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WASHINGTON, George. Letter signed (“G:o Washington”), as President, to Joseph Harper & Co., Mount Vernon, 27 September 1793. 1 page, 4to, matted and framed.
WASHINGTON WEIGHS IN ON A DISPUTE WITH FRANCE
Washington promises to pass along two communications about a dispute between a Philadelphia merchant and the French government, to Secretary of State Jefferson whom, he tells Harper, “it would have been more regular for you to have applied in the first instance. The proofs will be necessary for his inspection & information (if the matter has not been acted upon by the American Minister at Paris) that he may be enabled to report the case fully for my consideration.” One of Joseph Harper’s ships, the Andrew, and its cargo of rice, was seized in L’Orient, in Brittany. The owners appealed to Washington to indemnify their losses from the money the U.S. owed on its French loans! Jefferson, in a 9 October reply to Washington, thought “this would be an act of reprisal” and therefore inappropriate, at least until the matter was adjudicated in France. “Their money in our Treasury can no more be taken…than their vessels in our harbors.” He promised to write American Ambassador Gouveneur Morris and urge him to give Harper’s claim “that firm support which its justice calls for.” Jefferson, still a warm enthusiast of the Revolutionary regime in Paris, thought there was a likelihood of success: “The conduct of that Government in other cases communicated to us by Mr. Morris," he told Washington, "gives every reason to presume they do ready and ample justice in the present one…” Washington was keeping to his house in Mount Vernon because of a fatal yellow fever epidemic sweeping through Philadelphia. Jefferson, doing the same at Monticello, would leave his post as Secretary of State at the end of the year, succeeded by Edmund Randolph.
WASHINGTON WEIGHS IN ON A DISPUTE WITH FRANCE
Washington promises to pass along two communications about a dispute between a Philadelphia merchant and the French government, to Secretary of State Jefferson whom, he tells Harper, “it would have been more regular for you to have applied in the first instance. The proofs will be necessary for his inspection & information (if the matter has not been acted upon by the American Minister at Paris) that he may be enabled to report the case fully for my consideration.” One of Joseph Harper’s ships, the Andrew, and its cargo of rice, was seized in L’Orient, in Brittany. The owners appealed to Washington to indemnify their losses from the money the U.S. owed on its French loans! Jefferson, in a 9 October reply to Washington, thought “this would be an act of reprisal” and therefore inappropriate, at least until the matter was adjudicated in France. “Their money in our Treasury can no more be taken…than their vessels in our harbors.” He promised to write American Ambassador Gouveneur Morris and urge him to give Harper’s claim “that firm support which its justice calls for.” Jefferson, still a warm enthusiast of the Revolutionary regime in Paris, thought there was a likelihood of success: “The conduct of that Government in other cases communicated to us by Mr. Morris," he told Washington, "gives every reason to presume they do ready and ample justice in the present one…” Washington was keeping to his house in Mount Vernon because of a fatal yellow fever epidemic sweeping through Philadelphia. Jefferson, doing the same at Monticello, would leave his post as Secretary of State at the end of the year, succeeded by Edmund Randolph.