which you are an unworthy member. My friend, Mr. Macon, will fix with you or your friend, the time when, the place where, and the manner in which, we shall meet.
THOMAS BLOUNT.
Friday, 9th June,
4 o’clock.
_____
The above is a copy of a note which I, yesterday at 4 o’clock, wrote and addressed to Mr. George Thatcher, and which he, this morning between the hours of 6 and 7, when it was offered by my friend Mr. Macon, (who twice yesterday evening called at his lodgings to deliver it, but did not find him at home) refused to receive—grounding his refusal upon a supposition which Mr. Macon, after he had several times expressed it, told him was just, that it was a challenge from me.
THOMAS BLOUNT.
Philadelphia, June 10th, 1797.”
(Philadelphia Gazette, 10 June)
1. NB read of his friend’s averted duel with Rep. Thomas Blount (N.C.) in CC, 17 June, and lamented “that I could not be near my friend to resent the affront offerd your constituents by that proud blustering fellow Blunt Blount—you have behaved perfectly to the acceptance of every honest man in this case—and a thousand times better than I should have done in your scituation—but I shall loose the post if I enlarge” (NB to GT, 21 June 1797, Barrell Correspondence).
2. NB concluded the above-cited letter by asking GT to “seal the enclosed, after reading, and send it to the office by which you will oblige Your old friend.” Given GT’s reaction, the enclosure may have been an opinion piece on the “affair of honor,” intended for some Philadelphia newspaper.
1. On 3 July, President Adams submitted to both chambers of Congress an intercepted letter that incriminated Sen. William Blount (Tenn.) in a conspiracy to raise a filibustering expedition from American territory and deliver up Spanish Louisiana and West Florida to Great Britain in exchange for free navigation of the Mississippi River. (Blount was a deeply vested land speculator in Tennessee whose investments stood to suffer by the interruption of trade along the Mississippi River following the declaration of an Anglo-Spanish war in October 1796.) After two days’ debate, the House on 7 July voted unanimously to impeach Blount. The next day, the Senate “sequestered” his seat, effectively expelling him—and rendering his precedent-setting impeachment a moot point, since the Senate’s ultimate ruling that he was not impeachable may be interpreted as owing to the simple fact that he no longer held a public office from which to be impeached. Blount immediately fled back to Tennessee after his expulsion, but impeachment proceedings continued. When Rep. Robert Goodloe Harper (S.C.), as acting chairman of the House managers for the impeachment, moved on 21 December that Blount be compelled to appear personally for the trial, GT was among the minority of only eleven to vote in favor of the motion, after “a long, animated debate” (Anne M. Butler and Wendy Wolff, United States Senate Election, Expulsion and Censure Cases, 1793-1990 [Washington, D.C., 1995], pp. 13-15; PJM 17:97n; [Philadelphia] Universal Gazette, 27 Dec. 1798).
William Blount (1749-1800) served as first governor of the Southwest Territory and its superintendent of Indian affairs from the time it was ceded to the federal government in 1790 until his election as one of its first two senators upon statehood (as Tennessee) in 1796. Given that the ink on Rep. Thomas Blount’s challenge was barely dry, GT’s judicious and discreet tone in reporting here the imminent downfall of Blount’s older brother, and his apparent recusing himself from any part in the boisterous House debate over impeachment, is notable.
2. GT probably refers again to Sen. William Blount’s purported conspiracy; see fn. 1, above. Like Edmund Randolph’s purportedly secret communications with the French two years earlier, Blount’s letter was seen as evidence of a plot by government officials at the highest levels to collude with foreign powers against the United States’s interests. And as they had with Randolph, Federalists generally held up Blount’s secret maneuverings as further evidence of excessive French influence in national affairs—although they were reluctant to press the point too far out of delicacy to their British allies, who were equally incriminated in Blount’s conspiracy (PJM 17:43n).
1. “I spend my time much as heretofore, the morning & evenings I enjoy my own cogitations alone which to me is becoming the best company when from home—And I dont know but living so much in a City will make me quite a hermit” (GT to SST, 18 Nov. 1797, TFP).
2. GT drank tea with the Adamses the previous Sunday evening as well. One imagines GT among those who found that the president, in the opinion of the Federalist newspaperman John Fenno, “Since his election . . . has if possible been more easy of access & conversable than before—and this remark has been made by others” (GT to SST, 13 Nov. 1797, TFP; John Fenno to Joseph Ward, 17 April 1797, “Fenno Letters” p. 218).
3. Louisa Catherine Smith (1773-1857), daughter of Abigail’s younger brother William Smith, Jr., had served as her aunt’s private secretary in Quincy, Massachusetts and followed the rest of the household to Philadelphia in May 1797. She may have contributed little to the conversation that evening; Abigail observed that, “tho a very little Talker,” her niece was “an observing hearer” (Abigail Adams to Elizabeth Smith Shaw Peabody, 12 Feb. 1796, Adams Family 11:173).
4. Samuel Bayard Malcom (1776-1815; Columbia, 1794) was studying law and clerking for the Adams’s son Charles in NYC when he went to serve as the new president’s private secretary in March 1797. Abigail thought him “a Discreet young Gentleman of amiable Manners and obliging disposition” (John Adams to Abigail Adams, 8 Nov. 1794 and Abigail Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, 7 Nov. 1797, Adams Family 10:249n, 12:286).
5. The unseasonable cold eliminated any lingering risk of the summer fever. Just a week earlier, GT assured SST “there is not the least danger on account of the fever, now, any more than if it had not been in the City—This seems to be the general opinion” (13 Nov. 1797, TFP).
6. The three special envoys sent to repair relations in the wake of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney’s eviction from France included Pinckney himself, who had been awaiting follow-up instructions in Amsterdam; John Marshall; and Elbridge Gerry. The three represented a sectional as well as ideological and temperamental balance. Gerry, a retired merchant of Massachusetts, was a “classical republican” from the earliest days of the revolutionary movement, whose old-school pre-partisan mentality aligned perhaps most closely with John Adams’s own. Marshall, an easy-going but solid republican who had long since emerged as Richmond’s leading lawyer and head of Virginia’s Federalists, would in time become the Administration’s reliable “fixer” following Adams’s break with the Hamiltonians. Pinckney was a moderate South Carolina tidewater planter. Pinckney’s and Marshall’s nominations were approved by the Senate on 5 June 1797; Gerry, over the cabinet’s objections, was nominated and approved later that month.
The envoys’ instructions were to negotiate the settlement of outstanding claims against the French Republic, ideally leading to the reconciliation of all mutual grievances under a new commercial treaty replacing that of 1778. All three presented their credentials to Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord on 8 October. But, emboldened by Napoleon’s lengthening string of victories, Talleyrand and the Directory kept the envoys in official limbo for ten days before sending the first of four clandestine intermediaries to communicate the preconditions for launching negotiations: the disavowal of objectionable parts of Adams’s address to Congress on 16 May; the assumption of payments due American citizens (for contracted war supplies and spoliation claims); a forced loan to the French government; and bribes for the personal use of Talleyrand and the members of the Directory. On 30 October—fully three weeks before GT speculates in this letter about their arrival in France—the American envoys effectively sealed the fate of their mission by refusing the intermediaries, whose sordid demands ignited the American public’s righteous indignation when disclosed the following spring, in the notorious “XYZ Affair.”
1. President John Adams’s address upon the opening of the second session of the Fifth Congress, delivered on 23 November 1797.
1. The piece, which remains unidentified, was probably never published. It may have been sent instead to Joseph Priestley who, three months later, thanked GT “for your endeavour to vindicate the Unitarians” against an “attack” from Rev. James Abercrombie (1758-1841), assistant pastor of Philadelphia’s St. Peter’s (Episcopal) Church from 1794 to 1832 (Joseph Priestley to GT, 10 March 1798, “Priestley Letters,” p. 18). Although GT owned at least one of Abercrombie’s sermons (bound with other sermons in Thacher’s Tracts, v. 51), by its date—9 May 1798—it could not have been the attack in question.
2. On 30 November, a petition from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers) called Congress’s attention to God’s impending judgment against the nation for the evils of slavery—particularly the re-enslavement of 134 freed blacks in North Carolina. GT was the first to rise in defense of a motion for a second reading and referring the petition. He was also the only Massachusetts member to do so; even Isaac Parker and Samuel Sewall—Thatcher’s friends and future colleagues on the bench—spoke against the motion. When southern members objected that Quakers had already troubled the House on such business numerous times before, GT turned the objection on its head by observing logically that “it was not likely they should leave off petitioning, until the House should act. . . . Gentlemen, therefore, who wished not to be troubled again, ought to be in favour of a second reading and reference.” He acknowledged that the petition posed a conflict between two opposing principles, “but, the more frequently the subject was looked into, the more mitigated would be its effects.” The petition was read a second time and referred. On 14 February 1798 the select committee reported that the grievances fell under the cognizance of the courts and that the Quakers should be given leave to withdraw their petition. GT again interposed: he was not certain that redress lay beyond the competence of Congress and, to avoid prejudicing any future action, he moved the resolution be withdrawn in favor of simply acting no further on the petition. His motion was declared out of order, and the House agreed to the committee’s resolution (Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 658, 669, 1032-33).
1. NB would respond:
are you sure, ’tis only the dispute about the Treaty which hath left the seeds of “party contention”? may we not go further back, and and say the seeds of rebelion were sown by that arch fiend [Edmond-Charles] Genet? Did he not scat[ter] them? beginning at Georgia and endg in the county of Lincoln at Machias? the Treaty is only the onstensable cause of dispute—but those enemies to good governmt had they not this to fasten on, I have no doubt they would have created something as groundless, for we now see, tho we have suffered greatly by the spoilations [spoliations] of that terrible nation, yet we have greatly are much more benifeted by the Treaty— in short to me, ’tis very little short of a Miricle, that with all the opposition and pull backs we have experienced, we are now this respectable & Rich Nation which every thing voice proclaims us (NB to GT, 11 Jan. 1798, Barrell Correspondence).
2. GT refers to the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor, Year V of the Republic. On 4 September 1797, Paul Barras and two other members of the Directory ordered the arrest of their fellow Directors Lazare Carnot and François-Marie, the marquis de Barthélemy, on allegations that they were conspiring in a royalist plot. Carnot escaped to Switzerland but his colleague was deported with fifty-three suspected members of the Corps Législatif to French Guiana, known as the “dry guillotine” for its high mortality from tropical diseases. All were moderates who had opposed the Revolution’s laws against emigrés and clergy, the alarming rise of the army’s influence under Napoleon, a continuation of the war with Great Britain, and Barras’s hostility to rapprochement with the United States (Denis Woronoff [trans., Julian Jackson], The Thermidorean regime and the Directory, 1794-1799 [Paris, 1972; 1st English ed., Cambridge, 1984], pp. 59-61; Stinchcombe, XYZ Affair, pp. 52-53).
1. “Our latest news, & all we have, relate to the capture of the Duch Fleet by the English—which you will read an account of in your papers—This, I can discover plainly, is an event that affords much secret satisfaction to some & as much sorrow to others—Hence the total of happiness remains about the same” (GT to SST, 21 Dec. 1797, TFP). GT refers to the victory by a British fleet commanded by Admiral Adam Duncan, the future Viscount Duncan of Camperdown (1731-1804), over a smaller fleet of the Dutch Batavian Republic on 11 October 1797, off Camperduin on The Netherlands’s island of Texel. The battle neutralized the naval power of one of France’s major satellite states, defused the French threat of an invasion of Ireland, and left Britain in control of the North Sea.
2. GT’s letters throughout the winter of 1797-98 are full of this suspense: “All is yet conjecture” (GT to JH, 27 Jan. 1798, TFP).
3. “Great tranquility reigns in these parts—But the seeds of contention & political dispute are not dead—they only want occasion to sprout—Something from France may soon do it” (GT to SST, 14 Dec. 1797, TFP).
4. Porcupine’s Gazette was published daily in Philadelphia from March 1797 to January 1800 by William Cobbett (1763-1835), who had migrated from England in 1792 and adopted the nom de plum “Peter Porcupine” for his prickly prose. The newspaper served as the inflammatory pro-British counterpart to Benjamin Franklin Bache’s francophile Aurora. “It would be happy for us if there was a porcupine in every town in the Union,” wrote NB, and GT would seem to have agreed (NB to GT, 28 April 1798, Barrell Correspondence). Later, Joseph B. Varnum wrote GT that while he knew “the principles, Porcupine wished to disseminate were perfectly congenial with your own,” it was nevertheless “viewed with some astonishment by many of your republican friends, when they saw you pressing through the croud to make an Early subscription for the Paper he was about to Publish, in consequence of the Glorious reception which his former publications had met with by yourself, and others of your Political cast” (Varnum Letter). Included among Thacher’s Tracts (vols. 48 and 49) are numerous pamphlets written and/or published by Cobbet, under his own name or as “Peter Porcupine.” A Bone to gnaw for Democrats (1795) and The gros mousqueton diplomatique, or, Diplomatic blunderbuss (1796) are the titles of a few of those alluded to by Varnum in GT’s collection, and indicative of their creator’s provocative brand of partisan print.
5. Porcupine’s Gazette of 20 December, citing an editorial in CC, 13 December, condemned the latter’s editor Benjamin Russell for his lukewarm criticism of Benjamin Franklin Bache’s “conjectures . . . respecting the terms of our accommodation with the French,” suggesting that Russell had fallen victim to French minister Pierre Auguste Adet’s public opinion campaign (“Adet’s Blunderbuss”).
6. Under the editorship of Joseph Dennie, the Farmer’s Weekly Museum of Walpole, New Hampshire was regarded as one of the most authoritative newspapers in the United States. By late 1797 its news and opinion pieces reached a record 2,000 subscribers from the Ohio River to Europe, in addition to reprints appearing in other newspapers. The Federalist-leaning GUS, for example, relied on it heavily throughout 1797. In this way, “The Museum drew readers into an imagined Federalist community of beleaguered conviviality. . . . Not all Federalist politicians understood the usefulness of Dennie’s ability to reach and engage his reader.” But others recognized the Museum’s “efficient access to a sympathetic and dynamic—but far-flung and not otherwise easily reached—audience” (Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship [Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008], p. 134).
1. GT here refers to the “imaginary” threat posed by high appropriations for the support of the diplomatic establishment. In a type of reprise of its debate over the Jay Treaty two years earlier, the House would spend altogether a dozen days over the course of six weeks debating its prerogative to annul the executive’s power to conduct foreign affairs by leveraging its own power of the purse. On 28 February, GT gave a major speech pointing out that nations since the time of ancient Greece and Rome had lost their liberty not through excesses of executive influence but “by democratic mobs, by the erection of whiskey poles and liberty poles, and by discontented Representatives going home to their constituents, and setting them against the Government.” When would a president abuse his power by appointing an over-abundance of ambassadors? he asked; “It would be when the people at large shall have been stirred up by means of whiskey and liberty poles, and have become so intoxicated and corrupt, as to elect a man for President like themselves, who should abuse the power placed in him. But this was too extraordinary a state of things ever to exist in this country.” Until then, “If it was the opinion of the President, therefore, that it was proper to have Ministers in every Court in Europe, he ought to send them, and the House could not refuse to appropriate for their salaries. It would be usurpation to do so” (Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 1114-15). For more on the underrated significance of this debate, see Robert W. Smith, “The Foreign Intercourse Bill of 1798 and the Debate over Early American Foreign Relations,” JER, v. 36, 1[Spring 2016]:125-49).
2. Samuel Phillips Savage died intestate on 9 December 1797. In his last few years, he complained to “My very dear Children” how “Old Age with its train of Evils, I more & more daily experience. . . . it is dreadfull that an old person should have no other pro[o]ff of his Age that [than] a decayed Body & a Grey head” (Park, Savage Descendants, p. 25; Samuel Phillips Savage to SST, 19 Dec. 1795, TFP).
1. This omitted text contains explicit instructions for the removal and storage of ashes from their home’s fireplaces. Still tormented by thoughts of a wintertime house fire, GT wrote a week later: “What a distressing scene it must be for you all to be drove into the snow by the House being on fire—Every cold & stormy night this thought harasses my mind.” He ended the year on the same note: “Keep ashes covered,” he implored, “lest the fire may snap into the floor—& then all is gone—& you & the family turned into the Snow” (GT to SST, 10 Feb. 1798, TFP. He ended the year on the same anxious note; see No. 179).
2. The situation was unchanged a week later: “We have not a word of news from France or any part of Europe” (GT to SST, 10 Feb. 1798, TFP).
