To George Washington from Henry Laurens, 18 February 1778
From Henry Laurens
[York, Pa.] 18th febry 1778.
Sir
Since I had the honour of transmitting to your Excellency, papers collected as Evidence, by the Committee appointed to enquire into the Causes of the Loss of Tyconderoga & Mount Independence, those Members of the Committee who had the papers in hand for Inspection & arrangement & from whom I received them, have informed me there were Several which they had not intended to have troubled Your Excellency with—particularly a long anonymous Letter.1
Inclosed herein Your Excellency will be pleased to receive & to add to the former a Narrative of transactions &ca at the Said Posts, confirmed by the affidavit of Capt. Jesse Leavenworth.2 I have the honour to be With great R.
LB, DNA:PCC, item 13. The letter was sent “⅌ Baron Stuben”; Steuben also carried Laurens’s letter to GW of 19 Feb., which introduced Steuben.
2. Jesse Leavenworth (1740–1826) of New Haven, Conn., who received his B.A. from Yale College in 1759, was appointed a lieutenant in Benedict Arnold’s 2d New Haven Company of Governor’s Foot Guards in March 1775 and subsequently served as a first lieutenant in the 1st Connecticut Regiment. From 1776 to the end of the war, he apparently served at various times as a captain in the quartermaster department at Ticonderoga, N.Y., and as a shipmaster trading with and gathering information from Long Island (see Samuel Holden Parsons to GW, 19 Nov. 1778). Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull, Sr., enclosed Leavenworth’s deposition, which has not been identified, in his letter to Laurens and Richard Henry Lee of 23 January (DNA:PCC, item 66).