1. Belknap’s enclosure, not found, was his response to Secretary of War Henry Knox’s public criticism of the federal policy toward Native Americans and western expansion in his final report to the president of 29 Dec. 1794. “The desires of too many frontier white people to seize by force or fraud upon the neighbouring Indian lands has been and still continues to be an unceasing cause of Jealousy and hatred on the part of the Indians,” Knox wrote, adding suggestions to improve U.S.-Native American relations. Belknap defended the Washington administration’s efforts, pointing out that Native customs and forms of subsistence differed from those of American settlers, factors that complicated the prospect of peace on the frontier. “Husbandmen and Hunters, civilized and uncivilized people, cannot generally, live within the same limits; or if there be an attempt to incorporate them into the same society, the former will always rise superior, and the latter will sink into a state of dependence,” he wrote (Washington, Papers, Presidential Series description begins The Papers of George Washington: Presidential Series, ed. W. W. Abbot, Dorothy Twohig, Jack D. Warren, Mark A. Mastromarino, Robert F. Haggard, Christine S. Patrick, John C. Pinheiro, David R. Hoth, Jennifer Stertzer and others, Charlottesville, Va., 1987– . description ends , 17:328–332; Boston Columbian Centinel, 24 Jan. 1795).

2. In the autumn of 1793, the French National Convention abolished the use of regnal years and the Gregorian calendar, declaring it to be the first year of the French republic. This system divided the month into three “décades” of ten-day weeks and began in September, or vendémiaire, when the autumnal equinox was marked in Paris. The final five days of the year were reserved for festivals. It remained in place until 1805 (Matthew Shaw, Time and the French Revolution: The Republican Calendar, 1789-Year XIV, Woodbridge, Eng., 2011 p. 3).

3. French revolutionary Jean Paul Marat, assassinated by Charlotte Corday in July 1793, attained new heights of cultural popularity in the United States after his death (AFC description begins Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, Richard Alan Ryerson, Margaret A. Hogan, Sara Martin, Hobson Woodward, and others, Cambridge, 1963– . description ends , 10:74).

4. On 1 Jan. 1795 George Washington issued a proclamation calling for Americans to spend 19 Feb. in a national day of thanksgiving and prayer, which appeared in Boston newspapers beginning on 8 Jan. Some clergy balked at the president’s timing, since Lent began on 18 Feb. (AFC description begins Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, Richard Alan Ryerson, Margaret A. Hogan, Sara Martin, Hobson Woodward, and others, Cambridge, 1963– . description ends , 10:330, 350).