3. On Wednesday, 30 January, while members were milling about outside the bar of the House as clerks tallied a vote relating to the impeachment proceedings against Sen. William Blount, Rep. Roger Griswold (Conn.) overheard Rep. Matthew Lyon (Vt.) maligning the Connecticut delegation. When Griswold retorted by alluding to allegations of Lyon’s cowardice during the Revolutionary War, Lyon spat in his face. According to the testimony of Rep. Samuel Dana (Conn.), deposed on 6 February and reported to the House on 12 February, “Mr. Griswold turned towards the member from Vermont, fixed his eye upon him, and was slowly drawing back his right arm in a constrained manner, when, from his change of countenance and the cast of his eye, I apprehended that my colleague recollected where he was; he then took out his handkerchief and wiped his face,” and left the chamber. Another colleague immediately moved that Lyon be expelled for his “violent attack, and gross indecency.” GT was among the majority of 49 to 44 that succeeded in referring the matter to a select “committee of privileges.” (Another motion to place the offending member in the custody of the sergeant at arms failed by a vote of 62 to 29, Thatcher voting with the minority.) On 2 February, the select committee recommended that Lyon be expelled for “disorderly behavior.”
On 5 February, the House took up the select committee report. One member moved to expedite matters by having it referred directly to the House, but “as it respected the dignity of the House and the people at large, . . .[GT] hoped it would go through every form of the House” (Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., p. 964). It was immediately referred to the COWH. GT’s subsequent, near-solitary (4 to 88) vote against authorizing the COWH to examine testimony collected by the select committee seemed to be aimed only at preventing the testimony from having to be heard twice. The COWH spent several days listening to the select committee’s evidence, the further examination of witnesses, and Lyon’s rambunctious self-defense, which included the expression “I did not come here to have my ----- kicked by every body” (9 Feb. 1798, Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., p. 981). On 12 February, the COWH voted to expel Lyon and the House agreed by a vote of 52 to 44, with Thatcher voting in the majority. But Lyon was spared the ultimate indignity because the tally was less than the two-thirds required by the Constitution to carry a vote of expulsion. The House’s failure to punish Lyon set the stage for the incident reported by Thatcher in No. 158, below.
1. “From what he saw of the affray, [GT] did not think Mr. Lyon deserved to be punished for the part he acted. He certainly received a severe beating, but he appeared to be passive from the beginning to the end; and he did not think Mr. Lyon ought to be expelled because he had been beaten” (16 Feb. 1798, Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., p. 1036). GT failed to persuade his colleagues to exempt Lyon from the proposed joint sanction. The committee of privileges recommended that neither member be expelled. On 23 February, GT sided with the minority in a 53 to 38 vote that failed to end the matter by postponing further consideration until the last day of the session. By an overwhelming vote of 73 to 21 (with GT now voting in the majority), the House then agreed to the committee’s recommendation against expulsion, although it was only by a much smaller margin of 48 votes to 47 (with GT again among the majority) that the House defeated a last ditch motion to hold both Lyon and Griswold at least censurable “for riotous and disorderly behavior.”
1. On 5 March, President Adams informed Congress that the first dispatches from the envoys in France had been received in the State Department late on the previous evening, and would require some days to be deciphered. He would, however, without delay transmit the most recent dispatch, dated 8 January 1798, in which the envoys confessed to abandoning all hope of ever being officially received by the French government, and declared their mission a failure (DeConde, Quasi-War, p. 66).
2. While the cabinet examined the dispatches and deliberated the Administration’s response, President Adams was swayed by Attorney General Charles Lee’s advice that a full disclosure of the dispatches ought to be delayed until their authors had removed themselves beyond the reach of any punitive reaction by the Directory. The threat was real: the Directory had imprisoned four other foreign diplomats while the American envoys waited to be received—until which time they could not even pretend to be protected by diplomatic immunity. When the published dispatches finally did begin to circulate throughout Europe in late May, Gerry and Pinckney protested that the reckless release of papers had put them in physical danger (De Conde, Quasi-War, pp. 67-69; Stinchcombe, XYZ Affair, pp. 106, 115).
3. NB’s opinion by this time was a foregone conclusion: “What think you of the gasconade of that troubled Nation cut throat people the ARMY of ENGLAND that as they call it, which is to carry terror wth it” (NB to GT, 11 Jan. 1798, Barrell Correspondence). On 27 October 1797, the French Directory placed Napoleon in command of the Armée de l’Angleterre, aimed at executing an amphibious attack against England from France’s Channel ports.
4. The French government’s decree of 29 Nivôse, Year VI of the Republic (18 January 1798), that the character of a vessel was to be determined by the origin of its cargo and not its flag, was aimed at stopping all neutral (American) trade to or from the British West Indies.
5. “The spiting and caineing business you mention in Congress is painful to think on—the beast [Matthew] Lyon can not be put on a footing with [Roger] Griswal[d]” (NB to GT, 25 March 1798, Barrell Correspondence).
6. What think ye of the Congress now? (New York, 1775) was a widely-cited pamphlet by the New Jersey Anglican clergyman and Loyalist Thomas Bradbury Chandler (1726-90), aimed at promoting disaffection with the Continental Congress’s revolutionary leadership and reconciliation with Great Britain.
1. Setting aside his initial, even more bellicose response, President Adams’s message to Congress on 19 March announced that the envoys’ dispatches from France revealed “no ground of expectation that the objects of their mission can be accomplished on terms compatible with the safety, the honor, or the essential interests of the nation,” and he called for putting mainland defenses and American shipping on a more advanced war footing. But he refused to release the dispatches at this time—partly anticipating that Congress was not prepared for actual hostilities and partly fearing (as GT suspected) that it would endanger American lives in France (ASP:Foreign Relations 2:152).
2. After several days’ deliberation in the COWH, a motion was made on 30 March for the president to communicate to the House the instructions to and dispatches from the envoys in France. The motion passed on 2 April by a vote of 65 to 27. New England Federalists, including GT, made up most of the minority, while every Jeffersonian Republican present voted for the president’s release of the dispatches in their entirety. William Branch Giles (Va.) stubbornly did it “to try the sincerity of the Executive,” but anti-administration members must have questioned their aim when they saw Federalist stalwarts like James A. Bayard (Del.), and South Carolina’s Robert Goodloe Harper, John Rutledge, Jr. and Thomas Pinckney rise to cast their votes with them (30 March 1798, Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 1360).
1. Robert Goodloe Harper (S.C.) delivered his long and, however improbably, impromptu speech defending the Foreign Intercourse Bill on 2 March (Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 1159-1200). John Nicholas (Va.), joined by Albert Gallatin (Pa.), had taken the lead in attempting to amend the bill’s routine appropriation for the diplomatic corps by reducing both the salaries and the ranks of various posts. Publications of Gallatin’s speech of 1 March, Harper’s reply the next day, and the speech of Rep. James Bayard (Del.) of 3 March are among Thacher’s Tracts, v. 52-53. Harper’s speech included a reference to “the examples of the ancient Republics . . . adduced by my friend from Massachusetts, (Mr. Thatcher).” On 28 February, GT had given his own lengthy argument why Nicholas’s amendment amounted to a usurpation of executive authority, including “a view of the manner in which Athens and Rome had fallen. . . . (something of which had been seen in this country)”; see No. 156, fn. 1, above.
In his reply of thanks for sending Harper’s speech (“such a political feast I never before enjoyed”), NB declared “it is happy for the Union we can boast of such men as Harper.” The affront posed by “those Infamous Scoundrels, Nicholas and Gallatin,” he insisted, “is the effect of introducing foreigners [e.g., the Swiss-born Gallatin] into Congress, aliens to our Union . . . employed by that cutthroat nation [France] to alienate us from our country. to inslave us . . . and sell us as such, to that terrible Nation who aim at nothing short of Universal Empire. . . . do we not know that while [Edmond-Charles] Genet[,] Gallatin[,] Nicholas[, Edmund] Randolph, & [James] Munroe are sufferd to continue among us, they will be ploting our ruin, therefore the best thing we can do is to send them off in company with [James] Madison[, Edward] Livingston[, William Branch] Giles[,] Blunt [Thomas Blount] with and the rest of the minority to send them among their friends” (NB to GT, 28 April 1798, Barrell Correspondence).
1. On 3 April, in compliance with the House’s request the day before, President Adams transmitted his instructions to and dispatches from the American envoys to France, “omitting only some names, and a few expressions, descriptive of the persons.” To avoid endangering the envoys by giving offense to specific characters, the redacted documents identified Talleyrand’s intermediaries simply as W.X.Y. and Z. Adams requested that the communications “may be considered in confidence, until the members of Congress are fully possessed of their contents, and shall have had opportunity to deliberate on the consequences of their publication; after which time I submit them to your wisdom” (ASP:Foreign Relations 2:153-68). For the next three days the House deliberated on the XYZ Affair behind closed doors. When they reopened on 6 April and the injunction of secrecy was lifted, Federalists immediately pressed for the public printing of up to 3,000 copies of the communications; one member declared that each of the thirty towns in his New York district would expect at least one. GT’s old nemesis Thomas Blount could see no reason for printing more than the number needed to conduct the business of Congress, upon which GT seconded a motion for 2,000 copies “in order to oblige the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Blount)” (Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., p. 1378). A compromise motion to print 1,200 copies was adopted.
1. GT returns to this subject several weeks later, when acknowledging a letter from SST in which his burdened conscience imagines an imputation of fault: “When I read in it that you were reading over my old Letters to you near ten years ago I expected every moment to see that you had noticed how much longer they were than what I have wrote you lately—It is a fact I have thought of my self, not only with regard to your letters only, but to all my correspondents—I write less frequent, & & much shorter—I [a?] reason I may assigne hereafter” (GT to SST, 4 May 1798, TFP).
2. The Parkers’ third child, Ann Brooks Parker (d. 1873), was born in March 1798.
1. “I rejoice with you my friend that the eyes of the people appear to be opening” (NB to GT, 28 April 1798, Barrell Correspondence).
2. On 30 March, Harrison Gray Otis presented a petition to the House from a meeting of inhabitants of Roxbury, Massachusetts, opposing the arming of private merchant vessels for fear that “the pride, caprice, or passion of the master of a merchant vessel” would spark the very hostilities that the arming was intended to deter. On 2 April, Joseph B. Varnum presented a similar petition from inhabitants of the neighboring town of Milton, expressing concern that so many armed merchant vessels were captained by former British subjects “who still retain all their English prejudices against the French” and may provoke a war by committing a deliberate casus belli (Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 1357, 1367).
GT had come out in support of arming private merchant vessels when it was proposed, unsuccessfully, in late December 1797. The measure’s potential impact on the peace negotiations with France had so obscured the real question, claimed GT, that “any one coming into the House, in the course of the debate, might have guessed for forty years and not found it out.” Rep. John Nicholas (Va.) had appealed to the “Genius of Peace.” But “Mr. Thatcher said, he did not rise to invoke the Genius of America, or any other Genius. He did not believe in any genii. He wished to call the attention of the House to the question. . . . but as it had been the practice to abandon the question, and raise other subjects, he would take the liberty of following the example which had been set, by remarking upon what had been said. <The Speaker signified to Mr. T. that, in doing so, he would be out of order, and having expressed his intentions, the deviation could not be admitted.>” With thick sarcasm, GT ended by insisting that the question at hand “is to arm against rovers and pirates, and surely gentlemen would not say that the Terrible Republic were a set of rovers and pirates” (26 Dec. 1797, Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 769, 771).
3. Paraphrase of Luke 18:8.
1. Just two days later, Joseph Priestley wrote GT that the French, whose military successes made them “equally void of fear or shame, want to bully you out of a sum of money, but I do not think they will seriously go to war with you.” While agreeing with his friend’s assessment, GT probably would not have gone so far as Priestley did in exculpating the French Republic by insisting “This conduct of the French does not affect the Constitution, which does not differ essentially from that of this country nor the people at large. It is only the character of the people now in office who may change tomorrow” (Priestley to GT, 19 April 1798, “Priestley Letters,” p. 19).
1. Philadelphia’s Weekly Magazine of original essays, fugitive pieces, and interesting intelligence was published from 3 February 1798 to 1 June 1799, except when publication was suspended from September 1798 to January 1799 due to the death of its first editor, James Watters, during the yellow fever epidemic. GT’s collection of issues is bound among Thacher’s Tracts, vols. 64-65, 67-68.
1. The subsequent reference to “Mr. Harpers Pamphlet” suggests the enclosure was Rep. Robert Goodloe Harper’s (S.C.) widely-circulated Observations on the dispute between the United States and France . . . to his constituents, in May, 1797. GT’s copy of the first American edition of this 102-page pamphlet, published in Philadelphia in 1797, is among Thacher’s Tracts (v. 35).
2. The hypocrisy in continuing to call France a “republic” continued to nettle GT, who returned to it two months later (7 July) when the House was debating a bill to augment the army for the duration of the dispute “between this country and the French Republic.” When a like-minded member moved to strike “French Republic” and insert “France,” GT took the opportunity to call attention to the hypocrisy (while getting in yet another swipe against slavery) by insisting, on the contrary, that the language be allowed to stand:
Mr. Thatcher said the French Government had a right, if they thought proper to exercise it, to call their Government a Republic, in the same way that people in this country were in the habit of naming certain black creatures, Cato, Cæsar, &c., who certainly bore no resemblance to those heroes; and though France, under the name of a Republic, exercises all the arbitrary power of a despotism, yet, as she chooses to be thus styled, he did not see that we had anything to do with it (Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 2130-31).
The motion was defeated on a roll-call vote, and the language stood.
3. The Ottoman Empire’s regent (dey) of one of the so-called Barbary Pirate states, whose name had become a by-word for barbarism and arbitrary despotism.
4. Woodman, Snell Wingate, Isaac Lane, Cadwallader Gray, and Samuel Merrell comprised a committee of the inhabitants of Buxton, Maine, who petitioned the House on 28 April, “that the merchants may not be permitted to arm their vessels by public authority; and that such measures may be adopted by Congress as effectually to prevent a war with the French Republic, or any other nation.” GT wrote the committee the same day as this letter to Woodman (perhaps under cover of the same) to acknowledge he had received the petition on 7 May and that he had submitted it to the House the same day, when it was read and referred to a COWH. In his letter to the Buxton committee, GT insisted “that should war take place, I shall consider the Rulers of France the only culpable cause of the calamitous event,” and “I verily believe the party she boasts of having in America is daily decieving her as the Tories misled England during the Revolutionary war” (GT to Woodman et al., 10 May 1798, TFP).
1. GT omits from this account the dark turn of events once these young men concluded their homage to the president. Between 10 and 11 p.m., many of them gathered outside the home of Benjamin Franklin Bache, publisher of the pro-French Aurora, where they battered many of its doors and windows and hurled drunken threats before reconvening to the president’s mansion to serenade the Adamses (Rosenfeld, Aurora, pp. 110-11).
2. The black cockade, typically worn on the upturned front left flap of a tricorn hat, became the unofficial badge of pro-Administration men during the War Crisis of ’98. Whether the black cockade was adopted because it had been part of the Continental Army uniform; whether it was called also the “English cockade” because it derived from British tradition (black being the color of the House of Hanover) or because it denoted pro-British sympathies; or whether it was first worn at the special request of Abigail Adams (as one tradition states) or “Peter Porcupine” (as William Cobbett claimed), the black cockade provided a ready alternative to the tricolor cockade—the most recognizable sartorial signifier of French revolutionary sympathies (DeConde, Quasi-War, p. 82; Rosenfeld, Aurora, pp. 105, 118; Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution [London, 1988], p. 56).
3. Citing the “hazardous and afflictive situation” in which the United States had been placed by an (unnamed) “foreign power,” and considering “that the Duty of imploring the Mercy and Benediction of Heaven on our Country demands, at this time, a special attention from its Inhabitants,” President Adams issued a proclamation on 23 March, recommending 9 May “as a day of Solemn Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer; That the Citizens of these States, abstaining on that Day from their customary Worldly Occupations, offer their devout Addresses to the Father of Mercies, agreeably to those forms or methods which they have severally adopted as the most suitable and becoming” ([Philadelphia] Universal Gazette, 29 May 1798).
4. “Americans are rallying about their own standard which is a good omen—I am not so sanguine, as I have heretofore been, that peace with France will not be interrupted—It appears to me probable, that, if a Revolution does not take place in that country, a state of actual war will commence against this” (GT to SST, 15 May 1798, TFP).
1. On 28 May, President Adams responded by letter to one such address which GT had presented from the inhabitants of Wells, Maine. Adams accused “The agents of a foreign nation . . . of having a party in this Country, devoted to their interests,” and thanked the petitioners for “your approbation of the Measures of the Supreme Executive Authority of the nation” (copy, in GT’s hand, Foster Family).
2. In the summer of 1799, GT and his brothers-in-law sold Savage’s property. Brother William Savage, writing from Jamaica on 30 October 1800, had heard of the sale “& is well pleased with the price we got; but requested to be informed why you and Lucy [Savage Bigelow] had each a share and and [an] half. . . . I have wrote him pretty fully—& stated your Brother Henrys will by which he gave all his real estate to you & Lucy” (GT to SST, 2 Dec. 1800, TFP; for the remainder of this letter, see No. 199, below). Sarah and Lucy’s older brother Henry (b. 1758) died unmarried in 1784 (Park, Savage Descendants, p. 26).
