Phebe Hunter to Dolley Payne Madison, 22 March 1813 (Abstract)
§ Phebe Hunter to Dolley Payne Madison
22 Mar. 1813, Philadelphia. Introduces herself as the daughter of Dolley Madison’s “old friend, Mary Bryant.” Requests “counsel” for a friend, Mrs. Auchincloss of New York, whose husband is an alien and a merchant but “attends no public meetings, belongs to no political society, has neither imported nor exported for two years past, and has petitioned to be admitted a Citizen of the U. S.”1 Having been “advised by her friends to apply to the President for relief” and “informed Mr. Auchincloss’ is one of the particular cases excepted in the proclamation,” his wife “wishes to present herself to Mr. Madison, to solicit, as an act of lenity, that he may be allowed to remain quietly at his home.”2
RC (owned by Mrs. George B. Cutts, Wellesley, Mass., 1982). 1 p.
1. Hunter referred to Hugh Auchincloss, who had lived in the United States since 1803 (DNA: RG 59, War of 1812 Papers, U.S. Marshals’ Returns of Enemy Aliens and Prisoners of War, Part I).
2. Dolley Madison also received letters from Ann Anthony Stuart Auchincloss pleading her husband’s case, and forwarded them to John Mason, commissary of prisoners. Mason returned the letters on 28 July 1813, stating that he could not allow Auchincloss to remain in New York after requiring that others in similar situations leave but had granted Auchincloss’s request “to travel to Kentucky for his affairs” (DNA: RG 94, Post-Revolutionary War Papers, Bulky Files, box 56, John Mason Letterbook, 1813–15, vol. 143).