To Thomas Jefferson from Clement Biddle, 8 March 1793
From Clement Biddle
Walnut Street March 8. 1793
Sir
In making an Alteration in my Office the Lists of the Domesticks of the foreign Ministers Are so defaced as not to answer the purpose intended, which obliges me to request the favour of you to direct Copies of them, to be signed by you, to be put up in my Office. I have the honour to be, with great respect Your mo: Obedt. & very humle Serv.
Clement Biddle
Marshall in and for the
Pennsylvania district
RC (DNA: RG 59, MLR); endorsed by TJ: “Mr. Taylor will be pleased to comply with this”; endorsed by George Taylor, Jr.: “complied with.”
Clement Biddle (1740–1814), a Philadelphia merchant, had served with the rank of colonel in the quartermaster and commissary departments of the Continental army and Pennsylvania militia during the Revolutionary War. After the war he became George Washington’s trusted business agent in Philadelphia and was appointed United States Marshal for Pennsylvania by the President in 1789, an office he relinquished later in 1793 ().
TJ had found it necessary to begin keeping lists of the domesticks of the foreign ministers after the arrest of a servant of the Dutch minister by a Pennsylvania official in June 1792 led to a protest over this violation of diplomatic immunity (Edmund Randolph to TJ, 26 June 1792, and note).