Benjamin Franklin Papers
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https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-23-02-0029

To Benjamin Franklin from [Henry Hugh Fergusson], [21 December? 1776]

From [Henry Hugh Fergusson4]

AL: American Philosophical Society

Saturday Evening 9 [December 21?, 17765]

Mr. Fergusson presents compliments and wishes all happiness to doctor Franklin. He takes the liberty to send this card to doctor Franklin, to congratulate him on his safe arrival in Paris. Mr. Fergusson would be much obliged to doctor Franklin could he condescend to name an day and an hour when Mr. Fergusson could have the honour to personaly pay his respects to him was it for ever so short a time to make a few domestick enquiries after Mrs. Fergusson and his friends in Pennsylvania.

Addressed: To Doctor Franklin

Notation: Ferguson

[Note numbering follows the Franklin Papers source.]

4Identified by the handwriting, which is sui generis. Fergusson has appeared before as the husband of Elizabeth Graeme, to whom WF had once been attached; the Scot had family interests in Britain that took him there from Philadelphia in September, 1775, carrying a letter from BF to JW, and he stayed in Europe until March, 1777. Above, VII, 177 n; XXI, 538 n; XXII, 198; PMHB, XXXIX (1915), 306. We suspect that he was the “Mr. Ferguson” who came to Paris the previous September and acted as a messenger between Edward Bancroft and Silas Deane: Deane Papers, I, 237.

5The other note from Fergusson below, under Dec. 26, appears to have been his second to BF. If we are correct in our dating of it, and if this one was earlier, Fergusson must have been writing on the day BF reached Paris.

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