Browsing: Adams Family Correspondence, Volume 6

6. Col. Smith's correspondent was probably the Boston merchant George Erving, brother-in-law of James Bowdoin, and a reluctant loyalist émigré with strong sympathies for the American cause who lived in England from 1776 until his death in 1806. The account in Erving's letter to Col. Smith given here places the contracting of William Smith Jr.'s debt to Erving as occurring in the early 1770s, when Col. Smith was still a student at Princeton. See Sibley's Harvard Graduates , 14:151–157.