James Madison Papers

To James Madison from James Brown, 15 October 1811

From James Brown

in Goal Salem October 15 1811

The petition of James Brown of Manchester in the District of Massachusetts humbly shews, That at a District Court of the United States, holden at Boston, within and for the District of Massachusetts on the first tuesday of December in the year of our Lord one thousand Eight hundred and nine the United States recovered a judgment against him for the sum of $1600 and Costs of suit as a penalty for his violating an Act of the United States, entitled an Act laying an embargo on all ships and vessels in the ports and harbors of the United States, and the several acts supplementary thereto, and on the twenty sixth of August last he was committed to the gaol in Salem in said District upon an execution issued on said judgment, where he has ever since remained a close prisoner under said execution. And your petitioner further represents that he has always followed the sea and when he committed the breach of said law which exposed him to the penalty aforesaid, he was poor and had a numerous family dependant upon him for subsistence, and being unable to obtain any employment by which he could maintain them, he was unhappily for them and for himself induced by his poverty and the hope of relieving them to transgress the laws of his Country. This he does not presume to offer as an excuse for his Conduct, but he hopes it may be recieved as some mitigation of this his first and only offence, And he begs leave further respectfully to represent that he now is and ever since said judgement was rendered again[s]t him has been poor and utterly unable to satisfy the same or any part thereof; that his family, who have derived their subsistence from his labor, are now destitute of the necessaries of life and dependant on the Charity of their friends for support, and that his own health is in a very infirm and declining state and has already been essentially injured by his Confinement—That his further imprisonment will serve only to aggravate the distresses of his innocent family and further to impair his health without affording any benefit to the public, Wherefore he humbly supplicates the President to take his case into Consideration and to grant him a pardon for the offence, whereof he has been convicted as aforesaid and a remission of the forfeiture thereby incurred.1

James Brown

RC (DNA: RG 59, Petitions for Pardon, “James Brown and Nathan Storey [1809–1811]”). In a clerk’s hand, signed and dated by Brown.

1Filed with Brown’s petition are twenty-one pages of documentation relating to the case. Brown was evidently tried together with Nathan Story of Gloucester for having sailed from Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the ship Betsy without a clearance between December 1808 and March 1809 in order to take a cargo of fish, flour, and other American produce “to some foreign port” in either the West Indies or to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Full details about the cargo were supplied to Treasury secretary Albert Gallatin in an 11 Nov. 1811 letter from John Kittredge, collector at Gloucester, to whom Gallatin had forwarded Brown’s petition on 28 Oct. 1811 (2 pp.). Court documents accompanying the petition record that the jury found Brown indebted to the United States for $1,600 and that Story was not so indebted “in manner and form set forth in the declaration of the writ.” On 15 Oct. 1811 the Selectmen and Overseers of the Poor of Manchester petitioned JM to release Brown from prison on the grounds that he was poor, penitent, and unable to pay the debt, and that the town of Manchester wished to be spared the burden of supporting his family (2 pp.). Collector Kittredge had also seen a copy of this petition, and in his letter to Gallatin commented as follows: “He [Brown] has the appearance of being very poor and I have been informed, is partially deranged. Is it not incumbent on him to shew how he has lost so much money in so short a time?” He added that “it is very difficult for me to obtain any information relating to violations of the law. I did refuse, when the papers were first forwarded, to give a certificate requested by the Overseers of the Poor in Manchester; I then had and still have doubts in this case.”

Nevertheless, Gallatin advised JM that “Pardons have been granted in similar cases. That of Yeaton of Alexandria is of recent date” (see PJM-PS description begins Robert A. Rutland et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series (10 vols. to date; Charlottesville, Va., 1984–). description ends 3:357), to which JM responded: “Let a pardon issue J.M.” Filed with the documentation are two partial drafts (1 p. and 2 pp., respectively) for a pardon, and a copy of the pardon issued by JM on 4 Dec. 1811 (1 p.).

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