University of Virginia Library

APPENDIX

"At Washington, I learned the result of the dispatches
brought by the John Adams (a name of evil omen), and there
rumors were afloat, which have since gathered strength, of
a disposition in Massachusetts, and, indeed, throughout New
England, to follow the example of Nantucket, and declare for
a neutrality in the present contest with Great Britain. I
will not believe it. What! Boston, the cradle of American
Independence, to whose aid Virginia, stept forth unsolicited,
when the whole vengeance of the British ministry was wreaked
on that devoted town. Boston! now to desert us, in our
utmost need; to give up her old ally to ravage, at the price of
her own impunity from the common enemy?—I cannot, will
not, believe it. The men, if any such there be among you,
who venture to insinuate such an intent by the darkest innuendo,
do they claim to be the disciples of Washington?
They are of the school of Arnold. I am not insensible to the
vexations and oppression, with which you have been harassed,
with little intermission, since the memorable embargo of 1807.
These I am disposed, as you well know, neither to excuse, nor
to extenuate. Perhaps, I may be reminded of an authority, to
which I always delight to refer, `Segnius irritant animos, etc.,'
but let me tell such gentlemen that our sufferings, under
political quacks of our own calling in, are not matter of hearsay.
It is true they are considered by the unhappy, misguided
patient as evidence of the potency, and consequently (according
to his system of logic) of the efficacy, of the medicine, as
well as the inveteracy, of the disease. It is not less true that
this last has become, from preposterous treatment, in the highest
degree, alarming. The patient himself begins to suspect

something of the sort, and the doctors trembling, each for his
own character, are quarrelling and calling hard names among
themselves. But they have reduced us to such a condition
that nothing short of the knife will now do. `We must fight,
Mr. Speaker!' said Patrick Henry in 1775, when his sagacious
mind saw there was nothing else left for us but manly resistance
or slavish submission; and his tongue dared to utter what
his heart suggested. How much greater the necessity now,
when our country is regarded not as a property to be recovered,
and therefore spared, so far as is compatible with the end in
view, but as an object of vengeance, of desolation.

You know my sentiments of the men at the head of our
affairs, and of the general course of administration during the
last eight years. You know also that the relation, in which
I stand towards them, is one of my own deliberate choice;
sanctioned not more by my judgment than by my feelings.
You, who have seen men, in the ranks, when I commanded
in chief in the House of Representatives, and others, at that
time too green to be on the political muster roll, whose names
had never been pronounced out of their own parish, raised to
the highest offices. You, who are thoroughly acquainted with
the whole progress of my separation from the party, with
which I was once connected in conduct, do not require to be
told, that `there was a time in which I stood in such favor in
the closet that there must have been something extravagantly
unreasonable in my wishes, if they might not ALL have been
gratified.' But I must acknowledge that you have seen
instances of apostasy, among your quondam political associates,
as well as my own, that might almost justify a suspicion
that I, too, tired of holding out, may wish to make my peace
with the administration by adding one more item `to the long
catalogue of venality from Esau to the present day.' Should
such a shade of suspicion pass across your mind I can readily
excuse it, in consideration of the common frailty of our nature,
from which I claim no peculiar exemption, and the transcendent
wickedness of the times we live in; but you will have given
me credit for a talent which I do not possess. I am master of
no such ambidexterity; and, were I to attempt this game,
which it is only for adepts (not novices) to play, I am thoroughly

conscious that, like other bungling rogues, I should at
once expose my knavery and miss my object. Not that our
Political Church refuses to open her arms to the vilest of heretics
and sinners, who can seal their abjuration of their old
faith by the prosecution of the brethren with whom they held
and professed it; but I know that my nerves are of too weak a
fibre to hear the question ordinary and extraordinary from our
political inquisitors. I can sustain with composure and even
with indifference the rancorous hatred of thenumerous enemies,
whom it has been my lot to make in the course of my unprosperous
life, but I have not yet steeled myself to endure the
contemptuous pity of those noble and high-minded men whom
I glory to call my friends; and I am on too bad terms with the
world to encounter my own self-disrespect.

