1From George Washington to Benjamin Harrison, 18 December 1785 (Washington Papers)
I have had the honor to receive your letter of the 7th inst: enclosing an Act of the General Assembly, which passed at my request. This new proof of the confidence repos’d in me by my Country, lays me under additional obligations to it; and I am equally sensible of its favors, and the polite & friendly wishes with which you accompanied the act. If the etiquette of business makes it necessary...
2From George Washington to Benjamin Harrison, 14 June 1784 (Washington Papers)
Long as the enclosed letter & petition appear to have been written, they never came to my hands until thursday last; the latter, altho’ called a copy, having the marks of an original paper; another copy accompanying it, inducing a belief that it is so, I delay not a moment to hand it forward. My being perfectly ignorant of the laws of the Commonwealth, & unacquainted, if such confiscations...
3From George Washington to Benjamin Harrison, 22 July 1784 (Washington Papers)
I have had the honor to receive your favor of the 2d—What you have asked of the Secretary at War, if obtained, is all I conceive essential to illucidate the accounts of the old & present impositions on the public—the rolls in the pay office might serve as checks to those of the Musters; but where all these are to be met with, I know not, as the Troops of Virginia were, by order of Congress,...
4From George Washington to Benjamin Harrison, 24 September 1787 (Washington Papers)
In the first moments after my return I take the liberty of sending you a copy of the Constitution which the Fœderal Convention has submitted to the People of these States. I accompany it with no observations—your own Judgment will at once descover the good, and the exceptionable parts of it. and your experience of the difficulty’s which have ever arisen when attempts have been made to...
5From George Washington to Benjamin Harrison, 22 January 1785 (Washington Papers)
It is not easy for me to decide by which my mind was most affected upon the receipt of your letter of the 6th inst.—surprize or gratitude: both were greater than I have words to express. The attention & good wishes which the Assembly have evidenced by their act for vesting in me 150 shares in the navigation of each of the rivers Potomac & James, is more than mere compliment—there is an...
6From George Washington to Benjamin Harrison, 9 March 1789 (Washington Papers)
My friendship is not in the least lessened by the difference which has taken place in our political sentiments; nor is my regard for you diminished by the part you have acted. Men’s minds are as varient as their faces, and, where the motives to their actions are pure, the operation of the former is no more to be imputed to them as a crime, than the appearance of the latter: for both being the...
7From George Washington to Benjamin Harrison, 10 October 1784 (Washington Papers)
GW’s letter to Governor Harrison marks his return to public life as the leader of a movement to form a public company for improving the navigation of the upper Potomac and linking it with the waters of the Ohio. He first became deeply involved in schemes for opening up the Potomac in the early 1770s (see particularly the source note and its references in Thomas Johnson to GW, 18 June 1770 )....
8From George Washington to Benjamin Harrison, 18 January 1784 (Washington Papers)
I have just had the pleasure to receive your letter of the 8th—for the friendly & affectionate terms in which you have welcomed my return to this Country & to private life; & for the favourable light in which you are pleased to consider, & express your sense of my past services, you have my warmest & most grateful acknowledgments. That the prospect before us is, as you justly observe, fair,...