1. The special session of Congress that sat 15 May to 10 July 1797, convened by presidential proclamation of 25 March 1797 to consider a response to the French Directory’s effective cessation of diplomatic relations by refusing to recognize the appointed minister plenipotentiary, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.
1. The two gross misspellings (“childrend” and “Kitching”) are probably deliberately repeated from SST’s own letters, as mild reproach for her poor spelling.
2. “I had rather George would attend the Dancing than the reading School, if he can attend but one” (GT to SST, 21 Jan. 1799, TFP).
3. The education of the Thatchers’ young servant girl Betsey Witham was just as closely regulated as the other childrens’ in the household. When GT sent three or four books home to SST for her and the girls, including the popular epistolary novels Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) by the British novelist Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), he stipulated that one of them “I would have you give to Betsey—as her own” (GT to SST, 4 May 1798, TFP). GT evidently hoped Betsey would not fail to pattern herself after the title character Pamela’s conduct as a chaste and modest maidservant. The following week, he wrote SST:
I have received yours of the sixth instant—I am pleased with Betsey’s making a visit to her friends at York; I hope you rig[g]ed her out handsomly—And put her under the protection of some person in the Stage that will take care of her—I shall want to hear of her return—Her friends there, I hope, will not be so imprudent as to fill her head with notions that will make her discontented, & wish not to come back again—Poor people ar[e] the most likely to act unwisely in this particular with their children (GT to SST, 15 May 1798, TFP).
1. Ecclesiastes 3:1.
1. John Marshall and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney officially withdrew from the mission in April 1798. Elbridge Gerry remained until the autumn, providing a valuable channel of confidential information for his old friend Adams when the Directory’s change of policy promised a more fruitful reception to a renewed peace mission the next year.
1. In GT’s next letter to SST, dated 3 July, the single war measure perhaps best calculated to win public support for all the others was relegated to a postscript: “I must add, General Washington, late President, is nominated, & to day will be appointed, to take command of all the American Troops, should a War take place with France—Tell this to friend [Jeremiah] Hill” (GT to SST, 3 July 1798, TFP). Adams, who coincidentally had nominated Washington for the same post in 1775, dispatched the secretary of war himself to delivery the commission to Mount Vernon. Washington’s acceptance, which acknowledged his confidence in Adams’s “wise and prudent measures,” would exert a powerful effect over European public opinion as well—although, in the event, there was never any deployment over which Washington would assume active command (ASP:Foreign Relations 2:202; DeConde, Quasi-War, pp. 408-09n).
2. GT held firm to his prediction: as late as 3 July, responding to news of “so much sickness in the family,” he continued to “have no doubt we shall adjourn next week. But if I can I shall get leave of absence to day or tomorrow—in which case, I shall follow close on the heels of this Letter—My colleagues are not willing I should leave them at this time—I am very unwilling too; but our family must be my apology—few, if any members, can say what I can on the subject of attendance in Congress—for eight years I have not been absent one hour when Congress was in Session” (GT to SST, 3 July 1798, TFP). After 246 days, the exceptionally long second session of the Fifth Congress adjourned finally on 16 July 1798.
3. The dinner at Oeller’s Hotel was attended by “above 120 persons,” including Speaker Jonathan Dayton, members of both Houses, the Roman Catholic Bishop John Carroll, Philadelphia’s Episcopalian Bishop William White, all the principal officers of the federal government’s executive and judicial branches, Pennsylvania’s Senate Speaker George Latimer, officers of the federal army and state militia, “and other distinguished public characters.” Among the seventeen toasts drunk “with unbounded plaudits,” the thirteenth in particular—the now famous phrase “Millions for Defence, but not a Cent for Tribute,” coined on that occasion—was “encored with enthusiasm” (GUS, 25 June 1798). The phrase is attributed to Rep. Robert Goodloe Harper (S.C.), although it may have been inspired by the envoys’ own response to the XYZ emissaries’ solicitations for a bribe, “No; no; not a sixpence”—reported (without its traditional attribution to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney) in the envoys’ report of 27 October 1797, transmitted to Congress with their other dispatches on 3 April 1798 (ASP:Foreign Relations 2:161).
4. As early as late April, Dr. Samuel Savage intended to meet his brother-in-law en route home from Philadelphia, to discuss the disposition of Samuel Phillips Savage’s estate, about which GT was prepared to acquiesce in whatever his brothers-in-law proposed (GT to SST, 1 May 1798, TFP).
1. While hastening from Bath to Portland during the Supreme Judicial Court’s spring circuit in 1818, Justice Thatcher and Chief Justice Isaac Parker were obliged to travel over a Sunday, foregoing a visit to Rev. Jesse Appleton at Bowdoin College, “for it is one of the implied exceptions to the Sabbath day Act, that while Saints sleep, sinners may ride—I mentioned this to the chief Justice, & he seemed to think it might pass for pretty good law, but entertained some doubts as to its divinity—nevertheless he was willing to try it for once” (GT to Jesse Appleton, 13 July 1818, Jesse Appleton Papers, MeB). GT’s copy of Appleton’s published sermon On the perpetuity and importance of Sabbath (Portland, 1814), delivered in Portland on 10 November 1814 “for the purpose of taking measures to promote the due observance of the Lord’s day,” is among Thacher’s Tracts (v. 122-23).
2. GT did call on Barzillai Hudson on his way through Hartford (GT to SST, 3 Dec. 1798, TFP).
1. NB’s letter of 15 December, which exists only as an incomplete draft, included a recommendation of Dr. Daniel Pierce (1740-1803) of Kittery, for appointment to any naval hospital that might be built in the district (NB to GT, 15 Dec. 1798, Barrell Correspondence; Everett S. Stackpole, Old Kittery and her Families [Lewiston, Me., 1903], p. 664).
2. At their last meeting in Saco, shortly before GT’s return to Philadelphia for the third session of the Fifth Congress, NB expressed to him “the necessity of your friends exerting themselves to secure your election, & on my return to York told all those I wishd to be such what I thot necessary for this end and had they taken ¼ the pains I did, I have no doubt you would have had 19/20ths of the votes in York Kittery & Berwick.” NB complained about voting irregularities committed by the local constable, whom he advised the county’s high sheriff to dismiss “as an enemy to the federal constitution a vile Jacobine tool.” NB offered this and other evidence of hypocritical practices, that GT “be no longer deceived in who are your friends” (NB to GT, 15 Dec. 1798, Barrell Correspondence).
3. “As you say ‘On this subject we will converse hereafter.’ or if it be more agreeable to you never more mention it again—as it can be of no importance to either of us what we think on theological subjects disputations—tho I dont wish to would be far from conveyg. an idea that I think it is of no importance how we believe the gosple” (NB to GT, 14 Jan. 1799, Barrell Correspondence).
4. “I most heartily wish you may not be mistaken,” responded NB, “but when I hear the barking of the virginia monster [John Nicholas] and see the cunning subtlety of the genevian incendiary [Albert Gallatin]” inflaming “the lower class of people” against the proposed stamp tax and other levies necessary for war mobilization, “I am paind at heart, and wth fear for the worst and wonder what would be said could government be supported without any expence to the people” (NB to GT, 14 Jan. 1799, Barrell Correspondence).
5. Three days later, GT dashed off a quick note to NB, expressive of the same generally encouraging attitude: “Read the inclosed speech of Mr. Harper, & then think what must be the sentiments of those against whom it is directed” (GT to NB, 5 Jan. 1799, Barrell Correspondence). GT almost certainly refers to Rep. Robert Goodloe Harper’s (S.C.) long speech of 27 Dec. 1798, to which was devoted the entire day’s congressional coverage in the GUS of 3 January. Harper spoke in support of Rep. Roger Griswold’s (Conn.) proposed criminalization of private negotiations with foreign powers, such as those that had recently been undertaken by Dr. George Logan with the French Directory. Harper considered “this embassy to have been in itself a very silly affair,” but which, being permitted, “must lead to the total subversion of the government.” The main speakers against Griswold’s motion were NB’s favorite targets, Representatives Albert Gallatin (Pa.) and John Nicholas (Va.)
1. GT’s source was Boston’s CC, 26 December 1798, citing news delivered by the ship Liberty at Newburyport, Massachusetts. Under the by-line “French Transports Dished” was the report that British Admiral Horatio Nelson’s fleet had destroyed 366 French vessels in the harbor of Alexandria—evidently an exaggerated reference to the Battle of the Nile on 1 August, in which a slightly less powerful British fleet destroyed all but a few of the seventeen French ships in Aboukir Bay, off the coast of Alexandria. The French fleet was there supporting Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign, which, according to the same newspaper source, was being reduced by constant attacks from the native Mamelukes under the Beys of Egypt. On 12 October, a British squadron under Sir John Warren intercepted and defeated France’s Brest fleet in the Atlantic, en route to support Irish insurgents.
1. “I have noted what you say about Sallys & Georges going to Dancing School—I have before wrote you fully on this Subject: but I will add—as tis uncertain when they or either of them will have another opportunity, I would have them both go this quarter—You say George Dances well enough, & that he will not learn any thing else so long as he goes to dancing—No matter let him dance—this quarter—The more his mind is engaged, the better his feet & legs will obey—Dance away” (GT to SST, 5 Jan. 1799, TFP).
2. “As I grow old I grow negligent, or rather lazy about writing” (GT to SST, 14 Feb. 1799, TFP).
3. A nickname for the Thatchers’ seventh child, Anna Lewis, born Christmas Eve 1797.
1. “I wish I could send him a Violin. I [he] wrote me, that if he had one, he could soon learn—I wish he may—If Mr. [Prentiss] Mellen has more than one, & I think he has two, see if you cant bargain with him—I certainly will get one on my return to Boston. . . . Should Philips go to Portland, & can get a Violin by the advice of some person of Judgment, I would have him; but you must take care that he is not imposed upon in the price & goodness of the thing” (GT to SST, 26 Jan. 1799, TFP).
1. The House’s first order of business upon convening on 2 December immediately laid bare the serious sectional divisions within the Federalist majority. The election of Speaker, wrote Rep. John Rutledge, Jr. (S.C.), “puzzled and perplexed the federal part of the House more than any of the difficulties it has heretofore had to struggle with.” Rutledge was the candidate of Southern Federalists, who had hoped to release the northern and middle states’ hold on the speakership, but lacked sufficient votes. Three caucuses failed to settle the issue before Rutledge urged his supporters to unite behind Sedgwick and reject southern Republicans’ offer to vote as a sectional bloc. Two Georgia Representatives arrived late and were not informed of this arrangement, which alone prevented Sedgwick’s election on the first ballot. He beat Nathaniel Macon (N.C.) by 44 votes to 38 on the second ballot, while Condy again beat John Beckley for Clerk by a straight party vote of 47 to 39 (Patrick J. Furlong, “John Rutledge, Jr. and the Election of a Speaker of the House in 1799,” WMQ, v. 24, 3[July 1967]:432-36).
2. GT arrived in Philadelphia on 28 November 1799, and settled into his accustomed quarters in the home of Robert Wallace, shopkeeper, at 77 North Third Street (GT to ST, 2 Dec. 1799, TFP).
3. GT returned too late to witness the desolation that had raged through the seat of government just months earlier: “the fever has burst forth again like a volcano which has been somewhile smothered, and death or desertion is the only alternative,” wrote the former House Clerk, who had remained behind. “The sickness is yet principally confined to Spruce and Pine streets near the water” (John Beckley to William Irvine, 23 Aug. 1799, Beckley, p. 161).
4. Olive Hudson (1781-1849) was Barzillai Hudson’s first daughter from his second marriage, to Hannah Bunce Hudson. She married Hartford businessman David Watkinson (1778-1857) in 1803 (Guide, Watkinson Family Papers, Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.)
5. Josiah Thacher (d. 1836), the Thatchers’ eighth child and fifth son, was born in Biddeford on 30 July 1799.
6. Thatcher’s eldest brother Josiah (b. 1735), a veteran militia officer in the Revolutionary War, died on 5 October 1799 (Allen, Thacher Genealogy, p. 48).
1. To add force to the admonition, GT wrote the next morning, “Tis this moment reported that one man was burnt last night” (GT to SST, 18 Dec. 1799, TFP).
1. George Washington died at his Mount Vernon estate on 14 December 1799. On 24 December, President Adams approved a joint resolution of Congress, “That there be a funeral procession from Congress Hall to the German Lutheran Church, in honor of the memory of General George Washington, on Thursday the 26th instant, and that an oration be prepared at the request of Congress, to be delivered before both houses, on that day, and that the President of the Senate and Speaker of the House of Representatives, be desired to request one of the members of Congress to prepare and deliver the same” (GUS, 27 Dec. 1799). Rep. Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee (Va.) was chosen to give the oration, during which he delivered the famous lines describing Washington as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
2. Congress’s joint resolution of 24 December “recommended to the people of the United States, to wear crape on the left arm, as mourning for thirty days.” Jenks’ Portland Gazette printed the resolution on 6 January 1800. Any public recommendation by Abigail Adams is not known.
1. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) was a British philosopher and pioneering feminist whose writings included novels, essays, travelogues, history, and even a children’s book. Her husband, the like-minded radical William Godwin (1756-1836), edited her Memoirs and Posthumous Works (2 vols., Dublin, 1798). But for their weight and expense in mailing, GT would have mailed the edition home for SST as soon as he was done reading it (GT to SST, 30 Jan. 1800, TFP). Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (London, 1792; first U.S. edition, Boston, 1792) was an early feminist manifesto, composed in response to Talleyrand’s Report on National Instruction published the year before. Ironically for GT, both Wollstonecraft’s and Talleyrand’s treatises espoused ideas critical of those found in Rousseau’s Emile, one of GT’s sacred texts.
2. Gilbert Imlay (1754-1828) was a western lands speculator in Kentucky before settling in England by 1792, where he continued his unscrupulous business ventures while writing books encouraging immigration to America. He was in France during the Terror (1793-94) when he met Wollstoncraft and fathered their child Fanny, both of whom he abandoned after the family returned to England in 1795.
1. GT’s niece Tempe followed her husband Silas Lee to the seat of government, arriving on 12 January after a six days’ journey from Boston, and was inoculated for the smallpox by Dr. Benjamin Rush three days later. “The Doctor has strong expectations of rendering restoring her to good health before he has done with her—She is in good Spirits, & should she get cleverly over the Smallpox, she will enjoy herself nicely—this life will please her—more than it does me.” On 12 February, GT reported “I spent last evening with Mrs. Lee, & drank tea there with a large company of Gentleman: she is recovering rapidly—the pock are nearly gone & she looks finely, & enjoys herself as well” (GT to SST, 17 Jan., 12 Feb. 1800, TFP). Benjamin Rush (1746-1813; Princeton, 1760) studied medicine in Europe before returning to Philadelphia in 1769, to open what would become a thriving medical practice. A former member of the Continental Congress (where he signed the Declaration of Independence) and physician general of the Continental Army, Rush was at this time serving as director of the U.S. Mint.
1. Probably a report of the coup d’état of 19 Brumaire (10 November 1799), in which supporters of Napoleon succeeded in suspending the Directory and the Corps Législatif created under the Constitution of 1795, and installing a triumvirate Consulate consisting of Napoleon, the political theorist the Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, and the former Director Roger Ducos. It was first reported at the seat of government in the GUS and the Philadelphia Gazette of 21 January.
2. John Randolph of Roanoke (1773-1833) represented Virginia’s planter class when first elected to the House in 1799 and quickly rose within the Democratic-Republican party leadership until he proved too republican even for his cousin Thomas Jefferson, and became an outspoken “party of one” for much of his legislative career in the House or Senate alternatively, until his death. On 11 January 1800 he wrote an impulsive letter to President Adams complaining that two young army officers had harassed him at the theater the night before, for comments he made on the floor of the House that day, derogatory of standing armies and those who made a career of serving in them. Randolph maintained that such treatment compromised legislators’ independence, and demanded that suitable punishment be meted out by Adams as “principal representative” of “the majesty of the people.” Adams forwarded the letter to the House, reasoning that questions relating to privileges of the House “ought to be inquired into in the House itself, if anywhere.” Pro-Administration men immediately seized upon the occasion to condemn Randolph for applying to the executive branch to remedy a breach of legislative privilege, and exhaustively investigated his accusations—while Randolph could only assail their “false delicacy” in so diligently prosecuting a case that could only make him appear a bad constitutional lawyer at best, and a fool at worst. After debating the subject for the better part of three days, the House on 29 January declined to rule on the incident itself (beyond describing the army officers’ behavior “as an indiscretion of youth”), but voted to thank Adams for his “respectful sense of the regard” he had shown to the House’s rights and privileges (Annals of Congress, 6th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 372-74, 377-88, 426-507).