You may however very naturally ask why I have chosen
you for the object of this address? Why I have not rather
selected some one of those political friends, whom I have
yet found `faithful among the faithless,' as the vehicle of my
opinions? It is because the avenue to the public ear is shut
against me in Virginia, and I have been flattered to believe
that the sound of my voice may reach New England. Nay,
that it would be heard there, not without attention and respect.
With us, the press is under a virtual imprimatur, and
it would be more easy, at this time, to force into circulation
the Treasury notes than opinions militating against the administration
through the press in Virginia. We were indeed,
beginning to open our eyes in spite of the opiate with which we
were drugged by the newspapers and the busy hum of the
insects, that bask in the sunshine of court patronage, when
certain events occurred, the most favorable that could have
happened for our rulers; whose `luck,' verifying the proverb,
is in the inverse ratio of their wisdom; or, perhaps, I ought
to say who have the cunning to take advantage of glaring acts
of indiscretion in their adversaries at home and abroad, as
these may affect the public mind; and such have never failed
to come to their relief, when otherwise their case would have
been hopeless. I give you the most serious assurance that
nothing less than the shameful conduct of the enemy and the
complexion of certain occurrences to the Eastward would have

sustained Mr. Madison after the disgraceful affair at Washington.
The public indignation would have overwhelmed, in
one common ruin, himself and his hireling newspapers. The
artillery of the press, so long the instrument of our subjugation,
would, as at Paris, have been turned against the destroyer of
his country. When we are told that Old England says he
`shall,' and New England that he `must,' retire from office, as
the price of peace with the one, and of union with the other,
we have too much English blood in our veins to submit to this
dictation, or to any thing in the form of a threat. Neither
of these people know any thing of us. The ignorance of her
foreign agents, not only of the country, to which they are
sent, but even of their own, has exposed England to general
derision. She will learn, when it is too late, that we are
a high-minded people, attached to our liberty and our country,
because it is free, in a degree inferior to no people under the
sun. She will discover that `our trade would have been worth
more than our spoil,' and that she has made deadly enemies of
a whole people, who, in spite of her and of the world, of the
sneers of her sophists, or of the force of her arms, are destined
to become, within the present (century?) a mighty nation. It
belongs to New England to say whether she will constitute a
portion, an important and highly respectable portion, of this
nation, or whether she will dwindle into that state of insignificant,
nominal independence, which is the precarious curse
of the minor kingdoms of Europe. A separation made in the
fulness of time, the effect of amicable arrangements, may prove
mutually beneficial to both parties. Such would have been
the effect of American independence, if the British ministry
would have listened to any suggestion but that of their own
impotent rage; but a settled hostility, embittered by the
keenest recollections, must be the result of a disunion between
you and us, under the present circumstances. I have sometimes
wished that Mr. Madison (who endeavored to thwart
the wise and benevolent policy of General Washington `to
regard the English like other nations, as enemies in war, in
peace friends') had succeeded in embroiling us with the Court
of St. James twenty years sooner. We should in that case
have had the Father of his Country to conduct the war and
to make the peace; and that peace would have endured beyond
the lifetime of the authors of their country's calamity and
disgrace. But I must leave past recollections. The present
and the immediate future claim our attention.

It may be said that in time of peace the people of every
portion of our Confederacy find themselves too happy to think
of division; that the sufferings of a war like this are requisite to
rouse them to the necessary exertion. War is incident to all
governments; and wars, I very much fear, will be wickedly
declared and weakly waged even by the New England Confederacy,
as they have been by every government (not even
excepting the Roman Republic) of which we have any knowledge;
and it does appear to me no slight presumption that the
evil has not yet reached the point of amputation when Peace
alone will render us the happiest (as we are the freest) people
under the sun—at least too happy to think of dissolving the
Union, which, as it carried us through the War of our Revolution,
will, I trust, bear us triumphant through that in which
we have been plunged by the incapacity and corruption of men,
neither willing to maintain the relations of peace nor able to
conduct the operations of war. Should I, unhappily, be mistaken
in this expectation, let us see what are to be the consequences
of the separation, not to us but to yourselves. An
exclusion of your tonnage and manufactures from our ports
and harbors [will be one?] It will be our policy to encourage
our own or even those of Europe in preference to yours; a
policy more obvious than that which induced us of the South
to consent to discriminating duties in favor of American tonnage,
in the infancy of this Government. It is unnecessary
to say to you that I embrace the duties on imports, as well as
the tonnage duty, when I allude to the encouragement of
American shipping. It will always be our policy to prevent
your obtaining a naval superiority, and consequently to cut
you off entirely from our carrying trade. The same plain
interest will cause us to prefer any manufactures to your own.
The intercourse with the rest of the world, that exchanges our
surplus for theirs, will be the nursery of our seamen. In the
Middle States you will find rivals not very heartily indisposed
to shut out the competition of your shipping. In the same

