To James Madison from Thomas Jefferson, 9 August 1810
From Thomas Jefferson
Monto. Aug. 9. 10.
Th: J. to J. M.
I have just time before closing the mail to send you the Memoir on the Batture.1 It is long; but it takes a more particular view of the legal system of Orleans & the peculiar river on which it lies, than may have before presented itself. However you can readily skip over uninteresting heads. My visit to you depends on the getting a new threshing machine to work: which I expect will permit me to depart the last of this week or early in the next. Affectionate salutns.
RC (bound in an extra-illustrated volume of Esther Singleton, The Story of the White House [New York, 1907], in the collection of the White House, Washington, D.C.). For enclosure (63 pp.), see n. 1.
1. Jefferson enclosed his manuscript of “A Statement of the Usurpation of Edward Livingston on the Batture, or public Beach at New Orleans, and of the laws requiring his removal by the late Executive of the United States,” dated 31 July 1810 at Monticello (DLC: Jefferson Papers [filed at 1807]). After the U.S. circuit court in the district of Virginia had dismissed Livingston’s suit against Jefferson for want of jurisdiction, Jefferson published a revised version of the manuscript, with a preface, as The Proceedings of the Government of the United States, in Maintaining the Public Right to the Beach of the Mississippi, Adjacent to New-Orleans, against the Intrusion of Edward Livingston (New York, 1812; 25742). For a more recent republication of the 1812 pamphlet, see , 18:1–132.