From John Jay to the President of Congress (Samuel Huntington), 25 December 1779
To the President of Congress (Samuel Huntington)
Martinico St. Pierre’s 25th: Decr. 1779.1
Sir,
I have done what, perhaps, I shall be blamed for—but my pride as an American, and my feelings as a Man, were not on this Occasion to be resisted. The Officers of the Confederacy were here without Money, or the Means of getting any. The Idea of our Officers being obliged to sneak, as they phrase it, from the Company of French Officers for Fear of running in Debt with them for a Bottle of Wine, or a Bowl of Punch, because not able to pay for their share of the Reckoning, was too humiliating to be tolerable, and too destructive to that Pride and Opinion of independent Equality which I wish to see Influence all our Officers. Besides, some of them wanted Necessaries too much to be comfortable, or in this Country decent. In a Word, I have drawn on the Fund, pointed out for the Payment of Part of my Salary, for one hundred Guineas in their Favour, to be divided among them according to their respective Ranks. Indeed, it would have given me Pleasure to have done something towards covering the Nakedness of the Crew, but the Expense I have been put to by coming here, and the Preparations for another Voyage would not admit of it. I have the honor to be, &c.
(Signed) John Jay
LbkC, DNA: PCC, item 110, 3: 24 (EJ: 4254).
1. JJ wrote a second letter of this date to the president of Congress, transmitting a copy of the narrative of the ship’s chaplain, the Reverend Robert Keith, regarding the assistance given by Mrs. Sarah Smith of New York to Americans taken prisoner at Fort Washington. JJ urged Congress, if the information proved true, to find an opportunity of “saving from poverty and distress a widow who generously divested herself of a decent maintenance, and applied it to the relief of many citizens and servants of the United States, who were then gloriously enduring the most extreme cruelties for their faithful attachment to the rights of their country and mankind.” LbkC, DNA: PCC, item 110, 3: 20 (EJ: 4353); , 3: 446.