From George Washington to Timothy Pickering, 12 January 1798
To Timothy Pickering
Mount Vernon 12th Jan: 1798
Dear Sir,
Permit me to request your care of the enclosed letter to Mr Williams, our Consul at Hamburgh, in answer to a very polite & civil one informing me of the arrival of Genl Lafayette & family at that place.1 Allow me also to ask the favour of you to send me Colo. Monroe’s, & Mr Fauchet’s Pamphlets;2 and if you have leisure (not else) to let me know what the public sentiment respecting them, is. In one of these, or in some other way, I find by a writer in the Richmond Paper, a private letter of mine to Mr Gouvr Morris is given to the public. If given fairly, with the cause which produced it, I have no doubt of its operating against the measure it was intended to promote.3
As Silver could not be transmitted in a letter, & I had no other small notes, I send two of the Bank of Columbia, to pay for the Pamphlets. ⟨Yours always
Go: Washington⟩4
ALS, MHi: Pickering Papers; ALS (letterpress copy), DLC:GW; LB, DLC:GW.
2. Pickering sent both publications on 20 January. For the Fauchet pamphlet, see Pickering to GW, 14 Dec. 1797, n.1. James Monroe published his far more lengthy A View of the Conduct of the Executive, in the Foreign Affairs of the United States, Connected with the Missions to the French Republic, during the Years 1794, 5 & 6, in Philadelphia in late 1797. The copious comments and corrections that GW made in the margins of his copy of the Monroe volume are at the end of March 1798.
3. GW’s long and confidential letter to Gouverneur Morris in London is dated 22 Dec. 1795. GW again refers to the letter to Morris in his letter to Pickering of 6 February.
4. The closing and signature, which have been clipped, are taken from the letterpress copy.