MS (ViW); entirely in Ruston’s hand; undated; endorsed by TJ: “Ruston Dr.”

Dr. Thomas Ruston (ca. 1740–1804), a Pennsylvania native who received his A.B. from the College of New Jersey in 1762 and his M.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1765, practiced medicine in London until 1771 or 1772, when marriage to a wealthy heiress led him to pursue a business career in various parts of England before resuming his medical practice in Exeter around the end of 1777. A strong supporter of the American cause despite his residence in England during the Revolutionary War, Ruston wrote essays on American banking and finance which Benjamin Franklin so admired that he had them translated into French. In the spring of 1785 Ruston went to Paris to confer with Franklin and TJ about his return to America, and it was there that he probably wrote the memorandum printed here (see below). Later in the year he moved with his family to Philadelphia, where he gained entry to the city’s elite by virtue of his wealth and became a director of the Bank of Pennsylvania, a member of the American Philosophical Society, a public advocate of a balanced national economy, and a partner with Tench Coxe and Robert Morris among others in various speculative ventures that ultimately resulted in his imprisonment for debt and fraud in 1796 and left his fortune in tatters (James McLachlan, Princetonians, 1748–1768: A Biographical Dictionary [Princeton, 1976], 402–7; Cooke, Coxe, description begins Jacob E. Cooke, Tench Coxe and the Early Republic, Chapel Hill, 1978 description ends 324–30).

Although there is no record in SJL that Ruston ever corresponded with TJ, internal evidence suggests that he wrote this memorandum in response to a request the Virginian made at some point during the doctor’s visit to Paris in April 1785, when they met five times and discussed American commercial policy in Europe, the only occasions on which their paths are known to have crossed there (Ruston’s Diary, 5–6, 19, 26, 28 Apr. 1785, DLC: Ruston Papers). The memorandum also indicates that Ruston was generally unfamiliar with the American scene, and that he was writing before the establishment of the new federal government under the United States Constitution and the publication of census figures in October 1791, for his reference to the IMPOST almost certainly alludes to the duties which Congress on 18 Apr. 1783 requested authority from the states to levy for twenty-five years in order to help fund the public debt, a requisition that was finally defeated only in 1786 (Morris, Papers, description begins E. James Ferguson, John Catanzariti, Elizabeth M. Nuxoll, Mary A. Y. Gallagher, and others, eds., The Papers of Robert Morris, 1781–1784, Pittsburgh, 1973–99, 9 vols. description ends vii, 523–5n).