3. A paraphrase of “What think ye of the Congress now?” (see No. 159, fn. 6, above). NB’s reply of 25 February indicates that the expression, and the enclosed newspaper report to which it alludes, referred to the coup d’état of 19 Brumaire (10 November 1799). NB was skeptical that Napoleon’s Consulate promised the long-awaited peaceful settlement of the French Revolution. “Buonaparte is a great Millitary Character,” he conceded, “but as unprincipled as Cromwell,” with “nothing in him like of the Rom[an] Fabius or an the Amer[ican] Washington” (NB to GT, 25 Feb. 1800, Barrell Correspondence).
4. NB was less forgiving in his response. “I confess to you my friend her trampling on the Laws of society and living in whoredom with different men does not strike me agreeably” (NB to GT, 25 Feb. 1800, Barrell Correspondence).
1. Despite pleading brevity on account of “An armful of Letters,” GT’s next letter to SST quoted at some length one of those same letters: Isaac Parker’s description of SST’s visit to Portland, mentioned here, “ ‘during all which time she [Sarah] was so closely followed up by her old friends that Mrs. [Rebecca Hall] Parker could hardly obtain sight of her. . . . Mrs. Parker likes her a great deal better than she does you—that is she admires her, & only likes you’—This passage,” concluded GT, “cannot be more flattering to your vanity, than to my pride—If one of us only is to be praised I always wish it may be yourself. . . . I pray you to thank your young Galant, in my name, for his great civility & kindness” (GT to SST, 12 Feb. 1800, TFP). The “Galant” seems to have been Dudley Hubbard.
2. “Doctor Hubbard” was probably either a slip of the pen or a playful term of endearment for the Thatchers’ friend Dudley Hubbard. In 1795 he married Sophia Dame (1772-1828), nine years his younger; they had two children by 1800 (https://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/sophia-dame_35292968 [accessed April 2018]). A Dr. John Hubbard, practicing at this time in distant Readfield, does not seem to have been an acquaintance.
1. “I write all my letters in the [Congress] Hall” (GT to SST, 5 April 1800, TFP).
2. “Were there not too many members who had rather be in Philadelphia than their own houses we might with ease get thro our business by the time mentioned” (GT to SST, 19 Feb. 1800, TFP).
3. GT’s letter of 10 February 1800 enquired about SST’s recent visit to Portland, and of course about the children (TFP).
1. “For the two days past, I suffer by an oppression & visitation on the Lungs that I am not sensible of ever feeling before—attended by a constant effort to cough; unless I feel released from these sensations by tomorrow I shall apply to Doctor [Benjamin] Rush for advise; for I never tamper with myself” (GT to SST, 19 Feb. 1800, TFP).
2. President Adams nominated William Vans Murray minister plenipotentiary to France on 18 February 1799. Under pressure from a caucus of Federalist Senators, Adams withdrew the nomination a week later and instead named a three-man commission of Murray, Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, and Virginia’s Patrick Henry, confirmed on 27 February. Henry would decline and North Carolina’s Governor William R. Davie became the last member of the second peace mission to France (Elkins and McKitrick, Federalism, pp. 618-19).
3. This action on 1 February 1800, between Capt. Thomas Truxton’s frigate Constellation (38 guns) and the much heavier French frigate La Vengeance en route from Guadeloupe to France, is GT’s only known written reference to the military dimension of the Quasi-War with France. He could not yet know that it would be the last major naval engagement of that conflict. Truxton received a congressional gold medal—only the second naval officer so honored (after John Paul Jones).
1. GT was concerned about his eldest son’s aptitude for work long before Phillips tried his hand at shopkeeping in George Peirson’s store in Portland, beginning around January 1800. “All his Letters have more or less the marks of inattention. I write him frequently, & inculcate the necessity at attention to whatever he does—I think he will do by & by; He writes happily as yet, & I hope he will continue to enjoy his situation, & to recommend himself to Mr. Peirson.” Yet by April, GT was “fearfull he will grow tired of it—He is naturally fickle” (GT to SST, 27 Jan., 9 April 1800, TFP).
2. Zilpha Wadsworth (1778-1851) was the second child and eldest daughter among Peleg Wadsworth’s ten children. In 1804 she married Stephen Longfellow; their son, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was born three years later. Grandfather Wadsworth’s house in Portland was the poet’s home for the first thirty-five years of his life, and is today one of the gems of the Maine Historical Society.
2. “Two days ago I had a very handsom Letter from Sally; I think she improves, & tho you think I am opposed to Girls learning any thing, I declare to you that her progress gives me very great satisfaction” (GT to SST, 1 April 1800, TFP).
3. In an earlier declaration of these same priorities, GT advised SST to accustom their daughter Sally and niece Nancy Bigelow “to make tea, & see they do it with propriety & ease to their company—This is one of the best formal recommendation[s] to Misses they can acquire while little Girls—If they will acquire this graceful habit, I dont care if it is at the expence of breaking a dozen sets of cups & saucers” (GT to SST, 26 March 1796, TFP).
1. Olive Hudson had accompanied GT back to Biddeford from her home in Hartford, Connecticut after the close of the Sixth Congress’s first session on 14 May 1800, and evidently spent the summer and fall with the Thatchers (GT to SST, 4 Dec. 1799 [No. 184, above]).
2. The “little” evidently refers to their size: Catherine Searle (d. 1818) was nineteen at the time, and her younger sister Frances (d. 1851) was seventeen (Atkins, Atkins Family, chart between pp. 72-73).
3. The first House session to convene in the new Capitol met in a temporary space now (2018) subdivided and occupied by the Senate Republican Leader’s Suite (S-231 through S-234). The Senate then met on the ground floor, in the space now known as the Old Supreme Court Chamber, with public access to its gallery off a small lobby on the principal floor above. Across this lobby, on the west side of the north (Senate) wing, was the main entrance to the House chamber. (Its own public gallery—probably shallow overhangs carried on wall brackets—was accessed via a small staircase off what is today the Small Senate Rotunda.) The House chamber was the largest room in the unfinished Capitol, measuring eighty-six feet long, thirty-five feet wide, and thirty-six feet high, and heated by four fireplaces and a stove. In December 1801 the House relocated to a second temporary structure, called the “Oven” for aesthetic as well as ventilation reasons, while the then-new Library of Congress occupied the former House chamber (William C. Allen, History of the United States Capitol [Washington, D.C., 2001], pp. 39, 43-45).
1. Amariah Frost (1750-1819; Harvard, 1770) gave up thoughts of ministry to become a storekeeper in that part of his native Mendon that now lies within Milford, Massachusetts. In 1797 he traveled to Virginia and the new District of Columbia to scope business prospects. He opened a boardinghouse for congressmen, but returned to Mendon in 1802 and died in poverty (Harvard Graduates 17:384-86).
2. William Shepard (1737-1817) was a farmer of Westfield, Massachusetts, who rose to the rank of colonel in the state’s Continental Army line during the Revolutionary War. He sat in the state House of Representatives (1785-86), after which he achieved some notoriety for commanding the state’s troops at the successful if bloody defense of the Springfield Armory during “Shays’s Rebellion.” He sat on the Governor’s Council (1792-96) before serving as a Federalist Representative in Congress (1797-1803).
3. Nathan Read (1759-1849; Harvard, 1781) tutored at his alma mater until opening an apothecary shop in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1787, where he resided when he was elected to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Samuel Sewall. He took his seat the day GT penned this letter, and served as a Federalist until 1803.
4. “For myself I declare my home at Biddeford never had so many charmes as it appears to possess since my arrival & short stay in this place—I have not seen a single circumstance in any place or situation thro’ which I have passed but what tends to enhance all corresponding circumstances at home.” (GT to SST, 5 Dec. 1800, TFP).
5. Within weeks, Thatcher’s optimism proved false. “Mrs. Lee was well last evening—But having seen the federal City, she wishes herself at home as do most of the members” (GT to SST, 5 Dec. 1800, TFP).
6. GT probably did not see John Adams, or visit what would become known as the White House, until the full House attended on the president on 27 November to deliver their reply to Adams’s speech at the opening of the session a week earlier. In the words of GT’s colleague John Cotton Smith (Conn.), the House’s reply “was a handsome echo of the speech,” which explains why it was agreed to by such a small majority in the highly polarized House. (GT voted with the Federalist-dominated majority of 36 votes to 32.) GT left no account of this symbolically significant meeting at the White House, but one might rely on Smith’s continuing narrative to accurately reflect GT’s own experience—right down to the annoyance over transportation:
Usage required that the answer should be presented in a personal attendance of the whole House at the presidential mansion. But how could this be done? The only access was by a road long and circuitous, to avoid the swamp already mentioned, and the mud very deep. Fortunately, a recruit of hackney-coaches from Baltimore, by their seasonable arrival, enabled us to proceed in fine style, preceded by the sergeant-at-arms, with the mace, on horseback. We were received with great courtesy, the answer was well read by the speaker, the members all standing, and the reply of the president truly appropriate. After partaking of refreshments, the House returned to the Capitol in the same order. Thus ended the last official and personal interview between a president of the United States and either branch of the national Legislature (Andrews, John Cotton Smith, p. 208).
President Jefferson thought the executive’s addressing the legislature in person smacked too much of British monarchism and immediately discontinued the practice, which was not resumed until Woodrow Wilson’s first state of the union address in 1913.
1. John Templeman emigrated from his native England and settled in Boston, where he became a prosperous dentist and broker. His speculation in securities evidently involved state (specifically Rhode Island) debt certificates, on which subject he corresponded with GT (John Templeman to GT, 22 Nov. 1792, Chamberlain). In 1793 he joined the small but significant exodus of New England businessmen who moved to the new federal city. The Templemans owned “Prospect House,” at 3508 Prospect Street N.W. in Georgetown, now part of Washington, D.C.
2. “Those who consider themselves men of the world can find but few gratifications here, while all suffer many, & great inconveniences” (GT to SST, 5 Dec. 1800, TFP).
1. From a letter by George Pierson, dated 7 December 1800, GT would learn that Dr. (Aaron?) Porter removed “a large core out of the sore on his [Phillips’s] back, & thought it might now heal—poor child,” lamented the father, “what pain & misery he is doomed to suffer! when will it terminate! And how many more such trials have we to undergo! Alas how happy for us that all future events either joyous or grievous are hid from our eyes” (GT to SST, 20 Dec. 1800, TFP). Phillips may have been suffering from a type of skin lesion commonly associated with anthrax, contracted from exposure to bacterial spores from infected animals and animal products. Assuming GT’s descriptions are correct, this symptom and corrective procedure would seem to be unrelated to the typhus he is thought to have suffered at this same time (see No. 204, fn. 1, below).
1. “I have waited a great while expecting a Letter from you; but none comes—I must now write you to tell you how much I love you; and that a letter will give me the greatest pleasure—Your sister Sally has wrote me two or three; and I know you love me too well to let her gain all my affection—There are many things about the farm I want you to write me—Jotham can tell you all the answers to my questions [which follow]” (GT to George Thacher, Jr., 29 Dec. 1800, TFP).
1. James Sheafe (1755-1829; Harvard, 1774) was a prosperous merchant in his native Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which he represented in several terms as a state legislator before he was elected as a Federalist Representative to the Sixth Congress. He married his second wife, Sarah Meserve (d. 1863) on 13 July 1800 (John Wentworth, The Wentworth Genealogy [3 vols., Boston, 1878] 2:315).
2. Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, traveling the same route with a larger party just a few weeks later, found the roads “bad beyond the utmost stretch of a new england imagination” (Sally Foster Otis to Mary Foster Apthorp, 13 Jan. 1801, quoted in Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, p. 146).
1. By the end of this month, GT was writing that “The return of our dear Philips, with the good prospect of his full restoration to health, removes the last of the peculiar causes that have made this Session hitherto a most uncomfortable one” (GT to SST, 30 Jan. 1801, TFP). Family history records that Samuel Phillips Savage Thacher suffered a “severe attack of typhus fever” about this time, and remained an invalid until 1817 (Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, p. 410).
1. A letter from Samuel Phillips Savage Thacher, dated 5 February, informed GT that he had returned home to Biddeford sometime during the preceding month. “I am happy to find that your very long, and very painfull confinement has not had any bad effect either upon your mind or body so far as an opinion may be formed from the letter,” GT wrote in reply. “The reason you assigne for not having wrote more frequently since you have been at home I look upon as a pretty good one—but now the carresses of the children will begin to die away, and their playfullness become less diverting than when you first came home, I may look out for a letter by every post” (GT to Samuel Phillips Savage Thacher, 19 Feb. 1801, TFP).
2. It is tempting to think that GT refers here to Wieland; or The Transformation (1798) by Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810). The proto-Gothic psychological thriller matches the description of GT’s unnamed novel in several important respects: like Rousseau’s Eloisa, it follows an epistolary narrative structure; it describes a series of tragic marital and violent sexual relationships; and “strange events” such as spontaneous combustion, dreams, and ventriloquism drive the plot at critical junctures. Perhaps most compelling are the book’s meditations on two themes that particularly interested GT: the dangers of religious enthusiasms and the senses’ impact on human understanding and motivation.
1. Evidently the House was served that morning by the Senate chaplain, Thomas John Claggett (1743-1816; Princeton, 1764), the first Episcopal bishop consecrated on American soil and the first bishop of the Maryland diocese (1792). The House’s chaplain, appointed on 27 November 1800, was the Methodist minister Thomas Lyell, who began pastoring in Washington, D.C. the previous May (W.M. Ferguson, “Early Methodism in the District of Columbia,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 8[1905]:73).
2. Under the rules governing this process, agreed upon in the House on 9 February in anticipation of this very scenario, the proceedings were to be closed to the public, excepting only House officers and Senators. Each state delegation—voting as a unit, according to the majority of its members (under Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution)—would mark its choice on two identical ballots, to be collected by the sergeant at arms in two separate ballot boxes and verified against each other by separate slates of counters representing one for each state. Once balloting had begun, the House would not adjourn or consider other business until a choice had been made. Constitutionally, voting could not proceed without a quorum of two-thirds of the states being present, with the winner to be chosen by a majority of all the states.
3. “In this interval, the boarding-houses sent refreshments to the committee-rooms for the members” (Andrews, John Cotton Smith, p. 218).
4. Rep. John Cotton Smith (Conn.) thought it “a fact illustrative of the temper of the times” that when Rep. Joseph H. Nicholson (Md.) was confined to his bed with a fever, and “Federal gentlemen proposed to him, previous to the commencement of the ballot, that his colleague, Mr. [William] Craik, a Federalist, being himself in a delicate state of health, would cheerfully absent himself, or, as it was termed, ‘pair off’ with him {Nicholson} until the election should terminate,” to maintain the delegation’s even split, “this humane, not to say generous and gentlemanly proposition, was rejected, and the sick man, in spite of the entreaties of his friends, insisted on being, and actually was brought into the Capitol on his bed, and his vote received from him in that position” (Andrews, John Cotton Smith, pp. 218-19).
1. “I have wrote so many letters, during the last week, that I am almost weary” (GT to Samuel Phillips Savage Thacher, 19 Feb. 1801, TFP).
2. From the floor of the House at 10 p.m. on 11 February, GT dashed off to Isaac Parker the following brief note: “After seventeen trials no choice of President is effected—eight States for [Thomas] Jefferson six for [Aaron] Burr and two divided—the latter are Vermont & Maryland—The event very uncertain” (Gratz Collection: Old Congress, PHi).
3. New England Federalists particularly, to whose conversations GT may here be referring obliquely, were not unfriendly to such a doomsday scenario. With no clear path to victory for their preferred candidate Aaron Burr, some considered “running out the clock” and letting the session end without the House rendering a choice. Under the standing rule that no other business could be considered, no new provision could be made for preventing the interim succession to fall to the president pro tempore of the Senate which would be meeting in special session on 4 March—and would still be in Federalist hands (James E. Lewis, Jr., “ ‘What Is to Become of Our Government?’: The Revolutionary Potential of the Election of 1800” and Michael A. Bellesiles, “ ‘The Soil Will Be Soaked with Blood’: Taking the Revolution of 1800 Seriously,” in James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, eds., The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic [Charlottesville, Va., 2002], pp. 19-20, 66-67).
1. The [Washington, D.C.] National Intelligencer was the only newspaper this day to publish Thomas Jefferson’s inaugural address.
1. Thomas Dawes (1757-1825; Harvard, 1777), son of one of the leaders of the revolutionary movement in Boston, served as a Justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1792 until his resignation in 1802.
2. “I hear nothing from our Creditors, nor do I know what they intend to do with me—but I am determined on a line of conduct that shall be perfectly honest on my part, and honorable—no person shall ever say I have acted unfairly—property I never cared much about & all I have I will give up to them, & begin the world a new—We have got more than two thirds of the way through it, & perhaps a very few years more will bring both of us to the end of our Journey” (GT to SST, 17 June 1801, TFP).