section of country, and in the boundless West, you will find
jealous competitors of your mechanics. You will be left to
settle, as you can, with England, the question of boundary
on the side of New Brunswick; and, unless you can bring New
York to a state of utter blindness as to her own interests, that
great, thriving, and most populous member of the Southern
Confederacy will present a hostile frontier to the only States
of the Union of Hartford that can be estimated as of any
efficiency. Should that respectable city be chosen as the seat
of the Eastern Congress, that body will sit within two days'
march of the most populous county of New York (Duchess), of
itself almost equal to some of the New England States. I
speak not in derision but in soberness and sadness of heart.
Rather let me say that, like a thoroughbred diplomatist, I try
to suppress everything like feeling, and treat this question as a
dry matter of calculation; well knowing at the same time, that,
in this, as in every question, of vital interest, `our passions
instruct our reason.' The same high authority has told us that
Jacobinism is of no country; that it is a sect found in all. Now,
as our Jacobins in Virginia would be very glad to hear of the
bombardment of Boston, so, I very much fear, your Jacobins
would not be very sorry to hear of a servile insurrection in
Virginia. But such I trust is the general feeling in neither
country; otherwise I should at once agree that Union, like the
marriages of Mezentius, was the worst that could befall us.
For, with every other man of common sense, I have always
regarded Union as the means of liberty and safety; in other
words of happiness, and not as an end, to which these are to be
sacrificed. Neither, at the same time, are means so precious,
so efficient (in proper hands) [for?] these desirable objects, to be
thrown, rashly aside, because, in the hands of bad men, they
have been made the instrument almost of our undoing.

You in New England (it is unnecessary I hope to specify
when I do not address myself personally to yourself) are very
wide of the mark, if you suppose we to the South do not suffer
at least as much as yourselves from the incapacity of our
rulers to conduct the defence of the country. Do you ask why
we do not change those rulers? I reply, because we are a
people, like your own Connecticut, of steady habits. Our

confidence, once given, is not hastily withdrawn. Let those
who will abuse the fickleness of the People; I shall say such is
not the character of the People of Virginia. They may be
deceived, but they are honest. Taking advantage of their
honest prejudices, the growth of our Revolution, fostered not
more by Mr. Jefferson than by the injuries and (what is
harder to be borne) the insults of the British ministry, since
the Peace of 1783 a combination of artful men has, with the
aid of the Press, and the possession of the machinery of
government (a powerful engine in any hands) led them to the
brink of ruin. I can never bring myself to believe that the
whole mass of the landed proprietors in any country, but
especially such a country as Virginia, can seriously plot its
ruin. Our Government is in the hands of the landed proprietors
only. The very men, of whom you complain, have left
nothing undone that they dared to do in order to destroy it.
Foreign influence is unknown among us. What we feel of
it is, through the medium of the General Government, which,
acted on itself by foreign renegadoes, serves as a conductor
between them and us of this pernicious influence. I know of
no foreigner who has been, or is, in any respectable office in
the gift of the People, or in the Government of Virginia. No
member of either House of Congress, no leading member of our
Assembly, no judge of our Supreme Courts [is such a person?]
Of the newspapers printed in the State, as far as my knowledge
extends, without discrimination of party they are conducted by
native Virginians. Like yourselves, we are an unmixed people.
I know the prejudice that exists against us, nor do I wonder at
it, considering the gross ignorance on the subject that prevails
north of Maryland, and even in many parts of that neighboring
state.

What member of the Confederacy has sacrificed more on
the altar of public good than Virginia? Whence did the General
Government derive its lands beyond the Ohio, then and
now almost the only source of revenue? From our grant,—a
grant so curiously worded, and by our present Palinurus too,
as to except ourselves, by its limitations, from the common
benefit.

By its conditions, it was forbidden ground to us, and thereby

the foundation was laid of incurable animosity and division
between the States on each side of that great natural boundary,
the river Ohio. Not only their masters, but the very slaves
themselves, for whose benefit this regulation was made, were
sacrificed by it. Dispersion is to them a bettering of their
present condition, and of their chance for emancipation. It is
only when this can be done without danger and without ruinous
individual loss that it will be done at all. But what is
common sense to a political Quixote?

