To John Jay from Silas Deane, 2 December 1776
From Silas Deane
[Paris, 2 December 1776]
[Dear Sr.]
I send you the Memoirs of Mr. Beaumarchais and direct you to begin at the 20th page and collored the margins to the 6th page or 8th of the next Memoire. I hope my other letter may arrive,1 as it is difficult writing in this way. Let me entreat you to send me some instructions and powers in proper form, if you design I shall represent the United States in any tolerable character. I am, my dear friend, in a most critical situation and the anxiety, I daily undergo thrõ want of intelligence, will neigh distract me and the more so as everybody here has taken it into their heads I am plenipotentiary. In consequence of which I have a levee of officers and others every morning as numerous, if not as splendid, as a prime minister. Indeed I have had occasionally dukes, generals and marqueses and even bishops, and comtes and chevaliers without number, all of whom are jealous, being out of employ here or having friends they wish to advance in the cause of liberty. Good people in this country expect the new regulation of your governments universal toleration in religion will be one of the cornerstones of your building. This will endear you to all the good people in Europe and be one of the most noble and just steps that can be taken.
I have often wished you could come and give me your friendly aid here or take the burthen, too much I fear for me, off my shoulders. You know what slender power I received, yet being considered as a plenipotentiary of America I am constantly applied to as such, and when any advantage can be made for the United States by keeping up the character as far as consistent with justice, I have myself obliged to do it. My friend and confident2 has arrived at Berlin and was well received, but the King was in Potsdam so that he could not judge how his affair would issue, but as the overture was made from the King himself to me his agent here and as I know his views of establishing commerce at Embden, I [am] hoping that something of consequence [might ensue] at Easter. [I] shall write you more fully soon on that and other subjects [and] pray make remittance or consign me to prison for life, for I am already in debt for a prodigious sum for you.
Printed: 247–48, from an ALS written in invisible ink and rendered visible by Bendikson through the use of ultraviolet light. The letter was hidden within Deane’s letter of 2 Dec. 1776, written under the pseudonym Thomas Johnson to an equally fictitious Thomas Smith and made available to Bendikson by Jay biographer Frank Monaghan in 1937. All but the words in brackets were rendered from the passage in invisible ink. The original ALS has not been found.
1. Possibly Deane to JJ, 3 Dec. 1776, below. The invisible message included within the Beaumarchais volume has not been ascertained.
2. William Carmichael.