3. Hallowell Academy, chartered in 1791, opened its doors to young men in 1795. By 1873 it had become the Hallowell Classical Institute, a school run by Congregationalists as a feeder for Bowdoin College.
4. Sarah Manning (1754-1834), daughter of a London merchant, married Benjamin Vaughan (1751-1835) in 1781. Vaughan, himself the eldest son of a wealthy London merchant and West Indies planter, was a banker and member of Parliament before he was forced to flee England in 1794 for espousing the radical political beliefs of his close friend and mentor, Dr. Joseph Priestley. Like him, in 1797 Vaughan settled in the American backcountry—on a large tract in Maine inherited from his mother’s side of the family, for whom it was named: Hallowell. There he engaged in land speculation, “amassed one of the largest private libraries in New England,” and maintained a correspondence with the intellectual elite of both America and England while his politics veered towards a more anglophile Federalism, which ultimately alienated him from his former mentor (User’s Guide, Benjamin Vaughan Papers, Mss. B.V46p, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; User’s Guide, Vaughan Family Papers, Ms. N-83, MHi; Graham, Revolutionary in Exile, pp. 130-31).
1. James Bowdoin III (1752-1811; Harvard, 1771) inherited his father’s vast estate to become the epitome of the gentleman scholar and philanthropist who dabbled in politics. In 1794 he bequeathed money and land for the college in Maine that would be named for his father. A benefactor in death no less than while alive, he left the school his large private library amounting to 2050 volumes and an additional 2017 pamphlets. GT was wrong about their provenance: virtually every volume had been collected by the son, not the father (Kenneth E. Carpenter, “James Bowdoin III as Library Builder,” in The Legacy of James Bowdoin III [Brunswick, 1994], pp. 85-126).
2. On 12 February, Appleton wrote GT: “Having lately had occasion to pay more particular attention to the books, composing the library of this college, I have been peculiarly struck with the number, rareness, & value of those which you had the goodness to present. And tho’ the donation was made before my acquaintance with the institution, I cannot deny myself the pleasure of expressing to you my estimation of its worth, & of our consequent obligation. It may give you pleasure to be informed, that our collection, previously to Mr. Bowdoin’s bequest, amounted to about eighteen hundred volumes, & that, at present, it falls little short of four thousand” ([Jesse Appleton] to GT, 12 Feb. 1812, TFP).
3. An introduction to the geography of the New Testament, comprising a summary chronological and geographical view of the events recorded respecting the ministry of Our Saviour; accompanied with maps, questions for examination, and an accented index: principally designed for the use of young persons, and for the Sunday-employment of schools (1st U.S. edition, Cambridge, Mass., 1811), by Lant Carpenter (1780-1840), a British educator and Unitarian minister and apologist.
4. It was perhaps to help correct this lacuna in his education that GT compiled his own chronology of Old Testament history, 1015-457 b.c. (n.d., TFP).
1. Barker’s letter was a brief spiritual autobiography and confession of faith, to follow-up on a longer manuscript he had handed to GT a week earlier, “containing an explanation of the doctrines of the Gospel, agreeably to my present views,” to assist GT in forming a “Judgement, respecting the aggravated crimes which I have committed,” of which he repented following a conversion experience in November 1809. A later letter blamed his spiritual error on his decision to be a physician (“as the profession tends to skepticism . . . and to interpret the Phenomena of nature independently of their Author”), his youthful devotion to Joseph Priestley, and the irreverent habits of youth (“making light of Christ and his doctrines, preferring idle stories and humerous anecdotes”) (Jeremiah Barker to GT, 30 Dec. 1812, 24 June 1814, TFP).
2. Barker at that time was almost certainly courting his first wife, GT’s cousin Abigail Gorham (1749-90) of Barnstable, Massachusetts; they married on 12 October 1775. Abigail’s grandmother Mary (Thacher) Gorham (1687-1778) was the younger half-sister of GT’s grandfather Peter Thacher (1665-1736). Sometime after 1804, Barker married Abigail’s sister in law, Temperance (Garret) Gorham (Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, pp. 214-16). Elsewhere, when Barker addressed GT as “My dear friend & kinsman” who “speak[s] feelingly of our common Ancestor Mr. Anthony Thacher,” he was alluding to a more direct, blood relation: Barker’s great-grandmother Bethia (Thacher) Howland and GT’s great-grandfather Col. John Thacher were brother and sister—and both children of Antony and Elizabeth Jones Thacher (Jeremiah Barker to GT, 28 Jan. 1816, TFP; Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, pp. 69, 216-17).
3. John Calvin (1509-64) was a lawyer-turned-pastor who, after fleeing religious persecution in his native France, turned his adopted city of Geneva into a model theocracy of reformed Protestantism. His Institutes of the Christian Life (1536) became the movement’s catechism. Although “Calvinism” came to represent an accretion of beliefs not always creditable to Calvin himself, the tenet most closely identified with him is a total depravity so pervasive that man is not even capable of embracing the faith necessary for salvation, unless God predestines him for it.
4. Jonathan Edwards’s A careful and strict enquiry into The modern and prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will, Which is supposed to be essential to Moral Agency, Vertue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame (Boston, 1754).
5. Barker’s recollection apparently induced GT to revisit this work, since TBW noted a short time later, “You have been reading the Fable of the Bees” (TBW to GT, 7 May 1814, Wait Letters). The “Fable” was a poem (1705) later published as a book with prose commentary (1714) by Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), a Dutch physician who settled in England and became a social critic and political economist. Mandeville used allegory to satirize the hypocrisy of public morality by demonstrating how public benefits (such as employment) derived from private vices (such as conspicuous consumption).
6. Thomas Chubb (1679-1747) was an English lay theologian whose Deist views laid out in his Collection of Tracts on Various Subjects (London, 1730) were the subject of extensive criticism by Jonathan Edwards, Sr.’s Careful and strict enquiry into . . . Freedom of Will. GT owned multiple copies and editions of Chubb’s Tracts. They and several other of this prolific theologian’s works—more perhaps than by any other single author—were among GT’s bequest to Bowdoin College in 1824, and include: An examination of Mr. Barclay’s principles (1726); The previous question with regard to religion (1728 edition), and Supplement (1726); A vindication of God’s moral character (1726), and Supplement (1727); An enquiry concerning the grounds and reasons . . . on which two of our anniversary solemnities are founded (1732); Four tracts (1734); Some observations offered to publick consideration (1735); The equity and reasonableness of the divine conduct (1737); The True Gospel of Jesus Christ, Asserted (two editions, 1738 and 1741); The true gospel of Jesus Christ vindicated (1739); An enquiry into the ground and foundation of religion (1740); A discourse on miracles (1741); An enquiry concerning redemption (1743); The ground and formation of morality considered (1745); A discourse concerning reason (1746); Four dissertations (1746); Posthumous works (London, 1748) (catalog, MeB)
7. John Murray (1741-1815) emigrated from England and eventually settled in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1774, where he became the unordained minister of the first major organized gathering of Universalists in America. In 1793 he accepted the pastorship of Boston’s First Universalist Church, where he remained until overcome by illness in 1809. Although the belief in universal salvation through Jesus’ atonement was fundamentally at odds with the Unitarian belief that no atonement was even necessary, the two movements attracted some of the same early adherents. One of Murray’s first and most famous congregants was his wife, the playwright and feminist essayist, Judith Sargent Murray.
8. Lydia Gorham (1741-18[13?]), the older sister of Barker’s first wife Abigail, married Capt. Edward Bacon of Barnstable, Massachusetts, in 1764 (Totten, Thacher-Thatcher, p. 214).
9. John Newton (1725-1807) was a sailor in the British slave trade when he experienced a profound conversion experience and embraced evangelical Christianity. In 1764 he became an Anglican clergyman with a special outreach to religious nonconformists and dissenters. In addition to hymns—including his most famous composition, “Amazing Grace”—Newton authored several religious tracts in a popular series begun by his fellow evangelical political and social reformer, Hannah More. A bereaved Newton published his Letters to a Wife (London, 1793) shortly after the death of his wife of forty years, Mary Catlett.
10. Hannah More (1745-1833) was a London playwright and poet before retiring to rural Somerset, England in 1785 and devoting her literary skills exclusively to evangelical Christianity’s moral, social, and political reform movement—from its radical demands for the abolition of the slave trade, to its conservative glorification of the gentry and criticism of women’s rights.
11. William Wilberforce (1753-1833) was a longtime member of Parliament (1780-1825), where he spearheaded many political and social reforms following his evangelical conversion around 1785. He remains best known for his decades-long antislavery campaign, but his most famous writing on the role of religion and morality in public life was his Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System . . . Contrasted with Real Christianity (1797).
12. Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808), a Cambridge-educated English theologian, resigned his vicarage to found the first avowedly Unitarian congregation, London’s Essex Street Chapel, in 1774. Lindsey’s many writings to be found in Thacher’s Tracts (vols. 13, 116-17) include: The catechist: or, an inquiry into the doctrine of the scriptures, concerning the only true God, and object of religious worship (1781; London, 1792), as well as excerpts from Lindsey’s Memoirs compiled by Thomas Belsham and reprinted in American Unitarianism, or, A Brief history of “The progress and present state of the Unitarian Churches in America” (5th edition, Boston, 1815). Among the books GT donated to Bowdoin, titles by Lindsey include: Conversations on the divine government (London, 1802); Conversations on Christian idolatry in the year 1791 (London, 1792); An historical view of the state of the Unitarian doctrine and worship (London, 1783); The apology of Theophilus Lindsey, M.A. on resigning the vicarage of Catterick, Yorkshire (London, 1774); and A sequel to The apology on resigning the vicarage (London, 1776) (catalog, MeB).
13. Thomas Belsham (1750-1829) was the British Unitarian minister and theologian who took over Joseph Priestley’s Hackney pulpit (1794-1805). Several of Belsham’s published writings exist among Thacher’s Tracts (v. 143-44): The importance of right sentiments concerning the person of Christ: a sermon preached at Essex Chapel, April 10, 1806 (London, 1806); The claims of Dr. Priestley in the controversy with Bishop Horsley re-stated and vindicated (London, 1814); and A plea for infant baptism (London, 1817). Among the titles GT donated to Bowdoin is Belsham’s Summary view of the evidence and practical importance of the Christian revelation (London, 1807) (catalog, MeB). Priestley wrote GT on 14 February 1799, “I am glad that you like Mr. Belsham’s pamphlet so well. You may keep it, as I can get another copy” (“Priestley Letters,” p. 27). The timing suggests Priestley had sent GT Belsham’s early defense of Unitarian principles, A review of Mr. Wilberforce’s treatise, entitled A practical view of the prevailing religious system of professed Christians (London, 1798).
14. The Theological Repository; consisting of original essays, hints, queries, &c calculated to promote Religious Knowledge, edited by Joseph Priestley, was published annually in two series (1769-71 and 1784-88), in London. Although open to all contributors, it became a mouthpiece for dissenting, especially anti-Trinitarian viewpoints. Priestley’s works in GT’s 1824 bequest to Bowdoin include: A course of lectures on oratory and criticism (London, 1777); A letter to Rev. Mr. John Palmer, in defense of the illustrations of philosophical necessity (London, 1779); and A second letter to the Rev. Mr. John Palmer (London, 1780) (catalog, MeB). Included in the list of books GT evidently compiled as a catalog of his personal library, is Priestley’s Discourses relating to the Evidence of Revealed Religion (Booklist, n.d., TFP).
15. The Juggernaut was an idol of the Hindu deity Krishna, carried on a large cart or chariot in an annual procession in eastern India. European audiences as early as the 14th century described devotees throwing themselves under its wheels to be crushed as a sacrifice.
16. John 3:1-21.
17. Christ’s own expressed sense of his divinity obviously weighed heavily in any argument over the scriptural sources of Trinitarianism, to which Barker relentlessly referred. In an “Apology” prefacing a later letter to GT, Barker wrote: “Your brother Fisher Ames says, he read the N. Testament once on purpose to see how many declarations Christ made respecting himself. I wish you would do the same. I am engaged in the same pursuit And as all allow that he was a person of strict truth & veracity, we must believe in the truth of these declarations” (Jeremiah Barker to GT, 28 Jan. 1816, TFP).
1. George Bethune English (1787-1828; Harvard, 1807) was preparing for a career in the law when his religious skepticism led him to author the highly controversial Grounds of Christianity Examined (Boston, 1813). He went on to a colorful career as a U.S. Marines officer in Egypt where he converted to Islam and explored the Nile River as a mercenary soldier.
2. Two groups of Congregational and Baptist missionaries sailed from Salem, Massachusetts and Philadelphia in February 1812 to establish missions in the Burman Empire. Their safe arrival in Calcutta (present day Kolkata) four months later was reported in Boston’s Pilot on New Year’s Day 1813, along with news that the British authorities there had requested their removal. After brief detours to the Isle de France (Mauritius) and Madras (Chennai, India), some core members of the group finally reached Rangoon (present day Yangon, Myanmar) in mid-1813 (John Choules and Thomas Smith, The Origin and History of Missions [2 vols., Boston, 1832] 1:402-08).
3. English’s Letter to the Reverend Mr. Cary: containing Remarks upon his Review of The grounds of Christianity examined and his Letter respectfully addressed to the Reverend Mr. Channing, relative to his two Sermons on Infidelity, both published in Boston in 1813, are bound together in Thacher’s Tracts (v. 118). Samuel Cary (1785-1815; Harvard, 1804) served in ministry with James Freeman at King’s Chapel in Boston from 1809 until his death. William Ellery Channing (1780-1842; Harvard, 1798) was minister of Boston’s Federal Street Church from 1803 until his death. TBW was referring to Channing’s published Sermons on Infidelity (Boston, 1813) when he wrote GT, “I am happy to hear you admire Mr. Channing’s Discourses. Among our great and good Divines he is, the perhaps, the greatest and best.” Cary’s review of English’s Grounds of Christianity, on the other hand, was “wrote in too great haste. Mr. English’s Book requires more time, and possibly more learning and more thought than Mr. Cary has given it—and more talents than Mr. C. could give it” (TBW to GT, 22 Dec. 1813, Wait Letters).
4. Shortly before penning this letter, GT received one from TBW expressing the same opinion: “I very much dislike the Spirit which seems [to] influence Mr. English. He has more learning than Tom Paine, and less wit than Voltaire; but as much gall as either of them. The work probably would once have pleased me; but I abhor it now” (TBW to GT, 22 Dec. 1813, Wait Letters).
5. Celsus was a pagan Greek philosopher of the Roman period (active, ca. 180 a.d.) whose writings against Christianity are known principally through the Early Church apologists who tried to refute him.
6. Soame Jenyns (1704-87), British writer, politician, and friend of America’s revolutionary movement, wrote the deistic Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil. In Six Letters (1756) but returned to religious orthodoxy by the time of his View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion (1776).
7. Archibald Maclaine (1722-1804), the son of a dissenting minister, studied at Glasgow and pastored a Presbyterian congregation at The Hague, 1745-94. His English translation of the Institutes of Ecclesiastical History by Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1693-1755) was published in 1764.
8. Michael Servetus (ca. 1510-1553) was a true Renaissance polymath whose writings embraced such heresies as anti-Trinitarianism and Anabaptism (opposition to infant baptism). Excommunicated and forced to flee France, Servetus was detained in Geneva en route to Italy and convicted again—in large part, on the testimony of private letters he had written to John Calvin on various theological subjects. His execution solidified Calvin’s standing as the theocratic leader of Geneva, the undisputed center of reformed Protestantism. An impartial history of Michael Servetus burnt alive at Geneva for heresie (London, 1724), attributed to Sir Benjamin Hodges, appears on a list GT evidently compiled as a partial catalog of his personal library and can be found among the books he donated to Bowdoin in 1824 (Booklist, n.d., TFP; catalog, MeB).
9. British philosopher Samuel Clark (1675-1729) authored Demonstration of the Attributes and Being of God . . . Wherein the Notion of Liberty is Stated, and the Possibility and Certainty of it Proved, in Opposition to Necessity and Fate (London, 1705).
10. John Foster (1697-1753) was a British dissenting minister and prominent preacher whose Discourses on all the Principal Branches of Natural Religion was published in two volumes (London, 1749 and 1752).
11. In this punishingly terse locution, GT refers to one of the more dramatic alterations in Europe’s political landscape under Napoleon’s hegemonic rule. Surrounded by French satellite states and occupied by the forces of France itself beginning in 1808, Rome served as a virtual prison for the reigning pontiff Pius VII (1742-1823) until he was captured by French soldiers in 1809 and exiled to Paris. Upon Napoleon’s return from Russia in 1813, he compelled Pius to sign a concordat transferring the Holy See to France and stripping the Papacy of all remaining temporal jurisdiction and territories. Facing his own abdication, Napoleon did not release Pius until January 1814. The Pope’s temporal powers, along with whatever spiritual powers the Congress of Vienna had the authority to confer, were only restored in 1815.