That country was ours by a double title, by charter and by
conquest. George Rogers Clark, the American Hannibal, at
the head of the State troops, by the reduction of Post Vincennes
obtained the lakes for our northern boundary at the Peace
of Paris. The march of that great man and his brave companions
in arms across the drowned lands of the Wabash does
not shrink from a comparison with the passage of the Thrasymene
Marsh. Without meaning anything like an invidious
distinction, I have not heard of any cession from Massachusetts
of her vast wilds; and Connecticut has had the address,
out of our grant to the firm, to obtain, on her own private
account, some millions of acres; whilst we, yes we (I blush to
say it) have descended to beg for a pittance out of the property
once our own for the brave men by whose valor it had been
won, and whom heedless profusion had disabled us to recompense.
We met the just fate of the prodigal. We were
spurned from the door, where once we were master, with
derision and scorn; and yet we hear of undue Virginian influence.
This fund yielded the Government, when I had
connection with it, from half a million to eight hundred thousand
dollars annually. It would have preserved us from the
imposition of State taxes, founded schools, built bridges and
made roads and canals throughout Virginia. It was squandered
away in a single donative at the instance of Mr. Madison.
For the sake of concord with our neighbors, by the same
generous but misguided policy, we ceded to Pennsylvania
Fort Pitt, a most important commercial and military position,
and a vast domain around it, as much Virginia as the city of
Richmond and the county of Henrico. To Kentucky, the
eldest daughter of the Union, the Virginia of the West, we have

yielded on a question of boundary, from a similar consideration.
Actuated by the same magnanimous spirit, at the instance of
other States, with the exception of New York, North Carolina
and Rhode Island, we acceptedin 1783 the present Constitution.
It was repugnant to our judgment, and fraught, as we feared,
with danger to our liberties. The awful voice of our ablest
and soundest statesmen, of Patrick Henry and of George
Mason, never before or since disregarded, warned us of the
consequences. Neither was their counsel entirely unheeded;
for it led to important subsequent amendments of that instrument.
I have always believed this disinterested spirit, so
often manifested by us, to be one of the chief causes of the
influence which we have exercised over the other States.
Eight States having made that Constitution their own, we
submitted to the yoke for the sake of union. Our attachment
to the Union is not an empty profession. It is demonstrated
by our practice at home. No sooner was the Convention of
1788 dissolved than the feuds of federalism and anti-federalism
disappeared. I speak of their effects on our councils. For the
sake of union we submitted to the lowest state of degradation
—the administration of John Adams. The name of this
man calls up contempt and derision, wheresoever it is pronounced.
To the fantastic vanity of this political Malvolio
may be distinctly traced our present unhappy condition. I
will not be so ungenerous as to remind you that this personage,
of whom and his addresses and his answers I defy you to think
without a bitter smile, was not a Virginian, but I must, in
justice to ourselves, insist in making him a set-off against Mr.
Madison. They are of such equal weight that the trembling
balance reminds us of that passage of Pope where Jove weighs
the beau's wits against the lady's hair!

Intoxicated not more by the fulsome adulation with which
he was plied than by the fumes of his own vanity, this poor
old gentleman saw a visionary coronet suspended over his brow
and an airdrawn sceptre, `the handle towards his hand,' which,

attempting to clutch, he lost his balance, and disappeared,
never to rise again. He it was who, `enacting' Nat. Lee's
Alexander, raved about the People of Virginia as `a faction,
to be humbled in dust and ashes,' when the sackcloth already
was prepared for his own back.

But I am spinning out this letter to too great a length.
What is your object? PEACE? Can this be attained on any
terms whilst England sees a prospect of disuniting that Confederacy
which has already given so deep a blow to her maritime
pride, and threatens at no very distant day to dispute
with her the empire of the ocean? The wound, which our
gallant tars have inflicted on her tenderest point, has
maddened her to rage. Cursed as we are with a weak and
wicked administration, she can no longer despise us. Already
she begins to hate us; and she seeks to glut a revenge, as impotent
as it is rancorous, by inroads that would have disgraced
the buccaneers, and bulletins that would only not disgrace the
sovereign of Elba. She already is compelled to confess in her
heart what her lips deny, that, if English bull-dogs, and gamecocks
degenerate on our soil, English MEN do not; and should
(which God forbid) our brethren of the East desert us in
this contest for all that is precious to Man, we will maintain
it, so long as our proud and insulting foe shall refuse
to accede to equitable terms of peace. The Government
will then pass into proper hands, the talents of the country
will be called forth, and the schemes of moon-struck philosophers
and their disciples pass away and `leave not a rack
behind.'

