To George Washington from Alexander Hamilton, 5 November 1796
From Alexander Hamilton
[New York] Nov. 5. 1796
Sir
Yesterday after the departure of the Post I received your letter of the 3d. I have since seen the answer to Adet.1 I perceive in it nothing intrinsically exceptionable but something in the manner a little epigrammatical and sharp. I make this remark freely, because the Card now to be played is perhaps the most delicate that has occurred in your administration—And nations like Individuals sometimes get into squabbles from the manner more than the matter of what passes between them—It is all important to us—first, if possible, to avoid rupture with France—secondly, if that cannot be, to evince to the People that there has been an unequivocal disposition to avoid it. Our discussions therefore ought to be calm smooth inclined to the argumentative⟨,⟩ when remonstrance and complaint are unavoidable, carrying upon the face of them a reluctance and regret—mingling a steady assertion of our rights and adherence to principle with the language of moderation, and as long as it can be done, of friendship.
I am the more particular in these observations because I know that Mr Pickering who is a very worthy man, has nevertheless something warm and angular in his temper & will require much a vigilant moderating eye.
I last evening saw Doctor Bayley our health Officer, who tells me, that the French Consul here in a conversation with an assistant of the Doctors, who is a refugee from St Domingo, expressed a desire to make arrangements for the sick of a French fleet expected shortly to arrive in this port. I thought this circumstance worth communication.2 With the most respectful Attachment I have the honor to be Sir Yr very Obed. servant
A. Hamilton
ALS, DLC: Hamilton Papers. GW replied to Hamilton on 12 November.
1. Hamilton refers to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering’s letter of 1 Nov. to Pierre-Auguste Adet, the French minister to the United States. Pickering wrote that letter in response to Adet’s missive to him of 27 Oct. (see GW to Hamilton, 2 Nov., and n.2 to that document, and GW to Hamilton, 3 Nov., and n.1). Pickering’s reply appeared in The Minerva, & Mercantile Evening Advertiser (New York) for 4 Nov., after it had been published in Philadelphia newspapers on 3 November.
2. Rumors of the expected arrival in New York Harbor of a French fleet proved erroneous; a French squadron commanded by Adm. Joseph de Richery that had cruised off Newfoundland in the fall of 1796 returned to France in November. However, newspapers in the fall of 1796 reported a yellow fever epidemic in nearby Connecticut caused “by a vessel from the West-Indies” (Oracle of the Day [Portsmouth, N.H.], 29 Sept. 1796). The New York legislature had passed a law, dated 1 April 1796, which had provided for the quarantine of ships from foreign ports carrying upwards of forty passengers; “having on board a person sick with a fever;” or bound from ports ravaged by infectious disease (see , chap. XXXVIII; see also Hamilton and Richard Harison to Richard Bayley, 19 July 1796, in , 20:258–60). In previous years, French fleets had come into Bedloe’s (now Liberty) Island, N.Y., which the French had used as a quarantine station and hospital base between 1793 and early 1796. However, in June 1796, the city corporation of New York granted that island to the state for the purpose of erecting a sick-house and ordered the removal of the French facilities (, 248, 257).
Dr. Richard Bayley (1745–1801) served briefly during the Revolutionary War as a surgeon in the British army. He subsequently practiced medicine in New York. In 1792, he became a professor of anatomy, and later surgery, at Columbia College (now Columbia University). In February 1796, New York governor John Jay appointed Bayley health officer for the port of New York. That same year, Bayley published a work on the yellow fever, entitled An Account of the Epidemic Fever Which Prevailed in the City of New-York During Part of the Summer and Fall of 1795 (New York, 1796). Bayley held an interest in the pathology of disease, made detailed observations on yellow fever, and became involved in the creation of national and state quarantine laws.
Bayley’s “assistant” may have been French native and physician Julien Bouvier. Bouvier had practiced medicine in Saint Domingue and had been an entrepreneur of a military hospital in Cap Frangais (now Cap Haïtien), Haiti. He immigrated to the United States in 1795 and was naturalized in New York County in April 1796. A land speculator involved with Hamilton and Richard Harison, the U.S. district attorney for New York, Bouvier received an appointment in 1796 as physician at the lazaretto, or sickhouse, on Bedloe’s Island. In a letter to Jay, written from New York on 31 Dec. 1796, Bayley described Bouvier as a “gentlemen who had acquired much reputation in a long residence and practice of Physic, in the French West-Indies, and who hath fulfilled his duty with singular ability and attention, and with great success” (Bayley, Letters From the Health-Office, Submitted to the Common Council, of the City of New York [New York, 1799], 31–32). Bouvier lived at 293 Broadway in 1797.
The French consul at New York was Jean-Antoine Bernard Rozier (d. 1799). Rozier in June 1795 had been granted an exequatur as French consul for both New York and New Jersey, but President John Adams revoked it in July 1798 (see New-Jersey Journal [Elizabeth], 17 July 1798). A death notice printed in the Commercial Advertiser (New York) for 14 Aug. 1799 praised Rozier’s “strict integrity” and disposition “to promote the true interests of France and the United States, upon just principles.”