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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 M^r 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 inclos^g 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.

150. GT to SST, 21 March 1800, TFP; GT to SST, 30 Jan. 1792 (No. 72, below).

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 (“M^rs. 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 10^th 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.

199. GT to SST, 26 July 1789 (No. 39, below); TBW to GT, 19 Oct. 1787, Chamberlain.

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).

202. GT to SST, 26 Jan. 1789, TFP; 14 Nov. 1820 (No. 220, below).

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.

1. GT to SST, 12 April 1789, No. 33, below.

2. On 30 Oct. 1791, for example, GT wrote his brother in law Joseph Savage: “Yours of the 15^th & 19^th 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 M^r. [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: “M^r. 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.

2. GT to SST, 16 Dec. 1787 (No. 3, above).

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 Cap^t. [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 M^rs. 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. “M^r. 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, M^rs. [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 M^rs. 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 M^r. [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 Col^l. Smith’s—where I was introduced to M^rs. 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. 1^st 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 Hon^ble. 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