To George Washington from John Carey, 8 September 1796
From John Carey
London Septemb. 8. 1796.
Sir,
when you consider the serious nature of the business, on which I have the honor to address you, I trust your good sense will induce you to overlook & excuse any impropriety or indelicacy which there may be in my writing to you on the subject. A few days since, I, for the first time, saw a book entitled “Epistles Domestic, &c. from General Washington.”1 As you also have probably seen it, I need not describe its contents. On reading it, I felt, what every honest man must feel, indignation & contempt for the anonymous editor. Happening luckily to be acquainted with some of the gentlemen who write for the Critical Review, I requested an indulgence which I scorned to ask last year when my own interests were concerned (i.e. on the publication of the two vols. of your “Official Letters”)2—I requested & obtained permission to write a critique of the volume in question. I have the honor of inclosing it—for your own private inspection only, until it appear in print, which will be on the first of October with perhaps some alterations or amendments, if any occur in the interim between this first half execution of my thoughts, & my seeing the proof sheet.3 As soon as published, I shall do myself the honor of transmitting a printed copy of the Review that contains it.
I regret extremely that I cannot (without openly avowing myself the author) point out to the public the prodigious incorrectness of Mr Duché’s letter.4 Having compared it with a correct copy which I have taken from the files, I find no less than one hundred and forty deviations from the genuine text; in which number I do not at all count orthography or punctuation.
Permit me, Sir, to add, that I am much at a loss to know whether I ought openly to take any notice of this affair in case I should publish a continuation of your “Official Letters”; which I wish to do as soon as I can make it convenient. Perhaps some means may be found to guide my feeble & fallible judgment. I wish to act for the best: & if I err, the uprightness of my intention will, I trust, excuse me. I take it for granted that Mr Randolph has informed Your excellency of my intention respecting the whole letters, & passages of letters which I have omitted in my former publication—which is (as I informed him in 2 letters written in November last) not to publish them during your excellency’s lifetime, not even afterwards if deemed unadvisable by persons on whose judgment & integrity I can rely.
I shall shortly take the liberty of waiting on Mr King, who may perhaps be able to furnish me with some useful advice—though I do not mean to inform him of my being the writer of the critique.
I hope sir, you will excuse this incorrect & hasty scrawl—The vessel by which I mean to send it, is already down at Gravesend, & the captain just going—The same apology will serve for the critique.5 I have the honor to be, with very sincere respect, & warm wishes for your Excellency’s welfare & that of the U.S., Sir, your most obedt humble servant,
John Carey.
ALS, DLC:GW. The enclosure filed with this letter (see n.3 below) is followed by a “Nota Bene” in Carey’s writing, probably used as a cover: “This letter not relating to public affairs, and not being written to the President, as President of the U.S., but intended for General Washington in his private capacity, is not to be opened by his Secretary, or by any other person than himself.”
1. Epistles Domestic, Confidential, and Official, from General Washington, written about the Commencement of the American Contest, when he entered on the Command of the Army of the United States. With an Interesting Series of his Letters, particularly to the British Admirals, Arbuthnot and Digby, to Gen. Sir Henry Clinton, Lord Cornwallis, Sir Guy Carleton, Marquis de la Fayette, &c. &c. To Benjamin Harrison, Esq. Speaker of the House of Delegates in Virginia, to Admiral the Count de Grasse, General Sullivan, respecting an attack of New-York; including many applications and addresses presented to him with his answers: Orders and Instructions, on important occasions, to his Aids de Camp, &c. &c. &c. None of which have been printed in the two Volumes published a few months ago was first sold by James Rivington at New York in 1796 and was reprinted in London the same year.
The volume consisted of the seven forged letters designed to discredit GW that had appeared in a 1777 London pamphlet, buttressed by a much longer appendix of genuine documents. For the spurious letters, see Richard Henry Lee to GW, 2 Jan. 1778, and n.3, in 13:120–22; see also .
2. Carey had published a two-volume edition of Official Letters to the Honorable American Congress, Written, during the War between the United Colonies and Great Britain, by His Excellency, George Washington, Commander in Chief of the Continental Forces, Now President of the United States. Copied, by Special Permission, from the Original Papers preserved in the Office of the Secretary of State, Philadelphia (London, 1795).
3. The assertion that GW’s slave William “Billy” Lee provided the first seven letters prompted Carey to begin his undated six-page manuscript review with great skepticism. On reading the letters, Carey suspected “that the design of the anonymous fabricator was no very laudable one.” The seven letters, “chiefly filled up with the doubts, anxieties, & vague apprehensions of the supposed writer, intermingled with some private matter of an uninteresting nature,” merely serve “as a convenient vehicle for a few remarkable passages” that “are the marrow & quintessence of the whole.”
Before looking at those passages, Carey turned to the appendix. More than 100 pages of the Epistles concern the American reluctance to exchange prisoners, a position that GW “ever reprobated … In the publication before us, however, the unwary reader is taught to impute the whole blame to him alone, since a resolution of Congress is produced (p. 104) Seemingly giving him full power to treat for a general exchange. But, in comparing the resolution with the printed Journals of Congress, we find that the anonymous editor has falsified it, to answer his own purposes.” Another 27 pages of documents concern the grievances of the Continental army in 1783. Carey identified many revisions to actual texts that tend to portray GW as “a favourer, at least, if not the prime instigator, of the mutiny.”
Having established the editor’s ill will toward GW, Carey returned to the seven letters that form the main text. Carey quoted numerous passages in which GW claimed an aversion to American independence meant to make supporters of independence “hostile to the supposed writer, & to excite a thousand injurious surmises in the bosoms of those who are dissatisfied with the late commercial treaty, & who accuse the president of having sacrificed the interests of the U.S. to those of G. Britain.”
Carey concluded that the Epistles were “a performance which can, to no impartial considerate man, appear in any other light than that of an arrant forgery, trumped up for the purpose of rendering the President of the U.S. unpopular, & thus, probably, either compelling him to resign his high office in disgust, or, at least, preventing his re-appointment, in short, an electioneering manœuvre altogether” (DLC:GW).
For the printed review, significantly revised, see The Critical Review; or, Annals of Literature, 2d. ser., 18 (Sept.–Dec. 1796): 81–88. Carey sent this publication when he wrote GW on 1 Oct. 1796 (DLC:GW).
4. Carey was referring to Jacob Duché’s letter to GW dated 8 Oct. 1777, in which Duché urged GW to negotiate peace with the British (see 11:430–37). This letter began the appendix of the Epistles.
5. GW expressed appreciation when he replied to Carey on 30 Dec. 1796: “I am much indebted to you for the interest you feel, to have the imposition that has been attempted upon the public, detected” (DLC:GW).