You know how, steady and persevering, I endeavored for
eight years to counteract the artful and insidious plans of
our rulers to embroil us with the country of our ancestors, and
the odium which I have thereby drawn upon myself. Believing
it to be my duty to soften as much as possible the asperities,
which subsisted between the two countries, and which
were leading to a ruinous war, I put to hazard, nay, exposed to
almost certain destruction, an influence such as no man,
perhaps, in this country, at the same age, had ever before
attained. (The popularity that dreads exposure is too delicate
for public service. It is a bastard species. The true

sort will stand the hardest frosts.) Is it my fault, as Mr.
Burke complained of the crowned heads of Europe, that England
will no longer suffer me to find palliatives for her conduct?
No man admired more than I did her magnanimous stand
against the tyrant, before whom all the rest of Christendom at
one time bowed. No man, not even her own Wilberforce and
Perceval, put up more sincere prayers for her deliverance. In
the remotest isle of Australasia, my sympathy would have
been enlisted, in such a contest, for the descendants of Alfred,
and Bacon, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Locke, on whom
I love to look back as my illustrious countrymen. In any
contest, I should have taken side with Liberty; but on this
depended (as I believed and do still believe) all that made my
own country dear in my sight. It is past, and, unmindful of
the mercy of that protecting Providence, which has carried
her through the valley of the shadow of death, England `feels
power and forgets right.' I am not one of the whining set of
people who cry out against mine adversary for the force of his
blow. England has, unquestionably, as good a right to conquer
us as we have to conquer Canada; the same right that we
have to conquer England, and with about as good prospect of
success. But let not her orators declaim against the enormity
of French principles when she permits herself to arm and
discipline our slaves, and to lead them into the field against
their masters, in the hope of exciting by the example a general
insurrection, and thus render Virginia another St. Domingo.
And does she talk of Jacobinism? What is this but Jacobinism?
and of the vilest stamp? Is this the country that has
abolished the slave trade? that has made that infamous, inhuman
traffic a felony? that feeds with the bread of life all who
hunger after it, and even those who, but for her, would never
have known their perishing condition? Drunk with the cup of
the abomination of Moloch, they have been roused from the
sleep of death, like some benighted traveller perishing in the
snows, and warmed into life by the beams of the only true
religion. Is this the country of Wilberforce and Howard? It
is; but, like my own, my native land, it has fallen into the
hands of evil men, who pour out its treasure and its blood at
the shrine of their own guilty ambition. And this impious
sacrifice they celebrate amidst the applauses of the deluded
people, and even of the victims themselves.

There is a proneness in mankind to throw the blame of their
sufferings on any one but themselves. In this manner, Virginia,
is regarded by some of her sister States; not adverting
to the fact that all (Connecticut and Delaware excepted) are
responsible for the measures that have involved us in our
present difficulties. Did we partition your State into those
unequal and monstrous districts which have given birth to a
new word in your language, of uncouth sound, calling up the
most odious associations? Did we elect the Jacobins whom
you sent to both Houses of Congress, the Bidwells, and Gannetts,
and Skinners, to spur on the more moderate men from
Virginia to excesses which they reluctantly gave into at the
time, and have since been ashamed of? Who hurried the bill
suspending the privilege of the writ of HABEAS CORPUS
through a trembling servile Senate, in consequence, as he did
not blush to state, of a verbal communication from the President?
A Senator from Massachusetts, and professor in her
venerable university. In short, have not your first statesmen
(such I believe was the reputation of the gentleman in question
at the time), your richest merchants, and the majority of your
delegation in Congress vied in support of the men and the
measures that have led to our present suffering and humiliated
condition?

