From John Jay to Benjamin Rush, 23 January 1789
To Benjamin Rush
NYork 23 Jany 1789
DrSr
Your Recommendation adds to increases the number of considerations which induce me to wish well to Dr. Rodgers, for your Judgment relative to him as a Man and as a Physician cannot fail to have great Influence and will cooperate with my Regard for his worthy father1 to do him friendly offices. It will I assure you give me pleasure to cultivate the ^an^ acquaintance with your amiable friend Mr Coxe. His manners are pleasing, and his Talents ^& Information^ will be useful.2
It is much to be wished that the conduct of public affairs should be committed to men of abilities & Liberality; and there is Reason to hope that this will be more and more the Case, on the Proportion as our People become more informed, and the means of Education more diffused— Neither wisdom nor freedom ^Liberty^ [illegible] ^can have permanent abodes^ with ^civilized^ Ignorance; and we should always [be?] for the eternal alliance which subsists between the wicked and the weake,3 will never cease ^ever tend^ to introduce Despotism and Licenciousness in perpetual Rotation—
Mrs. Jay is obliged by your polite attention & reques joins with me in
requesting the favor of you to exp present our best compts. to Mrs. Rush.4— With Sentiments of Respect & Esteem I am Dr Sr Your most ob. & h’ble servt. Dr. Rush
Dft, NNC (EJ: 09452); E, NN: Bancroft.
1. Dr. John Richardson Bayard Rodgers (1759–1833), surgeon in the 1st and 3rd Pennsylvania regiments, 1779–83, and a founding member of the Society of the Cincinnati, settled in New York, where he became a medical professor at Columbia College, city health officer, president of the Medical Society of the State of New York, and manager of the American Bible Society. , 14: 46. He was the son of John Rodgers, minister at the First Presbyterian Church in New York.
2. See Rush to JJ, 5 Jan. 1789, ALS, NNC (EJ: 09457), in which he recommended Tench Coxe (1755–1824), Philadelphia merchant, political economist, and pro-Constitution publicist, at this time a member of Congress, and shortly to be appointed assistant secretary of the Treasury.
3. For other variations of JJ’s use of the expression “the wicked and the weak,” see, for example, JJ to Rush, 24 Mar. 1785, and to Richard Price, 27 Sept. 1785, , 4: 72, 191.
4. In 1776, Rush married Julia Stockton (1759–1848), daughter of Richard and Annis Boudinot Stockton of New Jersey. Lyman H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (2 vols.; Princeton, 1951), 1: 97n.