By an unidentified mode of transmission, Hosack had sent TJ a copy of the second edition of his work entitled A Biographical Memoir of Hugh Williamson, M.D. LL.D. (New York, 1821; probably Poor, Jefferson’s Library description begins Nathaniel P. Poor, Catalogue. President Jefferson’s Library, 1829 description ends 5 [no. 166]; TJ’s copy in PPL, inscribed by Hosack [edge trimmed]: “Thomas Jefferson. L.L.[D.] with the respectful regards of the Author”). In this work Hosack asserted that, while in London in 1774, Williamson followed up on a suspicion that colonial officials had corresponded secretly with the British government by gaining access to a government office and purloining a cache of incendiary letters written late in the 1760s by Massachusetts governor Thomas hutchinson and colonial secretary Andrew Oliver to Thomas Whately, an assistant to Prime Minister George Grenville. Hosack claimed that Williamson subsequently delivered the letters to Benjamin Franklin. They triggered an uproar when they were published in Boston after Franklin sent them to an associate there. The documents suggested possible government responses to colonial protests against parliamentary rule. John temple, a British customs official friendly toward the colonies, was suspected at the time of complicity in the theft of this correspondence. No extant sources support Hosack’s claims about Williamson’s role, and the mode of conveyance to Franklin remains unclear (Hosack, Biographical Memoir, 50–1; Leonard W. Labaree and others, eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin [1959– ], 19:404–7n, 20:509n).