If you wished to separate yourselves from us, you had ample
provocation, in time of peace, in an embargo, the most unconstitutional
and oppressive; an engine of tyranny, fraud, and
favoritism. Then was the time to resist (we did not desert
England in a time of war), but you were then under the dominion
of a faction among yourselves, yet a formidable minority,
exhibiting no signs of diminution; and it is not the least of my
apprehensions, from certain proceedings to the eastward, that
they may be made the means of consigning you again, and for
ever, to the same low, insolent domination. The reaction
of your Jacobins upon us (for although we have some in Virginia,
they are few and insignificant) through the men at
Washington (`who must conciliate good republicans,') is dreadful.
Pause, I beseech you, pause! You tread on the brink of

destruction. Of all the Atlantic States, you have the least
cause to complain. Your manufactures, and the trade which
the enemy has allowed you, have drained us of our last dollar.
How then can we carry on the war? With men and steel,
stout hearts and willing hands, and these from the days of
Darius and Xerxes, in defence of the household gods of freedom
have proved a match for gold. Can they not now encounter
paper? We shall suffer much from this contest; it will cut
deep; but, dismissing its authors from our confidence and
councils for ever (I speak of a few leaders and their immediate
tools, not of the deluded, as well in as out of authority), we
shall pass, if it be the good pleasure of Him, whose curses are
tempered with mercies, through an agony and bloody sweat, to
peace and salvation; to that peace which is only to be found in
a reconciliation with Him. `Atheists and madmen have been
our lawgivers,' and when I think on our past conduct I shudder
at the chastisement that may await us. How has not Europe
suffered for her sins! Will England not consider, that, like the
man who but yesterday bestrode the narrow world, she is but
an instrument in his hands who breaketh the weapons of his
chastisement, when the measure of his people's punishment is
full?

When I exhort to further patience; to resort to constitutional
means of redress only, I know that there is such a thing as
tyranny as well as oppression; and that there is no government,
however restricted in its power, that may not, by abuse, under
pretext of exercise of its constitutional authority, drive its
unhappy subjects to desperation. Our situation is indeed
awful. The members of the Union in juxtaposition, held together
by no common authority, to which men can look up
with confidence and respect. Smitten by the charms of
Upper Canada, our President has abandoned the several
States, to shift for themselves as they can. Congress is felo de
se. In practice, there is found little difference between a
government of requisitions on the States, which these disregard,
or a government of requisitions on the people, which the
governors are afraid to make, until the public faith is irretrievably
ruined. Congress seems barred by their own favorite act
of limitations from raising supplies. Prescription runs against

them, but let us not despair of the Commonwealth. Some
master-spirit may be kindled by the collision of the times who
will breathe his own soul into the councils and armies of the
Republic. And here, indeed, is our chiefest danger. The
man, who is credulous enough to believe that a constitution,
with the skeleton of an establishment of 10,000 men, not 2,000
strong (such was our army three years ago) is the same as with
an army of 60,000 men, may be a very amiable neighbor, but is
utterly unfit for a statesmen. Already our government is in
fact changed. We are become a military people, of whom
more than of any other it might have been said fortunatos suasi
bona norint. If, under such circumstances, you ask me what
you are to do, should a conscription of the model of Bonaparte
be attempted, I will refer you to its reputed projector,
Colonel Monroe. Ask him what he would have done, whilst
Governor of Virginia, and preparing to resist Federal usurpation,
had such an attempt been made by Mr. Adams
and his ministers; especially in 1800. He can give you the
answer.

But, when you complain of the representation of three-fifths
of our slaves, I reply that it is one of the articles of that compact
which you submitted to us for acceptance, and to which
we reluctantly acceded. Our Constitution is an affair of
compromise between the States, and this is the master-key
which unlocks all its difficulties. If any of the parties to the
compact are dissatisfied with their share of influence, it is an
affair of amicable discussion in the mode pointed out by the
constitution itself, but no cause for dissolving the Confederacy.
And, when I read and hear the vile stuff against my country
printed and uttered on this subject, by fire-brands, who ought
to be quenched forever, I would remind, not these editors of
journals and declaimers at clubs, but their deluded followers
that every word of these libels on the planters of Virginia
is as applicable to the Father of his Country as to any
one among us; that in the same sense [that] we are `slaveholders'
and `negro drivers' and `dealers in human flesh' (I
must be pardoned for culling a few of their rhetorical flowers)
so was he; and, whilst they upbraid Virginia with her
Jeffersons and her Madisons, they will not always remember

to forget that to Virginia they were indebted for a
Washington.

I am, with the highest respect and regard, dear sir, your
obedient servant,