12. The Thirty Nine Articles of 1563 was an Anglican statement of beliefs navigating the Church’s “middle way” between orthodox Catholicism and radical Puritanism; the Westminster Assembly’s catechism represented Puritan dissenters’ efforts to reform the Church of England in 1646-47; and from its beginnings in England in the mid-1600s, the Society of Friends (Quakers) relied an unmediated experience of God’s inner presence for spiritual direction.
13. William Warburton (1698-1779) was a prolific Anglican theologian who served as bishop of Gloucester from 1760 until his death. Thatcher refers to his magnum opus, The Divine Legation of Moses, demonstrated on the principles of a religious deist, from the omission of the doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments in the Jewish dispensation, which appeared in seven books published between 1737 and 1788. Warburton’s Julian, or, A discourse concerning the earthquake and fiery eruption: which defeated that Emperor’s attempt to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem (London, 1751) appears on GT’s list compiled as a partial catalog of his personal library and, with John Tillard’s Reply (London, 1741) to the second volume of Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses, can be found among the books GT bequeathed to Bowdoin in 1824 (Booklist, n.d., TFP; catalog, MeB).
1. Rep. Morris S. Miller (N.Y.) and Rep. Daniel Webster (Mass.) delivered two lengthy and widely-reported speeches on the floor of the House on 14 January 1814, opposing a bill “making further provision for filling the ranks of the regular army, encouraging enlistments, and authorizing the enlistments for longer periods of men whose terms of service are about to expire” (Annals of Congress, 13th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 940-51, 953-79). Webster’s “elaborate and ingenious” speech was aimed principally against the conquest of Canada, while Morris’s speech, “characterized by much warmth and perhaps a little violence,” attacked “the total incompetency of the administration to carry on the war” ([Washington, D.C.] Daily National Intelligencer, 17 Jan. 1814; [Boston] Repertory, 20 Jan. 1814). The Bill for the Encouragement of Enlistments passed later that day. Both Miller’s and Webster’s speeches were later printed in pamphlet form, although King may have mailed GT the complete version of Miller’s speech that first appeared in the (Georgetown, D.C.) Federal Republican, 1 Feb. 1814. Webster’s published Speech . . . on the 14th of January, 1814 (Alexandria, Va., 1814) is among Thacher’s Tracts (v. 95-96).
2. King had vainly opposed Congress’s passage of the Embargo Act of 17 December 1813. On 14 January 1814—the same day that Webster and Miller would also speak against the Madison Administration’s war measures—King rose again to move three resolutions repealing so much of the Embargo Act as suspended or interdicted the coasting trade within and among states (Annals of Congress, 13th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 936-39). The proposed resolutions were negatived.
3. The President’s message transmitting Secretary of War John Armstrong’s report, requested by a House resolution of 31 December 1813, was presented, read, and ordered tabled on 2 February 1814. Thatcher’s copy of the printed message and accompanying report is among Thacher’s Tracts (v. 110-11).
4. The origin of this expression is unknown, although the sarcastic use of what was initially intended as a Jeffersonian euphemism for the unpopular Embargo of 1807 was sufficiently widespread a year later when a thirteen year old budding poet named William Cullen Bryant used it in his first published poem, “The Embargo”:
“His grand ‘restrictive energies’ employs, / And wisely regulating trade—destroys.”
John Randolph of Roanoke made more famous use of the expression in his speech against the Militia Bill in the U.S. House of Representatives on 10 December 1811.
5. The Boston Port Bill, one of the punitive “Intolerable Acts” submitted to Parliament by Frederick North (1732-92; prime minister, 1770-82) on 18 March 1774 and passed on 31 March, closed the port of Boston to trade effective on 1 June, pending restitution of damages incurred by the “Boston Tea Party” of 16 December 1773. In remarks prefatory to submitting his proposed resolutions to Congress on 14 January 1814, King drew a comparison between Madison’s Embargo of 1813 and the Boston Port Bill of 1774, which had long since become a by-word for coercive economic measures (Annals of Congress, 13th Cong., 2nd sess., p. 938).
6. As a student at Harvard (Class of 1776) residing in Cambridge since 1772, GT would have been an eyewitness to the events in and around Boston leading up to the battles of Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775.
1. The 28-page Address (Boston, 1816), delivered before the Society’s anniversary meeting on 31 May 1816, is in Thacher’s Tracts (v. 156-57). It is one of seven publications of Appleton’s sermons, discourses, and addresses in the collection.
2. These were published in the Boston Recorder of 28 August 1816. “Mr. Tappan” may refer to Benjamin Tappan (1788-1863; Harvard, 1805), pastor of Augusta’s South Parish (Congregational), 1811-49, and overseer of Bowdoin College from 1814 until his death.
3. John Abbot (1759-1843; Harvard, 1784) was professor of ancient languages and classical literature from 1802 until his resignation in 1816, but continued as college librarian until 1824 and treasurer until 1829.
4. Amos Jones Cook (1778-1836; Dartmouth, 1802) succeeded a young Daniel Webster as preceptor of Fryeburg Academy in 1802, and served until a few years before his death (J. Jefferson Looney et al., eds., Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series [13 vols. to date, Princeton, N.J., 2004-present] 9:267).
1. William Ellery Channing delivered his famous “Baltimore Sermon” on 5 May 1819, at that city’s First Independent Church (now Unitarian-Universalist), which had been dedicated six months earlier. Jared Sparks (1789-1866), its first minister, graduated from Harvard in 1815 and was tutoring there and editing the influential North American Review when called to the Baltimore pulpit. After resigning due to ill health in 1823, he dedicated himself to literary pursuits, most notably as one of the nation’s first documentary historians. Channing’s speech became the Unitarian manifesto, boldly outlining the movement’s differences from the Standing Order churches. GT’s own second edition copy of the sermon (Boston, 1819), presented “with the respects of S[amuel]. Greele,” can be found among Thacher’s Tracts (v. 133-34). Four passages bear marginal markings and underlining (probably GT’s) where Channing challenges a triune interpretation of Scripture, denies the theological necessity of Jesus’ atonement, and declares that Jesus’ mediation with man consists in rendering assistance to those “who labour for progress in moral excellence” (pp. 9, 18, 19).
2. Metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls through a succession of bodies after death, was one of the religious tenets propounded by Pythagoras of Samos (ca. 570-495 b.c.), a Greek philosopher better known for his contributions to mathematics.
3. Jenkin Jones (1703-45) began preaching Unitarian principles in Wales in 1726 and published his True Account of Original Sin three years later. His nephew and namesake Jenkin Lloyd Jones, patriarch of an American Unitarian dynasty that included his own nephew Frank Lloyd Wright, credited Jones’s “Garden-planted Unitarianism” with the founding of six churches in Wales by the time of his death (Jenkin Lloyd Jones, “Renaissance of the Western Unitarian Conference,” Unity, v.49, n.12[22 May 1902]:187).
4. Owing to its strategic importance guarding the northern flank of the Straights bearing its name, Gibraltar has been subject to repeated sieges throughout history. At its height, “The Great Siege” (June 1779 to February 1783) brought together a combined allied force of 65,000 French and Spanish sailors, marines, and soldiers in an unsuccessful campaign to oust the fortified British garrison commanded by Governor George Augustus Eliot (1717-90), later Baron Heathfield of Gibraltar.
5. Samuel Worcester (1770-1821), a Congregationalist pastor of Salem, Massachusetts from 1803 until his death, was a spokesman for the Standing Order against the Unitarian schism. He is best known for a pamphlet war ignited by an anonymous review in Boston’s monthly Panoplist that was critical of American Unitarianism (Boston, 1815), a compilation of extracts from Thomas Belsham’s Memoirs of the life of Reverend Theophilus Lindsey. When William Ellery Channing published his objections to certain characterizations in the review, Worcester responded with a rebuttal Letter, to which Channing replied in kind, and so on through a series of six dueling pamphlets. They are bound together among the Thacher’s Tracts (v. 116-17). One of them may be the pamphlet by Worcester that TBW sent to GT with the note, “I have not read it; but it is no doubt written, like his first, with the rancor and craft of a Jesuit” (TBW to GT, 31 Aug. 1815, Wait Letters).
6. The Minister’s hope; and its influence on his preaching and character (Boston, 1819) was a sermon given in Lyme, Connecticut, at the ordination of fellow Baptist minister George W. Appleton, by William Collier (1771-1843), minister of the First Baptist Church of Charlestown, Massachusetts (1807-23). GT’s copy exists among Thacher’s Tracts (vol. 133-34), bound with Channing’s famous “Baltimore Sermon” and four publications written contra Channing, and several other trinitarian tracts.
7. Writing as “Nazarenus” less than a year later, GT elaborated on his opinion that Baptist preachers “appeared to be less informed, and some of them seemed to boast, as I thought, of their ignorance of what they called human learning, because in that they resembled the apostles” ([Portland] Christian Intelligencer, v. 2, 2[Dec. 1822]:39).
8. John Locke (1632-1704) was an English philosopher whose social contract theory heavily influenced the American revolutionary movement. His “empiricist epistemology” was an important step towards the theory of association embraced by GT. The idea that knowledge derives from the experiences impressed upon the mind’s “tabula rasa” (blank slate) appears in Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1689) and Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693).
9. Volume 3 (1815) was perhaps the most influential issue of the short-lived First Series of the Boston monthly Christian Disciple and Theological Review (1813-1818), established by the Unitarian luminaries William Ellery Channing, Noah Worcester, and Henry Ware. A Second Series of eleven volumes extended the run from 1819 to 1823. “You say you read no other Periodical Publication” (TBW to GT, 22 Jan. 1820, Wait Letters).
10. Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) was a theologian, mathematician, and evangelical minister of the Church of Scotland in Glasgow (1815-23). A review of his Sermons preached in the Tron Church, Glasgow (1st U.S. edition, New York, 1819) was published in the Christian Disciple and Theological Review, 2nd Series, 1(1819):212-27.
11. A reformulation of Jonathan Edwards’s Calvinist theology, also known as the “New Divinity,” identified with one of its principle proponents, the Yale-educated Congregational minister Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803).
12. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, considered the masterpiece of Spain’s Golden Age of literature, was written by Miguel de Cervantes (1547?-1616) between 1605 and 1615, and was available in its entirety in English translation by 1620.
13. One Thousand and One Nights, known in its first English language edition (1706) as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, is a collection of Arabic folk tales that began to be compiled for publication in the 9th century and first appeared under its present title in the 12th century.
14. An epic poem that portrays the civil war between Heaven and Hell through a retelling of the rebellion of Lucifer and the expulsion of Adam and Eve, Paradise Lost was written by the English poet John Milton (1608-74) and first appeared in its present form in 1674.
15. Edward Herbert, First Baron Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648) was an Oxford-educated mercenary soldier, diplomat, and poet whose claim to preeminence among English Deists rests on his treatise On Truth, as it is Distinguished from Revelation, the Probable, the Possible, and the False (Paris, 1624).
16. Samuel Greele married Lydia Maria Sewall (1791-1822) in 1812. Her only sisters were Anne Henchman Sewall (1793-1848) and Elizabeth Quincy Sewall (1798-1848); the former never married, and the latter did not marry until 1825. All three were daughters of Samuel Sewall (b. 1757), GT’s classmate in Harvard’s Class of 1776, and his colleague in Congress (1797-1800) and on Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court from 1801. Sewall’s death on 8 June 1814, soon after being elevated to Chief Justice, prompted GT to deliver a moving eulogy two days later from the bench at the court’s opening in Castine, Maine. He sent a copy to Greele, Sewall’s son in law, who replied “I have seen no account, that so fully exhibits his [Sewall’s] character & services,” and asked GT’s permission to reprint the “interesting extract.” The eulogy was duly printed in the [Mass.] Salem Gazette, 26 July 1814 (Samuel Greele to GT, 4 July 1814, GTP-Salem; www.sewellgenealogy.com/p488.htm#i129 [accessed Nov. 2016]).
1. Maine’s Constitutional Convention stood adjourned between 29 October 1819 and 5 January 1820 while the proposed constitution was submitted for the people’s approval in town meetings scheduled for 6 December 1819.
2. The House agreed to a Maine statehood bill on 3 January, despite efforts to use its passage as leverage to enable Missouri also to form a state government without the restrictions on slavery attached to the House’s Missouri statehood bill, which had passed (over Holmes’s nay vote) the previous March. By 11 January, Portland’s Eastern Argus was predicting that the effort would be renewed when the Maine statehood bill went to the Senate. “By letters from Washington,” the [Hallowell, Me.] American Advocate was able to report four days later that the Senate Judiciary Committee had accomplished just that, by an amendment passed on 6 January.
3. Resist from the start.
4. In a letter of 22 Jan. 1820, TBW encouraged GT to read the speeches of N.Y.’s Sen. Rufus King (CC, 19, 22 Jan.) “on the Missouri Question—respecting which I certainly feel more interest than any Subject since the American Revolution” (Wait Letters). He continued:
Judge [Isaac] Parker told me yesterday that he understood there had been a meeting of the Members of the Gen. Court from Maine—and that they had Voted Unanimously, That if the erection of Maine into an independent State was made to depend on the admission of Missouri as a Slave-State, they would prefer remaining in their present situation—forever! God grant that this may be true—Should it prove so—I shall always boast of having once been an inhabitant of—SODOM—for so I think I called it in my last letter.
This caucus of Maine state legislators concluded by claiming that their instructions “represent truely the opinions of an immense majority of the people of our District as well as the best interests of the country” (quoted in Banks, Maine Becomes a State, p. 191).
1. “The thought of removing with the family is so much like death I hate to dwell long upon it—No body thinks of death with pleasure unless they are very unhappy here—or are positively sure of much greater enjoyment in the unseen world to which they suppose they are about to enter—Now as I am satisfied with the good things God has given me here, I am in no haste to go away & leave them for what I can find better in another world—and so I am content with my station in the State of Maine, & not over anxious to remove to the State of Massachusetts—Yet as we cannot unite this world & the next, so I think I shall have to declare my election to remove, or to resigne—either of which has its inconveniencies” (GT to SST, 4 April [1820], TFP).
1. Massachusetts’s first convention to revise its constitution of 1780 met in the House chamber (present day Senate chamber) in the statehouse in Boston from 15 November 1820 to 9 January 1821. GT was friends or acquaintances with several of the delegates, including John Adams. While en route to a meeting of the Supreme Judicial Court in Plymouth shortly before the Convention convened, GT and some other Justices passed through Quincy and “called a few moments to see the old President—Miss [Louisa Catherine] Smith said they had made great dependence on our return visit & was disappointed at our not calling. I apologised as well as I could on the ground that we wanted time.” GT noted Adams’s election as a delegate from Quincy, “& I can see that as old as he is he feels pleased with the appointment, & is interested to prepare once more [to] assist his Country in amending the Constitution he had a great hand in forming [in 1779-80].” Adams was unanimously elected presiding officer of the convention, but declined on the grounds that “my forces are too far exhausted to perform the arduous duties” (GT to SST, 7 Nov. 1820, TFP; Journal of Debates and Proceedings . . . [Boston, 1821], pp. 8, 10).
It was not GT’s only contact with the ex-president. Contemplating a visit in 1809, TBW wrote GT that their homage “will do good. That good old Patriot must not go down in sorrow to the grave. For myself, I would do any thing, but turn Jacobin, to strew his path with flowers—and so would you.” TBW would have occasion to call upon their prior acquaintance, when he asked Adams for a recommendation for a printing contract in the gift of his son, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. The patriarch forwarded it with the note: “Of Mr Wait, I know little, but that he was once introduced to me by General [Henry] Knox, twice by Judge Thatcher, and Last Week by Mr Shaw, all in this House. He has always been represented And Appeared to be a modest discreet and respectable Citizen” (TBW to GT, 30 April 1809, Wait Letters; John Adams to John Quincy Adams, 13 January 1818, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 29 June 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-3433 [both accessed Sept. 2017]).)
2. Samuel S. Wilde (1771-1855; Dartmouth, 1789) was admitted to the bar in 1792 and briefly practiced in his native Taunton, Massachusetts and various towns in Maine before settling in Hallowell by 1799. He was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court in 1815 and, like GT, moved to Newburyport, Mass. in order to retain his seat after Maine’s statehood. “Frank, direct, calmly courageous, and of unalloyed simplicity,” Wilde remained on the bench until 1850. In 1792 he married Eunice Cobb (1774-1826), of Taunton (Willis, Lawyer of Maine, pp. 173-78; Joseph W. Porter, “Memoir of General David Cobb and Family,” Bangor Historical Magazine, v. 4, nos. 1-2[July-Aug. 1888]:7-8).
3. “I propose to spend a fortnight at least in Boston while the Session of the Convention [meets], & I think you will enjoy yourself in Boston & Cambridge during the same time” (GT to SST, 7 Nov. 1820, TFP).
