1. James R. Black (b. 1785) was a native of Newark, Delaware, where, after his graduation from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he had practiced law with George Read (J. Thomas Scharf, History of Delaware, 1609–1888 [2 vols.; Philadelphia, 1888], 1:539).

2. Black enclosed the proceedings of a Republican meeting held at the Red Lion Inn on 1 June 1812. After approving a preamble noting the “present eventful crisis of our Foreign relations” and stating it to be the “peculiar duty of every patriotic Citizen, to express his attachment to the constituted authorities of a Government of his own choice,” the meeting passed five resolutions. The first declared that there could be “no reasonable expectation of Justice” from either France or Great Britain and that while the meeting approved “the pacific policy of our National Councils” to avert “the evils of war,” the period had “now arrived, when we must repose our expectation of Justice, in the energy of the Government and the people, and the goodness of our cause, in a conflict, into which we have been driven by a series of insult, injury and oppression.” The second resolution expressed “full confidence in the talents and virtue” of the administration and promised “undivided support” for the measures “which the exigencies of the occasion demand.” The third disapproved in the present crisis of “any attempt to embody an opposition, founded on personal or local views to the present administration” and expressed “regret, that any measure could have given a semblance of Justice to those attempts.” The fourth resolution cheerfully volunteered those “personal and pecuniary sacrifices” which the war might demand and offered a promise never to “forsake the contest, till the legitimate ends of the War be obtained.” The final resolution directed the secretary of the meeting to transmit copies of the resolutions to the president of the U.S. and to the Republican newspaper in Wilmington.