RC (MWA:Adams Family Letters); addressed: “W S Shaw / Quincy”; internal address: “W S Shaw.”; endorsed: “Germantown 8th Sep / T B Adams / rec 15th / Ansd 20 / Sent 24th.”; docketed: “1799 / Sept 8.”

These letters have not been found.

For the origin of the debt John Phillips Ripley owed JQA, see JQA to TBA, 2 Oct. 1798, and note 6, above. Ripley published a legal notice in the Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser, 7 Sept. 1799, stating that the Penn. Supreme Court would hear his insolvency case in Frankford on 13 September. The case was apparently not resolved, as JQA still held the note from Ripley in Nov. 1801 (D/JQA/24, 13 Nov., APM Reel 27).

Not found.

On 17 July 1799 Judge Edward St. Loe Livermore of Portsmouth, N.H., delivered an address in which he suggested that William Lee had returned from France the previous summer with French passports obtained through a “species of bribery.” Those passports offered protection from French privateers, Livermore claimed, and were offered for sale to fellow merchants after Lee’s return. Responding in Boston newspapers, Lee charged Livermore with “a malicious and scandalous falsehood,” to which Livermore answered with a 14 Aug. letter stating that he meant no slight and cited the episode only to illustrate French corruption. After it was revealed that Lee had in fact purchased passports, Livermore published a 17 Aug. letter declaring his earlier statement proven. On 22 Aug. Lee assaulted Livermore in Portsmouth, and a physical altercation ensued between the 553 two men (Edward St. Loe Livermore, An Oration, in Commemoration of the Dissolution of the Political Union Between the United States of America and France, Portsmouth, N.H., 1799, p. 20–21, Evans, No. 35736; Boston Independent Chronicle, 8–12, 19–22 Aug.; Boston Columbian Centinel, 14, 17, 24 Aug.; Philadelphia Gazette of the United States, 2 Sept.). For more on Lee’s time in France, see AA to William Smith, 9 June 1798, and note 2, above.

TBA to Shaw, 29 July 1799, above.

Details surrounding the assassination of French envoys by Austrian hussars at Rastatt, Germany, on 28 April remained unclear. In early September New York newspapers published letters allegedly written by a Prussian officer present at the assassination, which shifted blame from the Prussians to the French. The Philadelphia Aurora General Advertiser, 7 Sept., called the letters an “impudent fabrication.” Later commentators considered the letters to be forgeries (New York Commercial Advertiser, 2 Sept.; New York Spectator, 4 Sept.; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on his Own Times, ed. Sara Coleridge, 3 vols., London, 1850, 1:279–280; Der Rastadter gesandtenmord, Vienna, 1874, p. 160–162; Cambridge Modern Hist. , 8:655–656).

In addition to “Adams and Liberty” and “To Arms Columbia,” in 1798 and 1799, Boston printer Thomas Paine composed “Adams and Washington,” “The Green Mountain Farmer,” and “Rise Columbia!” (O. G. Sonneck, Bibliography of Early Secular American Music, Washington, D.C., 1905, p. 2–3, 62, 126, 155).

RC (Adams Papers); internal address: “Mrs: A Adams.” Some loss of text where the seal was removed and due to wear at the edge.

The Walpole, N.H., Farmer’s Weekly Museum, 19 Aug., disparaged the defense of Joseph Priestley by “A New-England Man,” writing that he “cannot be induced by the subtilty of polemic disputation, by the pomp of learning, by the pride of philosophy, by the pageanty of electric tricks, nor by all the convulsive spasms of the tortured mouse in his exhausted receiver, to respect the character of this ’busy and intermedling priest.’”

The enclosure has not been found, but was likely an extract from JQA’s 9 July letter to TBA lamenting William Cobbett’s treatment of JA and providing an exhaustive update of Napoleon’s campaigns. He also enclosed letters from German acquaintances seeking assistance with U.S. legal matters and reported that he had sold TBA’s horse and shipped him a trunk (Adams Papers). The Massachusetts Mercury, 1 Oct., printed seven paragraphs of the letter that covered public matters, changing the date to 13 July and attributing it to “a gentleman of respectability in Europe.” A note printed below the extract from the “Communicator” disputed JQA’s assertion that Cobbett’s newspaper was 555 the most popular in the United States, claiming instead that “Porcupine’s Gazette is, and has been long despised by almost all Americans who love their country.” TBA received JQA’s letter on 11 Sept. and answered it on the 23d, thanking his brother for the accounts of European politics, reporting on JQA’s financial affairs, and offering comment on Capt. Thomas Truxtun and the yellow fever in Philadelphia (Adams Papers).

JQA signed the second Prussian-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce on 11 July in Berlin, for which see vol. 12:355, 356, replacing the original 1785 treaty, which expired on 8 Aug. 1796. Timothy Pickering enclosed a copy of the treaty in a letter to JA of 16 Sept. 1799 and reported that the original had arrived at his office (Adams Papers).

The letters from Tilly Whitcomb to TBA have not been found.

The prominent Democratic-Republican in the Wister family appears to have been Dr. Casper Wistar, a cousin of Daniel Wister. Dr. Wistar was vice president of the American Philosophical Society when Thomas Jefferson was named president of the organization in 1797. On 20 Aug. 1799 Wistar was mentioned as a potential Democratic-Republican candidate for Congress (John W. Jordan, ed., Colonial and Revolutionary Families of Pennsylvania, 3 vols., N.Y., 1911, 1:261–262; Jefferson, Papers , 29:276–277; Boston Gazette, 20 Aug.).

The piece TBA sent to the Philadelphia Gazette has not been found but was possibly “To the Electors of Pennsylvania” by “Plain Truth,” which appeared in the newspaper on 4 October. The writer attacked “the ’republican’ committee” that supported Thomas McKean for governor, denied that Federalists were timing their attacks to influence the election, and criticized McKean’s support of Dr. George Logan and the protesters against the Alien Acts who were arrested at St. Mary’s Church in February.