4. Probably Abraham Bigelow (1762-1832; Harvard, 1782), who was younger brother of GT’s deceased brother in law Amos Bigelow, and a lawyer in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Henry Bond, Genealogies of the Families and Descendants of the Early Settlers of Watertown, Massachusetts [Boston, 1860], p. 35).
5. The Thachers’ daughter Lucy Savage Thatcher Sawyer died on 30 August 1820.
6. Samuel Hartley (1770-1857) was a sea captain of Saco (Biddeford Area Biographical Resource, McArthur Public Library, Biddeford).
7. Josiah Calef (1782-1863) was a Boston merchant and shopkeeper prior to resettling in Saco in 1811, where he co-founded the Saco Iron Works (Clayton, York County, p. 178).
8. Catherine Lucy Sawyer (b. July 1820), the second child of the Thatchers’ recently deceased daughter Lucy Savage Thatcher Sawyer, died on 16 January 1821.
9. Daniel and Louisa Freeman Davis had one son and three daughters: the first-born Louisa; Helen (b. 1798); and Margaret (b. 1803) (Willis, Lawyers of Maine, p. 111-16; Frederick Freeman, Freeman Genealogy in Three Parts [Boston, 1875], p. 270).
1. In person, by the individual himself (rather than through an attorney); required of certain types of pleading before a court.
2. TBW and his wife Elizabeth Smith (1760-1845) had seven children who grew to adulthood, including three daughters: Mary (1790-1873), Rebecca (1793-1832), and Louisa (1796-1872) (https://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/thomas-baker-waite_126904523 [accessed Jan. 2018]).
3. GT had proposed that he and TBW attend Plymouth’s Forefathers’ Day commemoration on 22 December 1820, the bicentennial of the Pilgrims’ landing, as guests of his cousin, Dr. James Thacher (GT to SST, 7 Nov. 1820, TFP). SST evidently did not make the trip from Newburyport.
4. 1 Kings 10:1-7.
5. 2 Corinthians 12.
6. Forefathers’ Day orations took place throughout the country—from Maine to South Carolina—in that special bicentennial year of 1820. On 22 December, rising political star Daniel Webster delivered the most symbolically significant of these orations, at Plymouth, which had come to provide “a major platform to advocate New England-centered formulations of American history and cultural memory.” The Harvard philologist George Ticknor echoed GT’s verdict of the “great levee” and the preceding oration (“I was never so excited by public speaking before in my life. Three or four times I thought my temples would burst with the gush of blood”)—although one historian obviously errs in stating that Ticknor’s is “the only firsthand, contemporary account we have of the effect of Webster’s speech.” The oration, delivered in Plymouth’s First Parish Church (the “Temple” mentioned here) was followed by a dinner and ball held in the Old County Courthouse (Udo J. Hebel, “Forefathers’ Day Orations, 1769-1865: An Introduction and Checklist,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, v. 110, pt. 2[Oct. 2000]:379-80, 392-95; John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998], pp. 65-66; William T. Davis, Plymouth Memories of an Octogenarian [Plymouth, Mass., 1906], pp. 359-60).
7. Rev. Abiel Holmes (1763-1837; Yale, 1783), father of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., was minister of Cambridge, Massachusetts’s First Church (Congregational) from 1792 to 1832. His only two living daughters at this time were Mary Jackson (1802-25) and Ann Susan Holmes (1804-77).
8. Jeremiah Smith (1759-1842; Harvard, 1780) studied law a few years after GT and under the same mentor, Shearjashub Bourne of Barnstable, Cape Cod, before commencing practice in Peterborough, N.H. in 1786. He was a state legislator before serving as a Federalist Representative to Congress (1791-97). During the first session of the Fourth Congress, he and GT took accommodations at the same boardinghouse, 77 N. 3rd St. in Philadelphia (Congressional Directories, pp. 22-24). Smith resigned from Congress, moved to Exeter, and served as federal attorney for New Hampshire until 1800, when he began his judicial career as state and federal judge, including chief justice of the state supreme court (1801-09, 1813-16), interrupted by a single term as governor (1809-10). His only living daughter at the time was Ariana Smith (1797-1829).
9. Dr. James Thacher (1754-1844) of Plymouth, Massachusetts, was GT’s second cousin, their grandfathers being brothers (John and Peter, respectively). After distinguished service as a surgeon in the Continental Army, he established a practice in Plymouth where, besides writing extensively on medical matters, he authored the first town history and compiled the first published genealogy of the Thatcher/Thacher family in 1834. He served as longtime librarian for the Pilgrim Society, founded in 1820, which sponsored that bicentennial year’s Forefathers’ Day event. (The New-England Magazine, 7[July-Dec. 1834]:1-16; Finding Aid, James Thacher Correspondence, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Center for the History of Medicine, Harvard University, Boston).
1. Either Thomas Wells’s bookstore on Hanover Street, or Wells (William) and Lilly (Robert), booksellers on Court Street (The Boston Directory [1823], p. 238).
2. When the British Augustan Age’s preeminent “man of letters” Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717-97), playfully wrote a spurious letter in the name of Prussia’s King Frederick the Great to Rousseau in 1766, it touched off an epistolary firestorm in the firmament of the European Enlightenment, eventually implicating David Hume, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell, and others. In his own defense, Hume wrote A concise and genuine Account of the Dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau: with the Letters that passed between them during their Controversy (1766), printed in octavo as well as serially in The Gentleman’s and London Magazine (Nov. and Dec. 1766), pp. 704-13, 736-58. Walpole’s own Narrative of what passed relative to the Quarrel of Mr. David Hume and Jean Jacques Rousseau did not appear until 1798, as part of his posthumous Works as well as a separate, single-volume edition.
Rousseau’s Christian identity was a matter of perennial interest: “Why do the religious world class Rousseau with Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, &c.? Nothing can be more unjust. Rousseau was a almost a Christian. . . . One half of the rational Christians of the present day, had they lived in the midst of Popish Superstition with Rousseau, would have believed less than he did. . . . He not only approved, but ably defended practical religion” (TBW to GT, 6 Feb. [continuation of 4 Feb.] 1814, Wait Letters).
3. Various English translations of non-canonical Apocrypha dating to the early 18th century were collected into a single volume, The apocryphal New Testament, being all the gospels, epistles, and other pieces now extant (London, 1820) by the London satirist and bookseller William Hone (1780-1842).
4. An Essay on the Nature, Design, and Origin, of Sacrifices (London, 1748), by Arthur Ashley Sykes (1684-1756), a Cambridge-educated Anglican clergyman who wrote against Trinitarianism and supernaturalism.
5. John 18:10.
6. Thoughts on Political Economy (Baltimore, 1820), by the Baltimore lawyer Daniel Raymond (1786-1849), was considered by John Adams among many other contemporaries (mostly northerners) as America’s preeminent contribution to economic theory (Charles P. Neill, “Daniel Raymond,” Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 15th Ser., 6[June 1897]:224-37). GT may also have read and appreciated Raymond’s antislavery argument from an economic perspective, found in his book The Missouri Question (Baltimore, 1819).
7. Mark 3:25-26.
1. The mercantile firm that Henry Savage Thacher opened in Plymouth, North Carolina, with Edward Haggens in 1818 lasted until 1821.
2. Noah Worcester (1758-1837), older brother of Ellery Channing’s great nemesis, Dr. Samuel Worcester, was a Unitarian minister who moved to Brighton, Massachusetts around 1813 to edit the Christian Disciple, a major Unitarian and eventually Transcendentalist publication. He resigned in 1818 to focus his energies on the quarterly Friend of Peace, which he had begun publishing privately in 1815 and for which he often contributed editorial content under the pseudonym “Philo Pacificus.” Also in 1815, Worcester helped found the Peace Society of Massachusetts, the second such society in the nation. He served as its corresponding secretary until resigning in 1828, when the state society was absorbed into the newly founded American Peace Society. Worcester’s pamphlets A Respectful Address to the Trinitarian Clergy (Boston, 1812) and Monument of a beneficent mission from Boston to St. John’s (Boston, 1818) are among Thacher’s Tracts (vols. 103, 156-57).
3. A Stephen Neal represented Elliot in Maine’s constitutional convention of 1819-20.
4. GT publicly professed his thoughts about pacifism in a speech delivered on 25 October 1819 before Maine’s Constitutional Convention, on amending provisions for mandatory militia duty in order to exempt conscientious objectors:
He declared that he was himself against war, and was much inclined to the opinion that christians ought not to go to war; that he was a friend and well wisher to all the various means lately adopted by associations to prevent future wars by eradicating, softening and giving a new direction to the passions which led to war; and he had no doubt, as people acted upon pure evangelical principles, they would become averse to war; and in the same ratio wars would diminish in frequency, and become less cruel in the manner they had been carried on.
GT remained nevertheless resistant to public countenance of some pacifist goals:
Furthermore, he said there were already formed societies, and probably others of a like nature and profession might start up, whose professed object is to discountenance national wars; and, he had no doubt, that if the amendment took place, it would soon become a supposed natural sentiment with their members, especially those who might mistake obstinacy or party spirit, for conscience, to plead conscience as a ground and justifying reason why they should be exempted from the militia, or some tax they may please to say their conscience tells them is to carry on a war. Indeed, he felt persuaded, there could be no fixed limits to exemptions if the amendment became a constitutional principle (Perley, Convention Debates, pp. 189-90).
1. Elizabeth Haven Wardrobe lived with her uncle Joseph Haven (1757-1829), a merchant of Portsmouth, N.H., and his second wife Sarah Greenleaf Appleton (d. 1838). The latter was the widow of a former correspondent of GT’s, Boston physician Nathaniel Walker Appleton, as well as sister to the wealthy speculator James Greenleaf and sister in law to the lexicographer Noah Webster (Josiah Adams, Address of the Second Meeting of the Descendants of Richard Haven [Boston, 1849], p. 32).
2. A mid-winter visit to Saco, across the Saco River from Biddeford, perhaps to advance her courtship with GT’s son Henry, who then lived there.
3. GT’s granddaughter Sarah Gray Sawyer (1818-50), the only surviving child of Abner and Lucy Savage Thacher Sawyer.
1. The preacher, Experience Porter (1782-1825; Dartmouth, 1803), was called to few pulpits in his career as Congregational minister. He served briefly in Winchester and New Ipswich, New Hampshire, before being installed as pastor at Belchertown in 1812. Dismissed in 1825, he then studied medicine but died before he ever practiced (Nathan Franklin Carter, The Native Ministry of New Hampshire [Concord, N.H., 1906], p. 472).
2. Alice Bacon’s boardinghouse, 6 Suffolk Place (The Boston Directory [Boston, 1823], p. 33).
3. Son Henry Thacher married Elizabeth Haven Wardrobe in Portsmouth, N.H. on 26 September 1822.
4. The Thatchers’ two unmarried daughters, Nancy Bigelow and Elizabeth Jones.
1. Perhaps Sophia Blake Rice Bradford (1800-78), wife of Cambridge, Massachusetts’s preeminent physician, Gamaliel Bradford (1795-1839) (Finding Aid, “Gamaliel Bradford Daybook,” Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians, Philadelphia).
2. Perhaps Abigail Richardson Bordman (1770-1848), the childless widow of Andrew Bordman IV (1745-1817), a wealthy Cambridge real estate speculator and developer (Finding Aid, “Bordman family, Papers of the Bordman family,” HUG 1228, Harvard University Archives).
3. Mary Cushing (1774-1846) married Eli P. Ashmun (1770-1819), U.S. Senator and lawyer of Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1815. Three years after his death, she married Stephen Codman (1758-1844), a Boston banker and shipping merchant.
1. Benjamin Waterhouse (1754-1846) studied medicine in Edinburgh, London, and Leiden before joining the faculty of Harvard’s new medical school as professor of physic (1783-1812). He continued practicing until 1821, when he committed himself to promoting various causes through his writing, including his long-standing support of smallpox vaccination. His correspondence with Jefferson also turned towards theology around this time—particularly the rise of Unitarianism within New England’s Established Order. It is not certain to which specific letters GT refers. On 8 July 1822 Waterhouse asked permission to make public the famous letter of the previous 26 June, in which Jefferson confidently predicted “there is not a young man now living in the US. who will not die an Unitarian” (Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Waterhouse, 26 June 1822, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 29 June 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-2905 [accessed Nov. 2017]). Jefferson declined the request in his reply, dated 19 July 1822.
1. John Pierpont (1785-1866; Yale, 1804) failed at both law and the dry goods business in Boston, Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Baltimore before studying divinity at Harvard, shortly after which he was installed at the Hollis Street (Unitarian) Church in Boston (1819-45). The sermon to which GT refers is Pierpont’s What think ye of Christ?—A sermon, preached at Newburyport, Sunday, October 26, 1823 (Cambridge, Mass., 1823). “I have read with much satisfaction the Sermon of mr Pierpoint which you have been so kind as to send me,” Jefferson had written, “and am much pleased with the spirit of brotherly forbearance in matters of religion which it breathes, and the sound distinction it inculcates between the things which belong to us to judge, and those which do not.” To GT’s request that Jefferson permit the publication of his letters to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse (see No. 227, above), supposing “they might have an effect even on Sectarian bigotry,” Jefferson responded “have they not the Gospel? if they hear not that, and the charities it teacheth, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead. . . . I must pray permission therefore to continue in quiet during the short time remaining to me” (Thomas Jefferson to George Thatcher, 26 Jan. 1824, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 29 June 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-4012 [accessed Oct. 2017]).
2. Samuel Joseph May (1797-1871; Harvard, 1817) graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1820 and preached in pulpits throughout the United States before being ordained in 1822 in order to accept the pastorship of the Congregational church in Brooklyn, Connectictut—the first to embrace Unitarian worship in the most orthodox state in New England.
3. Matthew 5-7.
1. [Maine] Falmouth Gazette, 21 May 1785. GT’s authorship is established by the existence of a draft, dated 6 May 1785, among the manuscripts bound with volume 12 of Thacher’s Tracts.
2. Falmouth Gazette, 1 Oct. 1785; dated internally, 21 Sep. 1785. Additional essays by A Rational Christian appeared in the Falmouth Gazette, 29 Oct., 3 Dec. 1785 (manuscript draft printed below), and 7 Jan. 1786. Manuscript drafts for the last two essays are bound with volume 12 of Thacher’s Tracts.
3. “Senex,” CG, 21 Sep. 1786. The “Scribble Scrabble” essays are located in: Falmouth Gazette, 9, 23 March 1786; CG, 5 Oct., 2 Nov. (printed below), 8 Dec. 1786, 12, 26 Jan., 2, 16, 23 March 1787. For more on GT’s authorship, and its long-term political implications, see Introductory essay above.
More recently, Scribble Scrabble has been cited by constitutional law scholars in the argument over unenumerated rights and the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. See Saul Cornell, “The Original Meaning of Original Understanding: a Neo-blackstonian Critique,” 67 Maryland Law Review 150(2007):150-65; Nathan Kozuskanich, “Originalism, History, and the Second Amendment: What did Bearing Arms Really Mean to the Founders?,” Journal of Constitutional Law, v. 10, n. 3[2008]:413-46; and Patrick J. Charles, “Scribble Scrabble, the Second Amendment, and Historical Guideposts: a Short Reply to Lawrence Rosenthal and Joyce Lee Malcolm,” Northwest University Law Review Colloquy, v. 105, 4(2011):1822-40.
4. TBW to GT, 8 Jan. 1788, DHROC 5:647; JH to GT, 4 March; TBW to GT, 14 March 1789, DHFFC 15:10, 65. The “Crazy Jonathan” essays are located in: CG, 13, 20, 27 Sept., 4, 11, 18 Oct., 1, 9, 15 Nov. 1787; 8, 15 May, 18 Dec. 1788; 8, 15, 22 Jan. (all three printed below), 29 Jan., 5 Feb. 1789 (printed below); 15 Aug. (printed below), 22, 29 Aug., 5 Sept. 1791 (printed below). Significantly, the lengthier gaps (Nov. 1787 to May 1788 and Feb. 1789 to Aug. 1791) correspond to periods GT was away attending Congress.
5. It is impossible to establish with certainty GT’s identity as the author of other newspaper opinion pieces by One of the People published during two earlier periods (1794 and 1802-05). It was not a unique pseudonym; essays appearing over that signature can be found, for example, in Boston’s Massachusetts Gazette, 27 March 1787, and MC, 5 Sept., 17 Oct. 1787. The lynchpin potentially linking GT to other “One of the People” essays is their unusual placelines: the five essays by One of the People that appeared in EH between 6 September and 6 October 1794 were all written from “In the Woods,” while all but the first of the “Rational Christian” essays were written “From the Woods.” Between 22 February 1802 and 25 February 1805, another series of twenty one essays appearing in Jenks’ Portland Gazette was written by One of the People from “Elm-Trees”—the same placeline indicated in GT’s 1812 essay. All these submissions by One of the People share a consistent partisan perspective: the 1794 essays in EH condemned the rise of “Democratic Societies” and defended the Washington Administration’s foreign policy; the 1802-05 essays mostly criticized the Jefferson Administration; and the 1812 essay was an indictment of the War of 1812. All were positions embraced by GT, but he was hardly singular in this among polemicists of his day.
