1. The enclosed newspaper clipping contained an extract of a letter dated 22 Dec. at New York, written to “one of the sufferers by illegal captures at Naples,” urging that Capt. Stephen Decatur be sent to that city “to demand payment of just claims.” Neapolitan leaders, the writer believed, were “so much afraid of Decatur” that at his insistence they would pay U.S. claims “without trouble, or any risk of a war.” The seizures referred to were those enumerated in James Monroe’s 6 July 1812 report to the U.S. House of Representatives (see PJM-PS, description begins Robert A. Rutland et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series (8 vols. to date; Charlottesville, Va., 1984–). description ends 4:568 n. 1), and had been made by the Neapolitan government after it had officially invited American ships to trade in its ports on 1 July 1809. JM’s administration sent William Pinkney to Naples in 1816 to collect on these claims, but his efforts were unavailing (Theodore Lyman Jr., The Diplomacy of the United States. Being an Account of the Foreign Relations of the Country, from the First Treaty with France, in 1778, to the Present Time, 2d ed. [2 vols.; Boston, 1828], 2:214–21).