Amos Stoddard (1762–1813), lawyer and soldier, was a native of Connecticut who joined the Continental army in 1779 and served until the end of the war. He obtained a post as assistant clerk to the supreme court of Massachusetts in 1784, was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1793, moved to Hallowell in the Maine district, and represented it in the Massachusetts legislature in 1797. In 1798 Stoddard became a captain in the 2d Regiment of Artillerists and Engineers, United States Army, rising to the rank of major in 1807. He took possession of upper Louisiana for the United States in March 1804 and served as its civil and military commandant until later that year. Stoddard was subsequently assigned to lower Louisiana, about which he collected material for a book. He served as deputy quartermaster general during the War of 1812 and was mortally wounded during the seige of Fort Meigs, Ohio (DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; Heitman, U.S. Army description begins Francis B. Heitman, comp., Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army, 1903, 2 vols. description ends , 1:928; “Transfer of Upper Louisiana: Papers of Captain Amos Stoddard,” in Missouri Historical Society, Glimpses of the Past 2 [1935]: 78–122).

The inclosed paper, not found, was probably a subscription list for Stoddard’s work on Louisiana, Sketches, Historical and Descriptive, of Louisiana (Philadelphia, 1812; Sowerby, description begins E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 1952–59, 5 vols. description ends no. 4077), which was projected to run about five hundred pages (“Stoddard’s Sketches of Louisiana and Florida,” Medical Repository of Original Essays and Intelligence 13 [1810]: 402).