Arguing against GT’s authorship is the absence of any corroborative mention in any of his correspondence; it seems unlikely that essays of such length (averaging 2500 words) and requiring such effort would have escaped notice or comment by either GT or his friends. Furthermore, the essays were produced at a time when now-Judge Thatcher had earnestly foresworn any deep involvement in politics. At least one of them is mildly critical of deism (Jenks’ Portland Gazette, 28 June 1802). Perhaps most inconsistent of all is their sometimes racy tone, including a reference to “illicit concubinage . . . aimed at the President [Jefferson] because of his peccadillo with black Sally [Hemings]” (“One of the People,” Jenks’ Portland Gazette, 27 Dec. 1802). For the present, then, the authorship of all but the 1812 essay printed below must remain in dispute.
6. [Portland] Christian Intelligencer, v. 2, 2(Dec. 1822):37-47. The Christian Intelligencer and Gospel Advocate was edited by Russell Streeter (1791-1880), minister of Portland’s First Universalist Society. In addition to its familiar tone and signature placeline, “Elm-Tree,” GT’s authorship of “Nazarenus” is corroborated by his letter to Streeter written while riding circuit in Plymouth, Massachusetts; he regrets that “Nazarenus has been absent on urgent business for more than six weeks, & does not expect to be at home & leisure to turn his attention to the sublime subjects hinted at . . . [for] five weeks to come” (GT to Russell Streeter, 13 Oct. 1823, GTP-Biddeford).
1. The Falmouth Gazette, 12 Nov. 1785, published I.O.’s response to the “Rational Christian” essay that appeared in its pages on 29 Oct.
2. I.O. had requested that the Falmouth Gazette of 15 Oct. reprint “The REFORMER. NUMBER III. Religion patronized by Government,” which appeared originally in the [Boston] American Herald of 8 Aug. 1785, suggesting its publication “may serve as a proper supplement to that of the rational Christian.” GT quotes from “Reformer” throughout this rejoinder.
3. In place of “And go very far . . . Deity,” the paragraph in the published version concludes: “and who could resist the evidence? Man is formed to reason from analogy and experience—from what has been to what ’tis probable will be where the same causes unite.”
4. In place of “on the passions of Human Nature,” the published version reads: “on the actions of rational creatures.”
5. In place of “general assertions,” the published version reads: “inconclusive reasoning.”
6. The published version omits “a Sabbath and.”
1. The third of several District-wide conventions to discuss grievances against Massachusetts generally and a possible solution through separation, convened in Portland on 6 September 1786. Its agenda was contested between moderates counseling patience, especially in light of the Shaysite crisis (lest “we should but add to the confusion”), and radicals more inclined to exploit the “Shaysite moment.” The convention adjourned after two days, having sent on an “Appeal” to District voters for a referendum on separation, and a petition to the General Court restating the District’s grievances (Proceedings of Portland town meeting, 24 August, CG, 31 Aug. 1786; Banks, Maine Becomes a State, pp. 18-22). “Senex” had condemned such conventions “as mere mobs. . . . these usurpers of the rights of our legislators, are strangers and enemies” (CG, 21 Sept. 1786).
2. “Mobs in general are as honest as they are void of wisdom. That ‘they spoke their minds freely and firmly’—it is probable. The mobs at Concord, Worcester, &c did the like. Factious assemblies very rarely have much restraint or diffidence about them. The regicides, with firmness and deliberation, beheaded their monarch. Cromwell always spoke with freedom and boldness” (“Senex,” CG, 19 Oct. 1786).
3. GT took a considerable risk in drawing this parallel to the Society of the Cincinnati, one of his very few references to the controversial fraternal organization of Continental Army veteran officers. Just three years earlier, a joint committee report of the General Court decried the Cincinnati’s influence as an imperium in imperio tending to usurp the role of legislatures—exactly what some feared from Maine’s early separatist conventions, especially when seen against the backdrop of Shays’s Rebellion (Hünemörder, The Cincinnati, pp. 28, 44, 63, 137). In trying to steer public opinion between the populist tendencies of extra-legal conventions and the reactionary tendencies imputed to the Cincinnati, GT may have sought to legitimize the former by neutralizing fears of the latter. But he evidently experienced some push-back regarding the Cincinnati; less than two months later, Scribble-Scrabble inserted a clarification:
However, should the Legislature look upon the Cincinnati as the sons of Belial, and discover in each member a number of evil spirits, and from their conduct and the moral and political tendency of that order, have reason to believe the continuance of it will prove destructive to the liberties of the people, they will act wisely to exert the power they have vested in them over the natural alienable rights of the people, and, by one blow, cut off this monster’s head, or by some more gentle operation purge it of all evil spirits (CG, 12 Jan. 1787).
4. “The people have a right, in an orderly and peaceable manner, to assemble to consult upon the common good: give instructions to their representatives, and to request of the legislative body, by the way of addresses, petitions, or remonstrances, redress of the wrongs done them, and of the grievances they suffer.”
1. Matthew 23:23.
1. “Ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath” (Ephesians 6:4).
1. In this paragraph, GT substitutes “government” in quoting and paraphrasing what Joseph Priestley says about Education in his Essay on the First Principles of Government (London, 1771), p. 85
2. Joseph Priestley, Miscellaneous Observations Relating to Education (Bath, England, 1778), p. 27.
* I speak of government & religion being connected together. This I do simply as refering to matter of fact. I do not say now that they ought to be totally disconnected—or in what manner they should be related to produce the most happy effects. The government of the United States is the best national government in the world; and the term religion is not mentioned in any part of it. Some think this is a perfection—others deem it a faulty omission.
1. “An Address of Members of the House of Representatives . . . to their Constituents” was signed by 37 of the House’s 39 Federalists shortly after the war bill was agreed to in the House by 79 to 49 votes, with the entire Federalist contingent voting against the bill (Annals of Congress, 12th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 2196-2221; Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict [Urbana, Ill., 1989], pp. 46, 54-55). The address appeared widely in newspapers as well as pamphlet editions; GT would have seen it printed serially in CC (8, 11, 15 July), while coverage of Madison’s denouncement appeared in the Boston Gazette (16 July) as “A letter from Washington.”
2. Beginning from “soon after” to this point, the published version reads instead: “and a coldness existed towards his old political associates in advocating and recommending the Constitution. He now began to connect himself with those who had uniformly opposed the adoption of the Constitution, and because they followed him in his opposition to the general administration of Washington, he associated much with them and less with his old federal comrads.”
3. The printed version adds here: “At first, this was noticed as a singularity quite unaccountable in him; but it was soon discovered to arise from a systematical plan, with [Thomas] Jefferson and others, to form a powerful opposition to the Washington system of administering the new government.
He had been very early, after the commencement of the new Government, mortified by the defeat of a measure, he got engaged in rather by accident than a cordial attachment to the measure itself; but having engaged, as an auxiliary, he soon found himself looked up to as its great champion, when his pride forbid his retreat; this was the subject of discrimination between the then holders of public paper, and the persons to whom the notes had originally [been] issued as pay for actual service of monies advanced by Government.”
4. The printed version adds here: “when pressed.”
5. From this point to the end of the paragraph, the printed version reads instead: “with their non-importation, embargo, and non-intercourse; but happily for the country his views were defeated by Washington and his federal friends in Congress. Alas he is dead, and his friends are denounced, by a rabble of foreigners, as tories, and the country is suffering the natural consequences of the change, which may be read in the history of Jefferson and Madison’s administrations, in the new series of Non importation Laws, Embargoes, Non intercourse; Embargo again, War, Mobs!!!—These are thy works, Oh Republicans!”
6. The printed version adds here: “as many people of the present day do in the utility of Madison’s administration through his interested supporters.”
7. In place of “& become the leader of a faction,” the printed version reads instead: “of those whom he saw were well disposed to become a faction in opposition to Washington. He could effect what he did not feel; he was well acquainted with the causes by which Demagogues rose into consequence in Rome.”
8. The printed version adds here: “and with pleasure he heard it sometimes observed of Washington that there was a degree of sternness in his virtues.”
9. The printed version adds here: “and that place was the Legislature of Virginia.”
10. The remainder of this sentence is omitted in the printed version.
11. By early 1799, most state legislatures north of the Mason-Dixon Line had condemned the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which posited a states rights argument for nullifying federal statutes—the Alien and Sedition Acts in particular. Madison, recently returned to Virginia to assume leadership of that legislature’s Jeffersonian-Republicans, was prevailed upon to compose and shepherd through the General Assembly a report vindicating the Resolutions, which he himself had been instrumental in generating. (Jefferson coordinated this response behind the scenes since, as the sitting vice president, he recused himself from a formal role.) Madison moved for and chaired the House committee that reported “upon certain answers from several of the states” on 24 December 1799. As amended to clarify the states’ role as parties to the Constitution, the committee’s report passed the House of Delegates on 7 January 1800, and the Senate before the end of that month. The Report was published by government order in Virginia, and other editions were published for distribution among Republican members of Congress at the seat of government before the end of the first session of the Sixth Congress. Despite the prominence GT assigns to it in this letter, the Report of 1800 generated little public comment at the time (PJM 17:303-51).
12. The printed version adds, in concluding this sentence: “and as fully condemned the faction of that time.”
13. Beginning from “I extract the pith” to this point, the printed version reads instead: “when in the opinion of the people, they (the laws or doings of the President or of either house of Congress) shall be evidential that the President, or Congress or either house shall not have duly discharged their trusts, I give the following extracts as the instance of his general positions. I most sincerely wish the report could, at this time, be read by every citizen of the U. States. They might then compare his sentiments, on the right of the people to hold a free discussion and propogation of their sentiments on the laws and doings of Congress and the President, with his late denunciation of the protest of the minority in Congress against the war with England.” In place of the four-point summary that follows, the printed version quotes the relevant extracts from the Virginia House’s report.
14. The printed version reads “1798.”
15. The printed version adds, in concluding this sentence: “tho the result should be contempt and hatred of them?”
16. Beginning from “the Law of Congress” to this point, the printed version reads instead simply: “the result of such examination of the alien and sedition laws, as they were called.”
17. The printed version adds here: “in their negociations with France and their.”
1. James Bowdoin to Nathan Dane, Samuel A. Otis, and GT, 4 Aug. 1788, Coll. 420, John S.H. Fogg Autograph Collection, MeHi; John to James Pemberton, 20 March 1790, DHFFC 19:934; GT to David Sewall, 28 March 1790 (No. 42, above); Warner Mifflin to Henry Drinker, 3 June 1790, quoted in Nicholas P. Wood, “A ‘class of Citizens’: The Earliest Black Petitioners to Congress and Their Quaker Allies,” WMQ, v. 74, 1[Jan. 2017]:123-24. Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville (1754-93), French journalist, pamphleteer, reformer, and Girondist leader during the French Revolution, founded the abolitionist Société des amis des Noirs in early 1788.
2. GUS, 28 Nov. 1792 and CADA, 29 Nov. 1792.
3. Warner Mifflin to GT, 10 July 1793, Foster Family. Addressed to “William Thatcher / representative in Congress / for Proviance of main.”
4. Annals of Congress, 3rd Cong., 2nd sess., p. 1039; Rachel Hope Cleves, “‘Hurtful to the State’: The Political Morality of Federalist Antislavery,” in John Craig Hammon and Matthew Mason, eds., Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (Charlottesville, Va., 2011), pp. 208-09.
5. Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 2018-19, 2021-22; Wood, “A ‘class of Citizens’: The Earliest Black Petitioners to Congress and Their Quaker Allies,” pp. 133-34. For more on the Quaker petition of 30 November, see GT to SST, 4 Dec. 1797 (No. 152, fn. 2, above).
6. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Baltimore, 1968), p. 328; Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, pp. 424, 425; Boston Evening Transcript, 7 Feb. 1861.
If GT held a similarly negative impression of Otis, it did not survive the War of 1812. “In your last letter you express that enthusiasm which we all feel for the splendid eloquence of Mr. Otis. . . . the Champion of God’s chosen people” (TBW to GT, 3 March 1814, Wait Letters). This demonstrates once again that GT’s judgment of men was not imprisoned by ideological prejudice or even prior personal experience (in their dueling positions over the extension of slavery). Marginalia in Otis’s hand appears in at least one of the tracts that ended up in GT’s collection (An examination of the question: who is the writer of two forged letters addressed to the President of the United States; attributed to John Rutledge, Esq., member of Congress, from South Carolina [Washington, D.C., 1803], in Thacher’s Tracts [v. 52-53]). Presumably it was either shared by, or even gifted from, Otis himself.
7. January [undated], 1800 in [Philadelphia] Universal Gazette, 12 June 1800, and reprinted throughout the northern states, as far as Portland. This letter to GT “took on a life of its own,” launching Forten’s celebrated career as an abolitionist author, advisor, financial supporter of William Lloyd Garrison, and member of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Above all, it “awakened him [Forten], if he needed awakening, to the power of the printed word.” Beginning with this letter, “Forten would embrace any and every opportunity to get his sentiments into print” (Julie Winch, “The Making and Meaning of James Forten’s Letters from a Man of Colour,” WMQ, v. 64, 1[Jan. 2007]:133).
1. Earlier in the debate, John Rutledge Jr. (S.C.) protested that “Already had too much of this new fangled French Philosophy of Liberty and Equality, found its way and was too apparent among these gentlemen in the southern states, by which nothing would do but their liberty” (Philadelphia Gazette, 16 Jan. 1800).
2. The Philadelphia Gazette’s preliminary, summary account of this day’s debate, printed the next day (4 Jan.), credited the motion to Gray’s fellow Virginian, Rep. Samuel Goode, and the apparent error was perpetuated by the Annals of Congress.
3. The Pennsylvania cartographer John Churchman (1753-1805) first petitioned Congress barely two weeks after it convened in April 1789. His petition for a government subsidy to go to the Arctic to verify his theory of magnetic variation immediately involved Congress in questions about the proper construction of the “general welfare” clause, although floor debate at the time focused less on the proposal’s constitutionality than its expediency. The House’s response to Churchman’s second petition attempt, in December 1791, makes GT’s case even stronger than he presents it here: the select committee report (presented by no less an expert than Rep. James Madison) explicitly referenced the constitutional issues raised by the petition, “but thought it most proper to do no more than to state the matter for the consideration and decision of the House” (DHFFC 8:8, 16).
4. Vice President Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (London, 1787), under “Query XIV” (on “The administration of justice and description of the laws”), refers to a proposed gradual emancipation act providing vocational education for blacks until their forced re-colonization.
5. The noted jurist St. George Tucker authored A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of It, in the State of Virginia (Philadelphia, 1796), which proposed that a female child born to an enslaved mother after a certain date should be free (although indentured to servitude for twenty eight years), and all that child’s children should be born free. But the youngest of the enslaved black female population could still give birth to enslaved male children for another entire generation, and those enslaved males could live for several generations more, conceivably stalling the total eradication of slavery for another hundred years. Tucker’s plan also rejected the feasibility of forced re-colonization, but by denying significant civil rights, would have effectively created a permanent racial and economic underclass (Paul Finkelman, “The Dragon St. George could not slay: Tucker’s plan to end slavery,” William and Mary Law Review, v. 47, 4[Feb. 2006]:1213-43. My thanks to Dr. Finkelman for his help identifying the “certain learned professor”). Tucker (1752-1827) studied law under George Wythe at Virginia’s College of William and Mary, and succeeded his teacher as law professor there, 1790-1804.
6. The French Constituent Assembly’s decree of 16 Pluviôse, Year 2 (1794) was the first general emancipation act in the early modern Atlantic world. Passed in response to Saint-Domingue’s escalating slave revolt, it remained largely unenforced elsewhere in France’s other Caribbean possessions as well as her African and Indian colonies, and was ultimately revoked altogether by Napoleon in 1802.
7. In condemning the petition the day before, John Rutledge Jr. identified its real, behind-the-scenes instigators as the same Quaker abolitionists who had petitioned the First Congress in 1790: “Those Gentlemen who used to come forward to be sure had not avowedly come forward again, but had now put it into the hands of the black gentlemen.” Rutledge’s fellow Carolinian Robert Goodloe Harper echoed the accusation that the petition “was the act of a religious body of people whose fanaticism leads them to think it a bounden duty to come to the house every year, though [they] now come in a different name” (Philadelphia Gazette, 16 Jan. 1800).
8. John Brown (1736-1803), Federalist Representative from Providence, Rhode Island, was that city’s wealthiest merchant when he sat in Congress (1799-1801). GT refers to his notorious indictment for trafficking in black slaves—thought to be the first such prosecution under the Slave Trade Act of 1794. He avoided criminal conviction in 1797, and again in 1798.