Benjamin Franklin Papers
Documents filtered by: Recipient="Deane, Silas" AND Period="Revolutionary War"
sorted by: date (ascending)
Permanent link for this document:
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-22-02-0221

The Committee of Secret Correspondence: Certificate for Silas Deane, [2 March 1776]

The Committee of Secret Correspondence: Certificate for Silas Deane6

DS: Connecticut Historical Society; DS: Library of Congress; copy: South Carolina Historical Society; copy: Yale University Library7

[March 2, 1776]

We the underwritten, being the Committee of Congress for secret Correspondence, do hereby certify whom it may concern, that the Bearer, the Honourable Silas Deane Esquire, one of the Delegates from the Colony of Connecticut, is appointed by us to go into France, there to transact such Business, commercial and political, as we have committed to his Care, in Behalf and by Authority of the Congress of the thirteen united Colonies. In Testimony whereof we have hereunto set our Hands and Seals at Philadelphia, the second Day of March 1776.

B Franklin
Benja Harrison
John Dickinson
John Jay
Robt Morris

[Note numbering follows the Franklin Papers source.]

6See the headnote on the following document.

7In both copies the certificate, along with the instructions, is included in the minutes, also copied, of the committee’s meeting on March 2; the texts vary inconsequentially from those we print. In these copies the certificate is unsigned; that in the S.C. Hist. Soc. leaves Deane’s name blank in the certificate and in the instructions.

Index Entries