Abigail Adams Smith to Abigail Adams, 21 August 1801
Abigail Adams Smith to Abigail Adams
New-York, Aug. 21, 1801.
My Dear Mamma:
Our city has sustained a very great loss in the death of Dr. Bailey. As health officer, he was obliged to reside upon Staten Island, to which the sick from the vessels that came in were carried, and the hospitals have been crowded all summer with the Irish emigrants; he has taken the fever from them, and was only ill four or five days.1 He has not left his equal as a physician most certainly in the city of New-York. All those whom he attended as a physician, will sincerely mourn his fate.
Our State Government is acting a second part to the Jeffersonian administration. The council of appointment have determined that no person shall be appointed to, or retain an office, whose political sentiments are not of their own side of the question, and are turning out rapidly.2 * * * *
and his party are sunk into the insignificance they merit. I confess it would have mortified me more, to have seen them triumphant, than even the present state of affairs. * And * may keep up an intercourse, and may perhaps form a coalition against the next election.
For my part, I think those persons much the happiest who take no part in public life, and are not dependant upon the favour of any of them; for I believe their duplicity is equal to any of their other amiable qualities. The uncertain honours are a miserable compensation for the sacrifice of time and talents, which if properly applied, would render the individual happily independent.
Present my duty to my father. I am rejoiced to hear he enjoys his health.
I am affectionately, / Your daughter,
A. Smith.
MS not found. Printed from , 2:182–183.
1. Dr. Richard Bayley, for whom see vol. 9:276, died on 17 August. Bayley was health officer of the port of New York and worked at Staten Island’s marine hospital, where arriving seamen and foreign passengers received medical treatment (New-York Gazette, 18 Aug.; Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy, N.Y., 2017, p. 47).
2. On 8 Aug. Gov. George Clinton convened New York State’s Council of Appointment, a body composed of the governor and four state senators, the latter selected from among their own ranks by the Democratic-Republican-controlled senate. The council removed Federalist officeholders and replaced them with partisan supporters, including New York City mayor Richard Varick, who was succeeded by Edward Livingston on 24 August. The Federalist New-York Gazette, 9 Sept., reported that “Clinton and his friends” had “discovered their party malignity and disregard to the true interests of the State” (Hugh M. Flick, “The Council of Appointment in New York State: The First Attempt to Regulate Political Patronage,” New York History, 15:266–268 [July 1934]; A New Nation Votes; , 1:444; , 25:416).