Thomas Jefferson Papers
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https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-06-02-0256

From Thomas Jefferson to Isaac Zane, 17 June 1783

To Isaac Zane

Monticello June 17. 1783.

Dear Sir

I received your kind letter of the 7th inst. I have long intended myself the pleasure of visiting you, but fortune has as long been contriving obstacles to it. The appointment with which you inform me I am honoured will oblige me to stay pretty closely at home for some time to get my affairs into such a state as that they may be left. It at the same time perhaps offers me an opportunity of fulfilling my wish with respect to you by taking you in my route to Philadelphia which I shall endeavor to do. Nothing will deter me from it unless I should learn that the roads are too rough for a light carriage, a circumstance of which I am as yet uninformed. I shall be happy to hear from you while in Richmond by every opportunity. Parliamentary news is interesting and I hear little or nothing of it. What have you done? What are you doing? What are the manoeuvres of your leaders? Who are they? What the dispositions of the two houses? &c. You see you may easily fill a letter to me while I have nothing to communicate to you but what you have long known that I am with great esteem Dr. Sir Your friend & servt.,

Th: Jefferson

RC (Mrs. Aubrey Huston, Villanova, Penna., 1949); docketed in a later hand: “Found among the papers of the late Isaac Zane, Esq. member of the house of Delegates &ca.”

Zane’s letter to TJ of 7 June 1783 has not been found. The appointment to which TJ alluded was his election on 6 June as a delegate to Congress, along with Samuel Hardy, John Francis Mercer, Arthur Lee, and James Monroe (JHD description begins Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (cited by session and date of publication) description ends , May 1783, 1828 edn., p. 36, 39; a copy of the credentials of these delegates is in PCC, No. 179, I; the credentials were presented at Princeton on 3 Nov. 1783 by Mercer and Lee—TJ did not attend until the next day—and are printed in JCC description begins Worthington C. Ford and others, eds., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, Washington, D.C., 1904–37, 34 vols. description ends , xxv, 797–9).

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