RC (DLC); endorsed by TJ as received from the Treasury Department on 14 May and “Morgan & Garland decline” and so recorded in SJL. Enclosure: Hore Browse Trist to Gallatin, 1 Apr. 1804 from New Orleans, stating that Benjamin Morgan and William G. Garland have declined their respective revenue appointments; Trist doubts that another candidate of sufficient ability and integrity and who is willing to quit private business can be found in New Orleans; William E. Hulings is an exception, but he is shortly to depart for Philadelphia; Trist has made many inquiries regarding French inhabitants who are competent in English, but finds that they all lack sufficient intelligence or integrity to be trusted with a revenue position; they have all been taught since birth, Trist observes, that it is “meritorious to cheat the King, in any public employment,” and they generally have “so little respect for their oaths, that they are wholly unfit to be trusted under a free and virtuous government”; Pierre Derbigny is a good linguist and respectable, but Trist does not think him suitable for a revenue appointment; Trist considers Andrew Porter, who is acting temporarily in Garland’s place as customs supervisor, to be a deserving man but ignorant of his duties; the general ignorance of the subordinate offices in the custom house has made Trist’s situation “doubly arduous” (RC in same, at head of text: “Private”; Terr. Papers description begins Clarence E. Carter and John Porter Bloom, eds., The Territorial Papers of the United States, Washington, D.C., 1934-75, 28 vols. description ends , 9:218-19).